Saturday was World Oceans Day — an international day that serves as a call of action to protect the ocean.
WSHU’s Sabrina Garone spoke with Maritime Aquarium president Jason Patlis about why the health of Long Island Sound is a reason to celebrate! But there's still a lot of work to be done.
WSHU: What do you believe are some of the greatest challenges facing our oceans today? I know Long Island Sound is technically an estuary, but how does our region compare?
JP: Long Island Sound, like the rest of the ocean, is impacted by both local and global activities. And on the local side, we've done a pretty good job cleaning up Long Island Sound from the way it used to be in the mid-20th century. We've done really great work in improving water quality, addressing land-based runoff and wastewater runoff into Long Island Sound. Fishing regulations have really done a good job. There are stories now about seeing dolphins and whales just off the coast of Long Island, sometimes the eastern part of Long Island Sound. And that's all the result of protecting little forage fish — the little fish that serve as the base of the food chain for larger animals in the ocean. Including seals, which we have here at the aquarium, as well as dolphins and whales.
Where the Long Island Sound is still suffering is not on the local side, but on the global side. It really comes down to climate change. With more carbon dioxide emissions going up into the atmosphere, climate change is getting ever worse. The big consequences of that include rising seas as the polar ice caps melt. So we're seeing a lot more flooding along the Connecticut coastline, which is a real problem if you live along the coast, or you've got towns and businesses along the coast. We're seeing water temperatures heat up, and that's changing the migratory patterns of fish that we rely on for recreational fishing and commercial fishing. And the ocean is acidifying. That carbon dioxide gets absorbed by the ocean through chemical processes, affecting the seafood industry, particularly the oyster fishery.
WSHU: I'm glad you brought up some of those marine mammals a little bit earlier. There's a lot of cool wildlife that call the Sound home. Are there any species of particular concern that you think folks should be paying more attention to? And on the flip side, what can we celebrate when it comes to different marine species coming back to this area.
JP: There's not an easy answer because some species are doing really well, and some species are doing less well. Long Island Sound is home in the winter to seal populations, both harbor seals and gray seals, which come down from the Gulf of Maine. And if you come to the aquarium, you'll see a wonderful population of harbor seals. And the seals, because of better food conditions and better water quality, are enjoying a healthier Long Island Sound. But at the same time, the lobster fishery was very robust in Long Island Sound up until the late 1990s, and then the population just crashed.
Largely because of water quality, but even a lot of the causes are still not clear. But the lobster fishery has still not come back, and that was a very valuable industry that was lost to local fishermen. Horseshoe crabs are another important species native to Long Island Sound that provide food for a lot of bird populations that use the Atlantic Flyway. Atlantic sturgeon is a highly endangered species that used to be very prevalent in Connecticut and throughout the northeast. There's a lot of effort to try to return Atlantic sturgeon to better populations, and that requires a lot of dam removal along rivers, improved water quality and less fishing.
WSHU: Our region, whether its the Long Island side or the Connecticut side, you can access water pretty easily, whether it's the Sound, or you drive out to the more open ocean, or other waterways. Why should everyone care about the health of the ocean, even if they live in a place that's a little more landlocked?
JP: We often take the ocean for granted. For a lot of us, the ocean is not just down the road and yet, the ocean really is essential for life as we know it. It's synonymous with the planet itself. The surface of the planet is 71% ocean, 95% of all life lives in the ocean, and 50% of the oxygen that we breathe in the atmosphere is produced by plankton and photosynthesis of that plankton in the ocean. So we need a healthy ocean in order to have a healthy life and a healthy planet.
WSHU: Maritime Aquarium does a lot of work to help keep Long Island Sound healthy, right?
JP: While people know us as an aquarium, that's only part of what we do. We've got dozens of educators that work with schools across the region — in Fairfield County, across Connecticut and in Westchester. And we take a lot of school kids out into Long Island Sound on our special research vessel, our floating classroom. We have a lot of programs along the shoreline, in the marshes, and along beaches to show kids the Sound up front and up close.
But we also have a very significant conservation portfolio, and we have a big team of scientists that are working on a number of conservation initiatives. One of them is to remove abandoned fishing gear, in particular lobster traps. And over a year and a half, we've removed almost thirty tons of lobster traps. We've got a lot of programs to look at salt marsh resilience and how will the salt marshes react to climate change in the coming years as water inundation becomes more common. And that's a big part of protecting Long Island Sound; those salt marshes protect the coastline from flooding, and they provide habitat for a lot of important species.
WSHU: I think when people interact with nature and see wildlife up close with their own eyes, they are more likely to care about the health of our environment. That's the whole point of an aquarium, right? You can see things that you maybe haven't even heard of before. Can you speak to the importance of getting out and experiencing nature, whether they're visiting you guys down in Norwalk, or taking a walk by the beach?
JP: Oh, 100%. You really only care about something and appreciate something if you know it and understand it, have a personal connection to it. And so that is 100% of what we try to do at Maritime Aquarium, which is to introduce our guests to the ocean and all the amazing wildlife there is in the ocean, especially in Long Island Sound. People don't know that there are seven species of sharks in Long Island Sound. We've got several of them here in the aquarium. People generally don't know that the harbor seals are local to Long Island Sound. And so by introducing the amazing wildlife that exists right here in our neighborhood to our guests, hopefully they come away with a better understanding, a little more inspiration to protect the Sound and to learn about it. Maybe even go into a career to help protect it.
