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Center for Coastal Studies

    ENVIRONMENT

    As Right Whales Shift, Cape Cod Remains Safe Haven for Now

    With warming, whales follow food to new waters, and a key source declines

    By

    [PROVINCETOWN — North Atlantic right whales, critically endangered with a population of only around 370, move widely around our ocean. They have traditionally ranged from below Cape Canaveral, Fla., where they calve in winter, to New England and into Canada following the summer food supply. But their distribution has been shifting as the location of plankton, their key food, is altered by climate change.

    In January, a study published in Endangered Species Research found that right whales’ main food source is declining across its range, with less nutritious food sources taking its place.

    While this might suggest that Cape Cod Bay, which hosts a large proportion of the world’s right whales every spring, could lose its whales as they shift to new foraging grounds, that is not happening yet, according to researchers at the Center for Coastal Studies.

    The number of right whales visiting Cape Cod Bay each year has been steady and has even increased slightly, and its plankton resource has remained steady, said Charles “Stormy” Mayo, scientist emeritus with the Coastal Studies Right Whale Ecology Program. But of course, he said, this can’t continue forever as our waters keep warming.

    The first right whale calf to enter Cape Cod Bay this year was spotted by Center for Coastal Studies researchers on March 11 with its mother, Nauset, or EgNo 2413. (Photo by Center for Coastal Studies, NOAA Permit 25740-02)

     

    Following the Food Supply

    Right whales feed chiefly on Calanus finmarchicus, a chunky, nutritious species of the zooplankton known as copepods. Scientists following changes in whales’ behavior have long paid attention to these copepods’ range.

    In September 2021, a group of scientists led by Erin Meyer-Gutbrod of the University of South Carolina reported in Oceanography that plankton community changes had begun forcing right whales to abandon their traditional summer feeding areas in the Bay of Fundy as early as 2010. They now primarily use the Gulf of St. Lawrence to feed in the summer.

    The Endangered Species findings reported in January were based on research led by Taylor Evans, then a postdoc at the State University of New York at Stony Brook studying marine biology. Evans looked at “plankton tows” done by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration between 1980 and 2019 to see how the plankton communities were changing in the Northeast. What she found was that C. finmarchicus had broadly declined across its range — particularly in the Bay of Fundy.

    Evans told the Independent that C. finmarchicus is a cold-water species, and its decline is tied to increases in water temperature. In its place, other warmer-water copepod species, such as C. typicus, which have 10 times less nutrition than C. finmarchicus, are increasing. When it comes to nutrition, she said, “it would take a wild and unthinkable amount of them to make up for what we’re losing in C. finmarchicus.”

    Cape Cod Bay seems to be somewhat shielded from these declines. According to Mayo, the bay’s C. finmarchicus densities have not changed, even as declines happen elsewhere in the Gulf of Maine. “Though we are at the bottom of a conveyor belt that seems to be changing, we have what seems to be a stable system,” he said.

    Evans agreed. “I don’t see Cape Cod Bay being less important anytime soon,” she said. Indeed, as declines happen elsewhere, “it could even become more important.”

    Why Cape Cod Bay is so consistently hospitable for right whales is difficult to say with certainty, but according to Daniel Palacios, director of the Coastal Studies Right Whale Ecology Program, scientists think that it acts as a “cul-de-sac” — the current flows in from the north with nutrient-rich water, which leads to nutrient buildup in the bay. Additionally, because the bay is protected from the rest of the Atlantic Ocean, this concentration isn’t quickly washed away, he said.

    In recent years, Mayo said, more right whales than ever have visited Cape Cod Bay. A given year will host between 170 and 312 individuals — up to 75 percent of the world population of these whales. It seems to be a particularly important site for mothers and calves, Mayo said.

    “Right now, right whales are numerous in Cape Cod Bay,” he said. “That’s an indication that at the base level, which is the quality of the ecosystem, they’ve said, ‘Yeah, this is pretty good.’ ”

     

    On Jeffreys Ledge

    During a series of aerial surveys conducted by the New England Aquarium in January, scientists documented over 75 individual right whales congregating around Jeffreys Ledge off the coast of New Hampshire, representing more than 20 percent of the total population.

    While the sighting was noteworthy, Palacios said that it wasn’t a first. Jeffreys Ledge was considered a reliable right whale feeding site in the 1980s and ’90s, though it had become less important in recent decades. “These sorts of decadal shifts are not uncommon in baleen whales,” Palacios said. He also noted that the difficulties involved with surveying for right whales by air — like bad weather — mean that incidents like this may have happened before and just weren’t detected. “It might have been the right people out at the right time to detect this aggregation,” he said.

    Jeffreys Ledge is also an ephemeral feeding site, Palacios said. It has steep underwater walls that can channel nutrient-rich deep water upward, which causes plankton blooms — but only if the current is sufficiently intense and flowing the right way. That makes it, like so many other sites, an inconsistent supplier of food. “The one that has remained pretty consistent has been Cape Cod Bay,” he said.

     

    One Year at a Time

    But while Cape Cod Bay is holding steady for now, there is no reason to believe the collapse of these plankton communities will not happen one day. “I think that, eventually, Cape Cod Bay will go through dramatic changes,” Mayo said. “It’s not completely insulated from the changes in the larger Gulf of Maine.”

    Palacios agreed. “Over the course of 50 or 100 years, gradually things will continue warming to a degree that the water will be too warm for phytoplankton,” he said. “Therefore, yes, the whales may stop coming here.”

    Mayo said that he has tuned his expectations accordingly. Talking with staff, he said, he prods them to consider the question of whether whales will return to Cape Cod.

    “I’ve always said, ‘We’ll see if they come back; I don’t think they’re going to,’ ” he said. “But I said it this year, and they came back.”

    THE BREACH

    More Studies Planned for Breakwater Gap

    Officials warn that opening might not stop invasive marsh crabs

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — An on-again, off-again effort to install a gap in the Long Point Dike, more commonly called the West End breakwater, took a small step forward last week at a public meeting organized by town officials and the Army Corps of Engineers to gather public input on the project.

    PIONEERS

    Mayo Will Retire After 48 Years at Coastal Studies

    Daniel Palacios will succeed Mayo as director of Right Whale Ecology Program

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The Center for Coastal Studies is set to announce that Charles “Stormy” Mayo III, a cofounder of the organization and director of its Right Whale Ecology Program, will retire in May. Daniel Palacios, an endowed associate professor in whale habitats in Oregon State University’s Dept. of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences, will succeed Mayo as director.

    Charles “Stormy” Mayo III, pictured here on a whale rescue mission in Provincetown Harbor, will retire from the Center for Coastal Studies in late May. (Photo courtesy Center for Coastal Studies)

    “I think it’s time for new blood,” Mayo said. “Someone who really wants to manage this multifaceted effort and add whole new things.”

    Mayo, alongside his then-wife Barbara Shuler Mayo and scientist Graham Giese, founded the Center for Coastal Studies in 1976. They wanted to create an organization to study ocean science on the Outer Cape, though it was little more than “a tiny group of volunteers” at first, Mayo said.

    In those early days, Mayo said, “I did relatively little. They carried the water.” Then, in the mid-1980s, Giese left CCS to pursue work elsewhere, and Barbara Mayo was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died in 1988. Stormy Mayo was left in charge of most of the center’s operations.

    Mayo and his assistant, Carole Carlson, came upon the first known winter right whale in Cape Cod Bay in 1986, revealing that the bay is an important winter feeding ground for this extremely rare mammal.

    Since that sighting, right whales have become a focus of the center’s work, and Mayo has been in charge of studying them. Under his leadership, CSS undertook an ongoing 38-year-long right whale survey that has shed light on the whales’ habitat requirements, seasonal movement patterns, and dietary requirements in the bay.

    The research has led to passage of strict conservation laws covering Cape Cod Bay and prompted the creation of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, Mayo said.

    Daniel Palacios on a research vessel in Oregon. He will succeed Mayo as director of the Right Whale Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies. (Photo by Jami Ivory)

    Mayo has also saved whales directly through the center’s disentanglement program. Before CCS established its program, only one similar effort existed. It was in Newfoundland and focused on whales that were so wrapped up in fishing gear they couldn’t move. Mayo’s sought to help whales that were partially entangled, which meant chasing them down and untangling them as they struggled. That made the CSS program “somewhat of a revolutionary thing,” Mayo said.

    Thanks to the center’s work studying and disentangling these whales, “some unknown number of right whales are probably alive that would have been killed,” Mayo said.

    The Center for Coastal Studies now has 14 programs that cover everything from shark ecology to seafloor mapping. And it has become a renowned center for right whale research.

    Richard Delaney, the executive director of CCS, ascribed much of the organization’s success to Mayo. “He’s pioneered the center as a leading research organization,” Delaney said. “He was aware that in order to save the right whale we needed to be good stewards of the environment and the ocean where the right whale lives.” This philosophy, Delaney said, is a large part of how CCS has grown.

    Delaney also called Mayo a “natural mentor.”

    Amy Costa is among the people who consider Mayo a mentor. After she worked as a research assistant at CCS in 2000 and 2001, Mayo helped her get into graduate school at the University of Rhode Island by connecting her to Professor of Oceanography Edward Durbin. “Stormy introduced me to all the wonderful things about this area and sent me off on my career,” Costa said. She later returned to CCS and is now the director of its Water Quality Management Program.

    Mayo plans to keep studying whales in his retirement and will likely remain affiliated with CCS as a scientist emeritus. He said he plans to continue working on a device that can photograph Cape Cod Bay’s plankton from a drone to better understand how the whales’ food is distributed. He also wants to continue a project to understand how individual right whales choose whether to come to Cape Cod Bay each winter.

    Mayo said he looks forward to spending more time with his grandchildren.

    Stormy’s Successor

    Palacios said he is very familiar with Mayo’s research on right whales and plans to continue his predecessor’s legacy.

    Mayo cruises Provincetown Harbor at the helm of the Istar, a schooner he built over the course of 38 years and launched in 2014. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    But while taking over Mayo’s role “is an honor and a privilege,” Palacios said, the responsibility is “also daunting.” He suspects the beginning of his tenure “will be a little bit of drinking out of a fire hose.”

    Palacios grew up in Colombia and attended the University of Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano, where he got his B.Sc. in marine biology. He received his Ph.D. in oceanography from Oregon State University and spent 10 years working at NOAA’s Pacific Fisheries Environmental Fisheries Laboratory before returning as a research professor at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute. His research focuses include whale migration, habitat use, and tracking, and he has published studies on many species of whales and dolphins.

    One area Palacios is poised to explore is how whales respond to climate change. He thinks that “there’s a lot of information there that’s waiting to be mined” in the data gathered at the center.

    Mayo with Laura Ludwig in the couple’s fabled dahlia garden at their home in Provincetown. (Photo by Nancy Bloom)

    Once he gets more settled in, he hopes to expand CCS’s right whale research program. In addition to analyzing the long-term data, he is keen to investigate the viability of affixing radio tags to right whales to track their movements. “There’s a segment of the population and a time of the year when we are not sure where they’re going,” he said.

    “No one could be better to take over, to manage the basic work and expand into new areas” than Palacios, Mayo said. “Daniel’s background is an almost perfect fit … he has demonstrated really good science.”

    When asked what advice he wants to give Palacios for the new position, Mayo responded, “I don’t think he needs it.”

    CLIMATE CHANGE

    Provincetown Wants a Plan for Coping With Rising Sea Level

    Learning to ‘work with water’ will be key to resiliency

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Like all coastal areas, the Outer Cape may look unrecognizable in 2100 if worst-case sea-level rise projections — six to eight feet here — come to pass. But while change is inevitable, inaction is not.

    In Provincetown, a newly formed Coastal Resilience Advisory Committee (CRAC) began meeting last November. The group is motivated by “a need to understand better what our tools are for coping with the future — and the future is now,” said Mark Adams, the at-large member.

    Its first job is to work with community development director Tim Famulare to hone the scope of work for a consultant who will eventually develop a comprehensive coastal resiliency and climate action plan for the town.

    Members of the group represent the conservation commission, the planning board, the harbor committee, the historic district commission, and the recycling committee; they meet twice a month.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report says that a “shift in U.S. coastal flood regimes” is to come: major high-tide floods will hit as frequently as moderate and minor ones by 2050. That means what the town saw during the December 2022 storm, with powerful waves that exposed new saltwater flood pathways and caused major damage to homes and businesses, was a taste of what’s to come.

    The comprehensive coastal resilience process and its components are modeled on Nantucket’s, Famulare said. Nantucket’s plan assesses high-risk locations and community facilities and offers both island-wide and area-specific projects for the town’s consideration. The options boil down to protection, adaptation, or relocation — “building with the sea,” “living with the sea,” or “moving away from the sea.”

    In Provincetown, public infrastructure will be one focus: “our roads, our utilities, our municipal buildings,” Famulare said. “But a critical piece is what needs to be done to protect private property.”

    Famulare wants to issue the RFP by September and hire a consultant by Nov. 1. In Nantucket, that process took around 18 months.

    Sea Level Rise: No Borders

    In 2020, the four Outer Cape towns, the state office of coastal zone management, and scientists from the Center for Coastal Studies linked up to create the Intermunicipal Shoreline Management Program. Phase one was designing a public geodatabase to catalogue the bay coast’s natural resources and human uses.

    Phase two studied possibilities for regional sand management to combat beach erosion — with a potential “regional sand bank” in Eastham on the table. This idea has already been beta-tested: when Eversource constructed the new Provincetown Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), Famulare had the utility truck roughly 3,000 cubic yards of displaced sand from the transfer station to the Eastham DPW sand pit for future municipal use.

    The towns also conducted a low-lying roads inventory to design storm surge mitigation improvements for vulnerable segments — namely Route 6A from Snail Road to the Truro town line, where it turns from Commercial Street to Shore Road.

    In October 2022, the intermunicipal group received a $546,180 state grant to continue these projects through a third phase of analysis and implementation.

    In the same round of funding, Provincetown also got a grant of $80,355 to finalize plans for the Ryder Street Beach dune enhancement project, spurred by the 2018 storm that flooded Gosnold Street and town hall.

    The intermunicipal shoreline management program’s low-lying roads inventory should not be confused with the Cape Cod Commission’s low-lying roads project, which is conducting similar studies for all the Cape towns.

    In Provincetown and Truro, the commission’s work will exclude the segments already being studied by the four-town initiative.

    The need for regional coordination is obvious — sea level rise doesn’t recognize town borders. But Provincetown, with its small lots lining the waterfront, faces unique threats. That shore “has all these little low-lying areas in between houses, sometimes below decks, sometimes under an existing house, and you can’t see those things when you’re doing traditional kinds of mapping,” said Mark Borrelli, coastal geologist at the Center for Coastal Studies.

    There’s also no room for picking up the whole town and moving it landward — putting aside the political obstacle of getting dozens of private citizens to modify their properties in sync.

    The Herring Cove Beach north parking lot relocation in 2018, where the Seashore simply moved the whole plot inland 125 feet and elevated it by 15 feet, followed that approach. But the town, said Borelli, “is not laid out in a way that’s conducive to managed retreat.”

    The state Wetlands Protection Act, too, limits town action, like what local bylaws can legally require or what kinds of seawall construction the conservation commission can approve, Famulare said.

    Adams and Borrelli both said the key is for changes to happen little by little, thinking of the future rather than waiting to respond to catastrophic events.

    “There are towns that are worse off than Provincetown,” Borrelli said. “There are ways you can work with water. There are places where they build floodable parks. You can build parts of town where if they flood, they flood.

    “I said I was hopeful,” he added. “I didn’t say it was going to be easy.”

    ENVIRONMENT

    Reports Show Steady Deterioration in Coastal Water Quality

    Center for Coastal Studies work points to need to replace septic systems

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Reports in recent years from the Association to Preserve Cape Cod (APCC), which uses data collected by the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) at more than 100 testing stations in Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound, show a steady decline in coastal water quality.

    TRASH TALLY

    Herring Cove Cleanup Nets 3 Truckloads of Debris

    600 bottle caps, 200 balloons, and one turtle

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Lumber, Crocs, fishing gear, medical tubing, broken beach chairs, and beer cans were among the three truckloads of trash gathered in two hours’ time by volunteers at Herring Cove Beach on Jan. 14. Afterwards, the group’s gleanings were counted and logged in a database at the Center for Coastal Studies.

    ON THE ROPES

    Rope Reduction Seen as Best Hope to Save Whales

    Each disentanglement matters, but rescues are no match for the problem

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — In late May, the Marine Animal Entanglement Response Team at the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) got a call on their emergency hotline, which runs all day, all year: a humpback whale, swimming with her calf, was entangled.

    Paulette Durazo joined the Center for Coastal Studies whale disentanglement team after working with gray whales in San Ignacio, Mexico. (Photo by Agata Storer)

    “We were told that there was a whale swimming with a jumble of lines around its body,” said Paulette Durazo, a rescue assistant on the team. The whale turned out to be Thumper, who was already identified in the CCS humpback database. She had a thick rope wrapped six times around her body between her head and dorsal fin, with a tangle of rope on her left side.

    Cutting a Whale Free

    Normally, the response team would throw a grapple attached to a control line to hook the rope, slow the whale, and make it easier to free it from gear, Durazo said. But in this case, they didn’t want the control line tangling up Thumper’s calf, which was swimming near its mother but not entangled. The team deployed a cutting grapple instead.

    “The goal was to throw the grapple across Thumper’s body and cut through all the lines,” Durazo said. Still, the calf posed a challenge by swimming between Thumper and the boat. The team’s experience was rewarded when the grapple landed successfully and, with the momentum of the whale moving forward, the thick ropes were cut.

    Durazo has been part of the CCS Marine Disentanglement Team here for four years. She grew up in Tijuana, Mexico and got her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in oceanography at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Ensenada, Mexico. She then moved south to San Ignacio, collecting and analyzing data and monitoring gray whales in the quiet lagoons where they mate and give birth. It was there that Durazo “fell in love with whales,” she said.

    An image from the May disentanglement of humpback whale Thumper. (CCS photo under NOAA permit #18786)

    In the lagoons, “the moms and babies approached the boats,” Durazo said, “and you could touch them.” This fearless behavior is particular to the species, baleen whales about the size of humpbacks but without dorsal fins. Durazo learned to recognize individual gray whales by the white marks left on them by barnacles.

    In Provincetown, Durazo works primarily with humpbacks, but she has also encountered other types in her work. Between 2019 and 2022, the team fielded 113 calls reporting whale entanglements: 71 humpbacks, 22 minke whales, 17 right whales, two fin whales, and one sei whale. Forty-two entangled leatherback turtles were also reported.

    All the Rope in the Sea

    Summer is high season for entanglements — or at least for reports of them. The humpback whales are in Cape Cod Bay then, the whale watch boats are operating, and there are just more people on the water, Durazo said.

    So far this year, the team has received 30 reports of whale entanglements, said Scott Landry, director of the center’s disentanglement team. Six of the 30 were successfully disentangled.

    The team is not able to respond to every call that comes in, Landry said. The reasons vary. In some cases, the whale is spotted too far offshore with no possibility of the team arriving before nightfall. The team can go out only during daylight, as the required precision of grapple throwing and cutting lines from a distance is impossible in the dark.

    An image from the May disentanglement of humpack whale Thumper with Chatham Bars Inn boat in the background. The boat crew called in the disentanglement team and waited with Thumper and calf until CCS arrived. (CCS photo under NOAA permit #18786)

    Every successful disentanglement is a moving experience. But the numbers of whales saved this way is not enough to match the scale of the entanglement problem. “You can’t rely on it as a way of conserving the species,” said Landry.

    Five of the 30 whales reported entangled this year have been North Atlantic right whales, the most critically endangered of the species that CCS encounters. Only about 340 right whales remain in the world, Landry said.

    There is a way to mitigate the entanglement problem, Landry said, “by reducing the mileage of rope” in the ocean. “I’m not talking about the reduction of fishing. I’m talking about the reduction of rope.”

    The skeleton of an 11-year-old humpback whale, preserved and suspended from the ceiling, greets visitors to CCS’s Spinnaker Exhibition. The exhibit’s namesake is the former bearer of the skeleton, Spinnaker, a whale that was entangled four times before beaching, dead, in Maine’s Acadia National Park in 2015. The average natural lifespan for a humpback whale is between 45 and 50 years.

    “We spent literally hundreds of hours working on Spinnaker over the course of her life,” Landry said. Her final entanglement occurred within a month or two of her death, far offshore. “She was anchored in a lobster trawl,” Landry recalled, “and was only able to swim around in a circle, like a dog on a leash.” The team thought they had left her in good shape, Landry said. But an autopsy after Spinnaker’s body was recovered showed that she had rope lodged in her skull.

    A grapple used to cut ropes. (CCS photo under NOAA permit #18786-06)

    While Landry is proud of his team, he believes we need to get beyond the need for it. “It’s near shameful that we’re still teaching young people how to disentangle whales,” he said. It’s a temporary and partial solution. “We’re probably helping in keeping these populations afloat while we’re having these conversations about what to do,” Landry said.

    The rescue missions are also risky for the members of the disentanglement team, Landry said. “We’re working with very large wild animals that are at the worst moments of their lives — severely injured and in a lot of pain,” he said. “The last thing they want is to be approached by a boat.”

    Stormy Mayo, now the director of the CCS Right Whale Ecology Program, founded the disentanglement team with David Mattila after a 1984 encounter Mayo and boatmates had with an entangled humpback. They were conducting research on the water when the whale they named Ibis came into view. “She had nets all over her body and was in very bad shape,” Mayo said.

    The crew managed to slow her down and free her from the gear. “When we started working on it, we didn’t actually know much about entanglement,” Mayo said. “It wasn’t a recognized story.”

    Now, “the whole business of entanglement has become super important,” Mayo said, with right whales getting particular attention because they’re so endangered.

    A member of the disentanglement team throws the grappling hook to establish a control line to slow the whale. (CCS photo under NOAA permit #18786-06)

    Even though disentanglement cannot save the whales, there seems to be a consensus among those in the field that freeing individual whales from gear is worth the effort.

    “It’s a philosophical question,” said Dennis Minsky, a naturalist who works as a guide on the Dolphin Fleet whale watch boats, which are regularly involved in calling in sightings of entangled whales. (Minsky also writes a column for the Independent.) “I would just say, if you were walking by some living thing that was injured or needed help, and you didn’t help, what does that do to you?” he asked. “What mark does that leave on your soul?”

    Mayo said he feels “marginally optimistic” about the right whale population, largely because of new attention to the cause. “There are very bright people and some exceptionally active conservation groups who are working on it,” he said.

    And, as Landry noted, the rescues may be buying critical time for innovations that might turn things around. Ropeless gear could be one such innovation.

    “I’m incredibly surprised by the amount of attention that ropeless fishing gear is getting,” Landry said. “That gives me a lot of hope.”

    ANIMAL BEHAVIOR

    Sharks Patrol Shallow Waters Here

    Tagged sharks are common but can’t always be spotted from the air

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — The presence of great white sharks on the Outer Cape’s shores may not be the shocking news it used to be, but just how much of the time these fish are patrolling the waters close to shore during summer and early fall might be.

    Bryan Legare, a doctoral intern who is manager of the shark ecology program at the Center for Coastal Studies here, has been tracking shark movements and behaviors at Head of the Meadow in Truro since 2019 and at Nauset Beach in Orleans since 2020. He outlined his preliminary conclusions for the Barnstable County Assembly of Delegates on March 2.

    Based on three years of data, Legare said, great white sharks have been detected in near-shore waters at Head of the Meadow during one hour of every two-hour period between July Fourth and Labor Day. During the week of Aug. 9, 2020, they were detected at Head of the Meadow during 165 hours of the 168-hour period studied.

    Bryan Legare downloads environmental data at Head of the Meadow.

    When his tracking program expanded to Nauset Beach two years ago, the frequency of detection was a bit lower there in the first year. But by last summer, sharks were being detected at the same rate at Nauset Beach as they were at Head of the Meadow.

    Piggybacking on state shark researcher Greg Skomal’s tagging program, Legare said he uses a dense array of acoustic receivers that pick up the presence of tagged sharks and can closely pinpoint their movements.

    “There are also untagged sharks in these waters,” Legare said. “The point of this is not to be alarming, but to show these animals are in the near-shore environment. Even if we can’t see them from the sky or from land, they are present.”

    Legare has looked at shark behavior in relation to tide, time of day, and turbidity of the water. His preliminary findings suggest sharks are more likely to be present during high tide than mid-tide, but still show up in decent numbers at low tide. “What this tells me is they are probably responding to the currents, but again, that’s a preliminary assumption at this point,” Legare said.

    The data have shown white sharks tend to hug the bottom, whether the water is nine feet deep or 30. In greater depths or turbid waters, which are common on the Outer Cape, they can go undetected by both spotter planes and drones.

    Not surprisingly, Legare said the sharks are often found near heavy populations of seals, cruising back and forth along the inner bar.

    “You can clearly see that the density is highest near the seal haul-out — where seals come ashore in significant numbers to rest — and they spend the majority of time there,” he said. The advice that people not swim near seals “is a strong recommendation,” he said.

    While Atlantic white sharks are present throughout the day, Legare said they seem to favor low-light conditions, something he plans to study further because it could influence the effectiveness of technologies such as drones for spotting sharks.

    This summer, Legare will gather data at three more Outer Cape locations — Marconi and Newcomb Hollow beaches in Wellfleet and Herring Cove in Provincetown — thanks to funding from the National Seashore.

    While it is rare for a great white shark to bite a human, sharks have bitten people three times in the waters off Truro and Wellfleet since 2012, according to the Cape Cod National Seashore. In 2018, a boogie-boarder at Newcomb Hollow died, the first shark-bite fatality on the Atlantic coast since 1936.

    Bryan Legare, manager of the Shark Ecology Program at the Center for Coastal Studies, deploys receivers and an acoustic doppler current profiler at Head of the Meadow, where he has been collecting data since 2019. (Photos courtesy Center for Coastal Studies).

    Following Legare’s presentation, John Lipman, past deputy director of the Cape Cod Commission and an Orleans resident, asked about the use of real-time monitoring to alert the public to the numbers and locations of sharks. “My concern is that we’re not doing enough fast enough,” he said. “I worry, if we don’t do more, we’re going to have another shark attack.”

    Heather Doyle, leader of Cape Cod Ocean Community, an organization that advocates using technology to prevent shark attacks, argued that spotting sharks from the sky can be done and is “super tactical and available now.”

    Legare, however, had noted in his presentation that there are limitations to spotting sharks from planes or drones. “If they are 25 feet down in a turbid water environment, we’re not going to be able to see them from above,” he said.

    Wellfleet resident Pat DeFrancesco, a board member of Cape Cod Ocean Community, said, “I strongly feel we need to go back in time and restore the beaches to the safe and carefree environment that they were for my children growing up on the Cape.”

    In a phone interview, Seashore Supt. Brian Carlstrom said that the Park has installed call boxes at all six of the backshore beaches it manages. Meanwhile, his agency’s approach to safety emphasizes education. Lifeguards are receiving more training, he said, and the public is being informed about “shark smart principles,” that is, awareness about how humans can reduce risk when entering the sharks’ habitat.

    “We are doing everything we can,” Carlstrom said.

    THE DREDGE REPORT

    Shellfishermen, Scientists Study Wellfleet’s Goo

    ‘Black custard’ isn’t toxic, but it can be perilous

    By

    WELLFLEET — Chopper Young was working on his oyster grant one day when a shrill note pierced Chipman’s Cove. Stranded in the mucky tidal flats was a woman in a kayak. She puffed on her whistle, over and over. “Fire and rescue were down there already,” Young said, “but they couldn’t reach her.”

    He decided to take matters into his own hands. Wading out into the gummy harbor, Young tossed the woman a rope and tugged her out of the mud.

    But not without sinking in himself, said Young, “balls deep.”

    DEBRIS BRIGADE

    Citizen Scientists and Artists Report In After 4-Day Trash Tally

    Yellow tubing is mystery newcomer to the trash heap

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    TRURO — After a four-day Outer Cape cleanup held in late September, the Marine Debris Team of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) took a deep dive into the 16 contractor bags and 12 piles of trash too large to be bagged, all of which had been collected from 28 miles of the back shore.

    The debris team has not yet learned the purpose or origins of yellow tubing that appeared in this year’s cleanup for the first time.

    Twenty volunteers spent four days at the Winkler Crane garage to sort and count 24,410 items weighing 1,950 pounds and including everything from derelict fishing gear to nacho chip bags.

    The debris was dumped out onto a large table and sorted into categories by the “debris brigade,” a group of citizen scientists and artists convened by Laura Ludwig, the Marine Debris Program manager at CCS.

    The inventory was conducted to assess the composition and sources of the debris — it is part of a long-term study by Ludwig’s team. Sorted items were counted, tallies entered on data sheets, and daily totals recorded. The count included items as small as produce stickers (a total of 39), Boston parking tickets (5), and syringes and their caps (265).

    The top 10 items (by count — not by weight: the weightiest item was fishing gear, 1,104 pounds of it) found over four days from Coast Guard Beach in Eastham to Race Point in Provincetown were:

    1. Bits of foam and plastic and items as small as produce labels got sorted into buckets during the inventory.

      Nondescript plastic film: 3,899 pieces (31 pounds)

    2. Nondescript rigid plastic: 3,505 pieces (18 pounds)
    3. Nondescript foam: 3,404 pieces (23 pounds)
    4. Food/candy wrappers: 1,702 wrappers (7 pounds)
    5. Bottle caps: 1,517 caps (18 pounds)
    6. Balloons and their strings: 902 (25 pounds)
    7. Straws or stirrers: 735 (1 pound)
    8. Rope less than 1 meter long: 588 pieces (combined with fishing gear, 1,104 pounds)
    9. Lobster claw bands: 578 bands (1 pound)
    10. Yellow mystery tubing: 551 pieces (1 pound)

    The purpose and origins of the yellow tubing is still a mystery, said Ludwig. This item has never appeared in Cape Cod cleanups until this year and has now been recorded in cleanups at many other Massachusetts sites as well, she added.

    Anyone with information about the mystery yellow tubing is invited to contact Ludwig at [email protected].

    CLIMATE CRISIS

    Coastal Studies’ Rich Delaney Is Going to Glasgow

    A small-town CEO with global influence at U.N. conference

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    PROVINCETOWN — Center for Coastal Studies CEO Rich Delaney may sit in the driver’s seat of a small nonprofit working to save the whales in Provincetown, but he has a global role in setting policies that can help save the world.

    The United Nations Climate Change Conference begins in Glasgow, Scotland on Oct. 31. The two-week event brings together the leaders of 197 countries who will negotiate climate mitigation measures, including reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. will send President Joe Biden; former Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry, who is now the first special presidential envoy for climate; and 13 cabinet secretaries. Delaney will be there, too, as co-founder and board president of the nonprofit Global Ocean Forum.

    Rich Delaney is president and CEO of Provincetown’s Center for Coastal Studies. (Photo Nancy Bloom)

    His organization will set up a pavilion with dozens of others just outside the inner beehive of diplomatic activity. It is hard to imagine what such an event, with thousands of high-level dignitaries, even looks like. Delaney explained in a recent interview that the complex is massive. Within it, there is a sort of inner circle. The diplomats will be in a huge room “similar to what people envision at the U.N., with desks in the round and all the interpreters,” he said.

    Outside this political nucleus, in the compound set up for the conference, there will be pavilions with organizations holding seminars and lectures on their specific topics. Indigenous peoples, who are disproportionately affected by climate change, will have a pavilion, as will the small islands “who are not only threatened but may disappear” because of sea level rise, Delaney said. Private industry, including Fortune 500 energy companies, will have pavilions, too. This speaks to the fact that green energy is the profit-making path of the future, Delaney said.

    And then there will be Delaney’s Global Ocean Forum.

    When it started in 2001, Delaney was able to get the Forum certified as a nongovernmental organization. This certification enables the group to attend the conference at a higher level than most. Aside from the U.N. delegates themselves and the news media, NGOs fall into the last allowable category of participants known as observer organizations.

    “We get to be in the building,” he said. “We don’t sit in on the negotiations, but we attend some of the hearings. That is the platform we use to be close enough to the negotiators to influence them.”

    The Global Ocean Forum achieved a major goal in Paris, in 2015, when the U.N. conference adopted language recognizing the importance of ocean health in the overall well-being of the planet. Before that, Delaney said, he and others were “flabbergasted” by the lack of recognition in the ocean’s critical role in climate change.

    “It still baffles me,” he said.

    How Important Are Oceans?

    Phytoplankton, microscopic plants at the surface of the water, produce 60 to 70 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, Delaney said.

    When Delaney’s group formed, climate change was a fringe issue. Today it’s a “global priority,” according to the UN climate change conference literature. Delaney has ridden the wave up to this conference, where the stage is now set to either advance the goals recommended by climate scientists or not.

    Each of the participating nations in the Glasgow arena have a “nationally determined contribution” or overall benchmark to improve global climate health. Currently, these goals are voluntary, but the aim of this convention is to move toward more ambitious and, ideally, more enforceable commitments, Delaney said. The U.S., for example, has pledged to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent below the 2005 level by 2030, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate.

    This will be hard to do, however, without Congress passing an infrastructure bill containing climate-conscious policies. Congress has set a goal of voting on it by Oct. 31, the day the U.N. conference begins. All eyes are on West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, two Democrats who are currently at an impasse with the rest of the Democratic senators.

    “The infrastructure bill is critical,” Delaney said. “And if the two senators for unexplainable reasons hold up passage of that bill along with the Republicans, all of whom are opposing it, it will be incredibly irresponsible. The whole world is waiting for the U.S. to resume its leadership role after five years missing in action with Trump, and if two people end up killing it, it will be a tragedy.”

    But, Delaney added, even if that happens, the Biden administration will still be able to use administrative and executive actions without Congress. Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, can make public transportation a higher priority, and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan will be able to impose regulations to control emissions from coal-fired power plants, Delaney said.

    Locally, what can be done? Delaney came back from the 2015 U.N. Climate Conference and, with other local activists, founded the Cape Cod Climate Change Collaborative. That nonprofit has met annually and will hold its signature event on Oct. 29. The free “Net Zero 2021: Powering Change at the Grassroots Level” conference will be virtual. Green energy methods that consumers can use are on the agenda, which can be found at netzerocapecod.org.

    Delaney will deliver opening and closing remarks at the Net Zero event. A couple of days later, he will get on a plane for Glasgow.

    ENVIRONMENT

    CCS Teams Scour Half a Ton of Trash From Back Shore

    An Outer Cape debris cleanup reveals a catalogue of what humans leave behind

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    PROVINCETOWN — The first group of beach walkers departed Coast Guard Beach in Eastham bound for Lecount Hollow in Wellfleet on Friday, Sept. 24. Buckets in hand, they scanned the shore. They were not gathering shells or driftwood. Their finds were manmade and were destined to be carefully catalogued, like items in an archeological dig. They were collecting trash.

    TRANSITION

    Center for Coastal Studies Chooses a New Leader

    President Richard Delaney will remain as senior adviser

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    PROVINCETOWN — Unlike the stereotypical introverted scientist, Sarah Oktay, the new executive director of the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS), puts herself out there.

    “It has always been my M.O. to help the public feel engaged and part of the solution,” said Oktay, speaking by phone from the University of California Davis, where she is the director of strategic engagement for the John Muir Institute of the Environment.

    Sarah Oktay at the field station on Nantucket in 2014. (Photo courtesy Sarah Oktay)

    Oktay, who is 58 and holds a Ph.D. in chemical oceanography, will take over the nonprofit on Jan. 1, when President Richard Delaney transitions to the role of senior adviser.

    Until 2016, Oktay worked on Nantucket for 12 years, running the University of Massachusetts’s Boston-Nantucket Field Station. “I spent a lot of time talking at the Antheneum, and I did a weekly column for Yesterday’s Island,” she said. “I have 800 pages of essays I have written about humpback whales, great white sharks, and seals — lots on seals. When I left Nantucket, it was front-page news.”

    Her work involves the chemicals that harm water quality. For example, she has studied the chemical profile of the ash in the Hudson River that resulted from the 9/11 attack.

    “I feel that scientists need to communicate to the public what we do,” she said. “The public pays taxes that enable our research, and people have a hunger for what is going on.”

    The CCS was founded almost 50 years ago by Graham Giese, Charles “Stormy” Mayo, and the late Barbara Shuler Mayo. It was among hundreds of nonprofits and field stations that began popping up in the late 1960s, inspired by the influential best sellers of biologist Rachel Carson, Oktay said.

    The center had a budget of $3.8 million and Delaney earned $170,000 as president in 2019, according to the latest federal tax returns available.

    Oktay said the center has become a big name in marine research. There is no better place to learn about the ocean and whale migration, she said.

    The CCS is the world leader in the study of right whales, she said.

    Saving right whales from extinction will be her number one priority, she added. There are fewer than 400 left in the world. The slow surface-dwelling creatures are being killed by ship strikes and fishing gear entanglement. A female can have only one calf a year, and throughout her life may produce 30 calves, said Oktay. If each female stayed healthy, the species would rebuild. But right whales are easy to kill; ship captains often don’t even see them.

    “For the tankers that bring cars to the U.S., it feels like hitting a chipmunk,” she said.

    Oktay said she has known Delaney for over 20 years and has been a “super fan of the Center for Coastal Studies. I cannot think of a place I’d rather help more,” she said. “There is incredible staff retention. When you are looking for a new job, you always want to go to a place where the staff are invested.”

    Delaney will remain as a senior adviser and plans to attend the U.N. Climate Change Conference (also known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP) in Glasgow in November, said Cathrine Macort, the CCS director of communications.

    During Delaney’s tenure, the center’s staff doubled to 40, and Delaney worked to make the oceans a priority in global climate change policy. In 2015, he attended the U.N. conference where the historic Paris agreement was ratified. He assisted in adding language critical to ocean health.

    Oceans produce 60 to 70 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, Delaney said. People hear about the rain forests, but phytoplankton, the microscopic organisms that live on the ocean’s surface, are even more critical to the air we breathe.

    Delaney began his 40-year career as a science teacher and a field naturalist on Cape Cod, and then became regional director of the Cape Cod Planning and Economic Development Commission (the predecessor of the Cape Cod Commission).

    Delaney is convinced that good science leads to solutions.

    For example, the center has done water quality monitoring at 150 sites on the Cape for 20 years, he said. These data show where wastewater has harmed bodies of water. The data helped influence the state legislature to attach a 2.7-percent tax on short-term rentals to address the wastewater problem on the Cape.

    “That is the full circle,” Delaney said. “Good science, good policy, and money to solve it.”

    Whale of a Time

    By

    The Center for Coastal Studies hosts “Whale Camp,” for children ages 8 to 12, on Monday, July 19th through Wednesday, July 21st, 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Learn how to identify whales and turtles, create whale-inspired art, and meet members of the Marine Animal Disentanglement Team. Camp culminates in a whale watch. Registration is $175 to $200 at coastalstudies.org.

    Whale Tales

    By

    Join the Center for Coastal Studies for “Napi’s Lecture: An Evening With the Right Whale Team” on Wednesday, May 26th, at 7 p.m. Learn about this “somewhat unusual” 2021 season, which started with the arrival of Millipede and her calf. Register for this free virtual event at coastalstudies.org.

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