BLiACH FAUNA STUDY OF THE CERC FIELD RESEARCH FACILITY, 

 DUCK, NORTH CAROLINA 



by 



James F. Matta 



I. INTRODUCTION 



The Outer Banks of North Carolina are a series of offshore sandy 

 barrier islands extending from the Virginia-North Carolina border to 

 Cape Fear. The barrier islands, rarely more than 6 kilometers wide, 

 are separated from the shore by shallow sounds of varying widths and 

 are occasionally connected to the mainland or pierced by inlets to the 

 Atlantic Ocean. 



These islands provide an inhospitable environment to both plants and 

 animals. Strong winds, salt spray, and scouring sands have limited 

 plant and animal communities to a few dominant, well-adapted species. 



The CERC Field Research Facility (FRF) is located on a narrow 

 section of Currituck Bank (North Bank) , about 48 kilometers south of the 

 Virginia-North Carolina State line and 2 kilometers north of Duck, Dare 

 County, North Carolina (Fig. 1). Currituck Bank extends southward about 

 91 kilometers from the State line to Oregon Inlet, the first break in 

 the Outer Banks south of Chesapeake Bay. At the FRF site, the ocean 

 and sound beaches are approximately 914 meters long. 



Barrier island beaches offer several different habitats for 

 invertebrates. The swash zone and surf zone are severe habitats, 

 where the main limiting environmental factors are the stress of wave 

 action and the periodic exposure and submergence caused by the tidal 

 cycle. 



The ocean beach at the FRF site is a high-energy beach with a steep, 

 narrow beach face bordered by 7-meter-high foredunes. The foredunes 

 were stabilized in 1935 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and 

 the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) in a project which involved the 

 area between Virginia Beach, Virginia, and the middle of Ocracoke 

 Island, North Carolina (Stratton and Hollowell, 1940). According to 

 Dolan (1972) and Dolan, Godfrey, and Odum (1973), this stabilization 

 narrowed the beach and increased the oceanside slope on the dune face 

 and the beach. 



The beach face slopes down to an abrupt topographic step at 50 to 

 100 centimeters below mean sea level (MSL) . This step is the line of 

 demarkation between the coarse bottom material of the lower swash zone 

 and surf zone, and the fine sand of the buildup zone and the outer part 

 of the surf zone. Three wave zones and five bottom zones were defined 



