Coalition rallies to save an ailing Barnegat Bay
Excess nitrogen hurts clamming, fishing, tourism industries
BY PATRICIA A. MILLER
Staff Writer

An aquamarine Barnegat Bay shimmers in the early June sun. A small sailboat slips silently through the shallow water, tacking close to the shoreline. Gulls keen overhead and children play in the beige sand.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Barnegat Bay is sick. Very sick. A fusillade of fertilizer from the sky, land, tributaries and years of overdevelopment is slowly choking the life out of it.

"When we look out at the bay, how could anybody think that it was troubled?" Willie deCamp, the executive director of Save Barnegat Bay said, as he pointed to the seemingly pristine bay.

"The bay is in a lot of trouble biologically."

DeCamp and members of a number of other Jersey Shore environmental groups held a press conference June 1 in Lavallette to launch a public awareness campaign about the bay's perilous ecological state.

Excess nitrogen is the bay's enemy, according to the groups.

It comes in many forms - the overuse of fertilizers, pet wastes, deforestation, septic systems and air pollution.

James Merritt, the director of the Sedge Island Education Center off Island Beach State Park, lugged two buckets of lime-green macro algae to the presentation.

Macro algae provides oxygen when it is alive, but lowers the bay's oxygen content when it decomposes and falls to the bottom, he said.

"This worries me," Merritt said, as he held up a dripping clump of thread-like algae. "It's smothering a lot of things. It's literally sucking the oxygen out of the water. It's difficult for lots of sea creatures to live in. It consumes more oxygen when it's decomposing."

The dense growth also traps fish and marine life as they search for food and become entangled in the algae. Merritt brought a small aquarium with two baby diamond-back terrapins he had rescued that morning. The tiny turtles, less than 2 inches long, tried to scuttle up the aquarium walls.

The algae is flourishing in the bay because of excess nitrogen. It decreases the transmission of light through the water, which harms vital eelgrass beds, habitats for fish and shellfish.

The number of oysters, crabs and scallops in the bay has dropped dramatically over the years, all victims of excess nitrogen that flows into the bay from water sources miles inland, as far as Jackson and Plumsted townships, said Helen Henderson, Save Barnegat Bay's project manager.

Overdevelopment has taken an indirect toll on the bay's fishing and clamming businesses, she said.

"The clammers are saying there aren't the resources there anymore," Henderson said. "This is all related to tourism and the economics of the state."

The number of states licenses issued for clamming and oystering has dropped from 17,000 in 1989 to 7,400 in 2004. There are only nine active commercial clammers on the bay now, she said.

Tim Dillingham, executive director of the American Littoral Society, said the bay is already ailing.

"All the signs are here," he said. "Barnegat Bay is sick, if not dying. If we don't wake up and recognize we are seeing all these signs, if we lose what this bay provides, it's going to leave a tremendous hole. Barnegat Bay is an afterthought to local politicians and state politicians."

"Are we going to continue to chase ratables, or protect the estuary?

The coalition is hoping to raise awareness with a three-pronged approach: educating the public and elected officials; holding individuals, businesses and government accountable; and encouraging changes in public policy.,

The state now mandates that municipalities have a stormwater management plan, which addresses nonpoint sources of pollution, said Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action.

The campaign even has a flag, with a forest-green background, a white jellyfish in the center of a circle with a diagonal line across the circle. The jellyfish, or stinging sea nettles, have multiplied in the bay over recent years, possibly because of excess nutrients and warmer waters, coalition members said.

Gregory Auriemma, chairman of the Sierra Club of Ocean County, said "mind-boggling" development in Ocean County - including a proposed 9,000-home project in Jackson Township - are examples of overdevelopment that eventually impact the bay.

"We can't continue to build McMansions with chemical cocktail lawns," he said.

The coalition consists of the American Littoral Society, Clean Ocean Action, the Ocean County Sierra Club, the Sedge Island Natural Resources Education Center, the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, Re-Clam the Bay, NJ Peer, the Bay Head Environmental Commission, the Mantoloking Environmental Commission and the Friends of Island Beach.

"Our dream would be to make it socially unacceptable to have a beautiful lawn," said Save Barnegat Bay member Jennifer O'Reilly.