Wakefield, RI.
By Michael A. Rice
With last summer’s fish and shellfish kills in Greenwich Bay, it is instructive to look at the state’s response to similar events in the past. Back in the mid-1890s, fishermen and oyster farmers along the shores of Point Judith Pond expressed grave concern about late summer fish kills and massive losses of oysters in the pond. Then as is now, the major freshwater input to the pond was the Saugatucket River emptying into the head of the pond, but at that time there was no permanent breachway on the pond. The barrier beach would occasionally break through during stormy periods allowing flushing of the pond by waters from Block Island Sound.
After a particularly intense fish kill in the summer of 1895, the fishermen and oyster farmers of the pond approached scientists at the Rhode Island Agricultural Experiment Station at the newly established Rhode Island College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts (now the University of Rhode Island) to inquire if they could explore the reasons for the fish kill and somehow solve the problem. As a result of this inquiry, Dr. G.A. Field of the Experiment Station established in the following year Rhode Island’s first marine laboratory in the coastal fishing village of Jerusalem. This laboratory, now known as the Jerusalem Coastal Fisheries Laboratory operated by the DEM Division of Fish and Wildlife, is the one of the oldest continuously operating marine laboratories in the world, only predated by the U.S. Fisheries Commission (now National Marine Fisheries Service) lab in Woods Hole founded in 1875 by U.S. Fisheries Commissioner Spencer F. Baird, and the Marine Biological Laboratory also founded in Woods Hole in 1888 by the famed Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz.
Reports on early research from the archives of the RI Agricultural Experiment Station show an amazing array of research projects aimed at improving water quality in Point Judith Pond and increasing the productivity of its fisheries. According to the 1900 Station report, experiments were begun to explore means for artificial propagation of oysters and lobsters. The effect of artificially enriching seawater with nitrogen fertilizers was explored, leading to an understanding of how phytoplankton blooms occur and suggesting methods of how to artificially propagate phytoplankton for shellfish food. Additionally, Field and his colleagues preformed and chemical analyses of the waters of Point Judith Pond using the then newly developed (1888) Winkler chemical titration technique for dissolved oxygen, showing that during the summer months the dissolved oxygen levels would nearly approach zero. Field’s report on the reasons for the oyster kills included his oxygen depletion data and a suggested means for alleviating the reduced oxygen conditions in the pond, which was the construction of a permanent breachway to allow free tidal exchange of waters with the Block Island Sound.
As amazing as some of these early reports are, I find most fascinating that the likely cause of the summer low oxygen condition in the pond was not reported, even though the answer would have been very obvious at the time. Directly upstream on the Saugatucket River in Peace Dale, Rowland G. Hazard operated one of the largest textile mills in the region; producing very high quality dyed woolen cloth (a similar mill was operated by the Robinsons in Wakefield as well, also on the Saugatucket). As part of the process of cleaning and carding prior to thread spinning, wool was treated with an ammonia wash to remove the natural lanolin oils. Additionally, Hazard was well known for his early adoption of the use of aniline dyes recently developed in Germany. Based on his own research, Field would have known that the ammonia effluents would have a stimulatory effect on phytoplankton in the pond, and the aniline dye effluents would have been colorfully obvious as they ran down the Saugatucket toward the pond.
The establishment of the Agricultural Experiment Station’s Marine Laboratory was clearly a reactionary response to the immediate problem of the fish kills, but the longest term impact of the laboratory had been its ability to quite serendipitously stimulate the marine-based economy of the Ocean State. The early research into the propagation of lobsters at the Jerusalem laboratory led directly to the establishment of Rhode Island’s marine ‘public aquaculture’ project with the 1898 establishment of a state lobster hatchery by the RI Commission on Inland Fisheries at the end of Fowler Street in Wickford (now the DEM Enforcement Marine Base). Research into the methods of artificially propagating oysters led to improvements in the oyster aquaculture methods practiced in Rhode Island to such an extent that such that by 1910, the impact of the old oyster aquaculture industry on Rhode Island’s economy was estimated to be in the range of $900 million annually in today’s dollars. Additionally, Dr. Field’s advice to establish a permanent breachway into Point Judith Pond was eventually acted upon by the General Assembly, thereby creating the port of Galilee, one of America’s leading fishing ports, with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues annually.
With the establishment of the Narragansett Marine Laboratory (Now URI’s Narragansett Bay Campus) in the 1940s, the Jerusalem Marine laboratory was turned over by the university to the newly formed Department of Fish and Wildlife (reorganized from the legislative Commissions on Shellfisheries and Inland Fisheries). For a time, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Laboratory was used as a facility to support the restoration of Atlantic salmon to the local rivers and estuaries, but since the late 1960s the Coastal Fisheries Laboratory at Jerusalem has been DEM’s base of operations for gathering fisheries catch data and monitoring the Galilee fishing fleet.
Although there was a change in mission for the laboratory from fish propagation research and public aquaculture to predominantly management of wild-capture fisheries, there had been a brief resurgence of aquaculture research at the facility during the 1970s. John Karlsson of DEM Fish and Wildlife reestablished the capability of propagating shellfish at the lab with a project to reestablish scallop populations into the coastal ponds. Additionally at that time, pioneering research into the artificial propagation of striped bass was undertaken at the facility, but these efforts as in the past unfortunately ended due to budgetary constraints and lack of sustained interest.
Ironically another shellfish kill exactly one century after the founding of the Jerusalem has brought the facility back to its founding roots. The February 1996 oil spill from the barge North Cape caused massive mortalities of shellfish and lobsters along the south shore. Resulting from the public outcry has been the establishment of a very promising program to artificially propagate several species of shellfish in an effort to restore the biomass lost in the spill. Over the last two years the cooperative program between the U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service and DEM has succeeded in reestablishing the capability within Rhode Island to produce shellfish for habitat restoration and fishery enhancement purposes. Beyond the immediate goal of restoring what has been lost due to the North Cape spill, the long term impact of what is now happening at the Jerusalem Laboratory may be found in the experience and know how being developed by the young marine scientists currently working at the lab. Restoring fisheries and shellfisheries is not a trivial matter, requiring expertise developed and maintained through sustained programming. Will we have the expertise around when the North Cape settlement funds disappear, or when the next ‘crisis’ occurs?
Michael A. Rice, an occasional contributor, is professor and chairman of the Department of Fisheries, Animal and Veterinary Science at the University of Rhode Island.