The............................Gribbles are Back
High Miles
By SAMANTHA GROSS, Associated Press Writer
Sat Oct 7, 5:04 AM
A piece of wood that has been eaten by ...
NEW YORK - The city's waterfront is getting cleaner, and bothersome
river critters not seen in hundreds of years are once again attacking
wooden ships and piers.
The waters were once so filthy that early 20th-century sailors could be
sure their boats would be safe from such threats _ because organisms
simply couldn't survive in the muck. But scientists are now seeing a
resurgence in gribbles, shrimp-like crustaceans that grow to about
one-17th of an inch in length and attack wood from the outside, and
shipworms, which latch onto the outside of wood and burrow inward,
growing up to several feet long as they devour the material.
"As the river gets cleaner, it's easier for things to live in it," Chris
Martin of the Hudson River Park Trust said of the return of the tiny
mollusks and crustaceans. "We don't make the piers out of wood anymore
because of them."
But many of the region's older waterside structures remain, and from the
South Street Seaport to the Jersey City waterfront, wooden piers have
had to be expensively refitted or abandoned entirely.
The city's floating Waterfront Museum fell victim recently, springing
leak after leak, and the holes were getting so bad that they couldn't be
plugged.
Captain David Sharps sent the antique wooden barge upriver for repairs,
then discovered another big problem when he went looking for the
museum's dock.
"Lo and behold, there was no dock," Sharps said, recalling a trip to the
Brooklyn pier with his daughters on a sunny summer weekend. "Practically
the entire pier had fallen into the water ... We had fixed up this old
barge and she was basically all dressed up and nowhere to go."
Years ago, captains would actually park in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal _
not far from where the museum was docked _ to kill off any marine growth
on their ships, thanks to water so polluted it could change color daily,
said John Waldman, a Queens College professor who has studied the
environmental history of New York Harbor.
"It had this legendary smell that you could smell for blocks, even
miles," he said. "The harbor was quite dead."
With human waste being dumped directly into the waterways, wildlife _
including shipworms and gribbles _ died off, Waldman said.
By 1900, the harbor's oysters were smothered. Visitors would gape as
methane gas bubbles rose to the surface, produced by waste degrading at
the bottom. Sections of the harbor caught fire. In the first decade of
the century, civil engineers found 10-foot-tall deposits of human waste
at the bottom of the waterway.
Officials soon began treating the sewage, but it wasn't until the Clean
Water Act of 1972 that wildlife began fully returning to the harbor. A
recent study in Hudson River Park found that all the species of fish
that had existed there in the early 1800s had returned.
Shipworms began returning to the region in full force in the 1990s,
according to Mal McLaren, president of McLaren Engineering Group, which
repairs wooden structures that have been attacked by the critters.
Earlier this year, scientists found evidence of two shipworms near the
wooden supports of the Tappan Zee Bridge. But the water in the area is
likely not salty enough to support a shipworm colony that could cause
structural damage, experts said.
Gribbles require even higher levels of salinity, meaning they present
less of a problem in many New York spots.
McLaren, who recalled once seeing a single pier in Jersey City that
carried traces of tens of thousands of shipworms, said weakened wooden
pilings can be jacketed in concrete or replaced with plastic. For now,
the Hudson River Park Trust and other custodians are taking such steps
to maintain many of the original piers along Manhattan's coastline.
But others, like Captain Sharps, say that sometimes it's best to simply
accept that the invisible critters thriving beneath the water may have won.
After spending more than $200,000 rebuilding his barge and coating its
wood in shipworm-resistant tar and plastic, Sharps didn't bother paying
for repairs on his 20-foot-by-100-foot pier in Red Hook. That fallen-in
dock has since been abandoned, and the Waterfront Museum now sits at a
structure of stone and steel.
tim
"High Miles" <2Blu...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:GOGdnWPlJLQY7LTY...@comcast.com...
I think I'll reconsider my exile from seafood. Mmmm... Shipworms and
Gribbles... Mmmm...
Joel Olson
And that's the long and short of it.
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The [pre-Cambrian]soft-bodied forms exposed on the sea floor started to become scarce
because they were evolving. Before now they had been exposed to inactive predation
only. This was a fairly inefficient process, in which maybe one in ten individuals
would meet a sticky end. This may have been the sticky end of a predatory priapulid
worm, or the sticky end of an anemone's tentacle, but a species can live with odds of
one in ten. - Andrew Parker
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