Citizens of New York and marine biologists, and I expect conservationists, are excited to see bottlenose dolphins showing up in the city’s harbour. They have been drawn to the city by cleaner water and good stocks of Atlantic menhaden (a forage fish described as ‘the most important fish in the sea’). Sarah Trabue watched the dolphins from the city’s wildlife conservation society’s research boat last week and said: “Dolphins were everywhere”.
With five fellow scientists, she has just published a paper on this welcome development. They decided that judging from the clicking noises that the dolphins made that they were foraging for food almost daily at the harbour entrance during late summer and early autumn.
The East River was once known as a ‘brown channel’. As I understand it, that is a reference to the victims of the local Mafia who ended up in the water (or a reference to poop 😎) but this river is now a habitat for bottlenose dolphins.
Howard Rosenberg, a senior scientist at the wildlife conservation society, said that it is unusual and that “It’s not normally where they are seen”, but in a conversation with a local radio station he said that they seem to have come into the river on purpose and showed no sign of distress.
It is the cleaner water and ample supplies of food which have brought them there. According to a report dated 2019 by the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, the city’s harbour is cleaner now than it has been in nearly 110 years. The New York Post states that the last time the harbour waters were this pure, the Model T had just been introduced to the country and Albert Einstein had just published his theory of relativity!
The harbour is the city’s greatest natural amenity so it’s great to see this development. In the 17th century, New York Harbour was “a magnificent coastal paradise” said Jon Cronin, a former New York commercial fishermen who is now a conservationist.
The city’s population increased from 60,000 in the early 1800s to almost 4 million by the turn-of-the-century. There was an onslaught of poop! Comment: whenever I see beautiful villages and cities I always wonder where all the poop goes!
In the early days in New York “Not a single waste product was treated in any way”, said John Waldman, a biologist at Queens College and the author of Heartbeats in the Muck: The History, Sea Life, and Environment of New York Harbour”. The biggest threat to the harbour water’s environment is not chemicals and heavy metals et cetera but a “torrent of turds”!
Clearly, the city’s administrators have worked very hard on dealing with those turds to prevent them from polluting the waters. The harbour is now full of marine life and human activity including swimmers. And you can fish successfully in New York Harbour. There has been a 50% increase since 2014 of registrations for recreational marine fishing.
A lot of stuff ends up in the harbour such as a dead giraffe, a mailbag stuffed with a human torso, a grand piano, silicon breasts, and a freight train from 1865!
Below are some more articles on marine wildlife.
