Undersea Incubators: 



By Michael Weaver 



It's a quiet, calm 

 scene, this place 

 where the land 

 meets the sea, where salt 

 water mingles with fresh 

 in a forest of marsh 

 grasses and muddy 

 bottoms. 



If only you would peek beneath 

 the surface. 



Blue crabs burrow in a cloud of 

 sediment. Tiny shrimp weave 

 around clams and other crusta- 

 ceans settled in the waist-deep 

 waters. Spot, croaker and flounder 

 dart among the seagrasses in 

 search of food or in attempts to 

 escape larger predators that would 

 make a meal of them. 



Estuaries are among the world's 

 most fertile undersea environments. 

 It is here that millions of fish and 

 other ocean creatures migrate 

 yearly to feed and grow before 

 returning to deeper waters and 

 continuing another spawning 

 cycle. 



Despite their importance and 

 abundance of life — it is estimated 

 that 90 percent of the fish caught 

 by North Carolina's recreational 

 and commercial fishermen spend 

 some time in an estuary — the state 

 had no protection there until the 

 last decade. 



By the mid-1980s, however, regu- 

 lations prohibited a wide range of 

 bottom-disturbing activities such 

 as trawling, dredging and mechan- 

 ical harvesting in shallow waters 

 identified a decade earlier as 

 valuable habitat. 



By 1987, North Carolina had 

 wrapped a protective ring around 

 more than 128,000 acres of estua- 

 rine waters it had defined as 



nurseries worthy of keeping au 

 naturel. 



How have they fared? 



"The struggle continues as to 

 further protection," David Taylor 

 said recently from his Morehead 

 City office with the N.C. Division of 

 Marine Fisheries. 



Though the average fisherman 

 knows he can't tow a trawl net 

 through a nursery area or arbitrarily 

 widen a channel for his boat, 

 Taylor says inland farming and de- 

 velopment practices play just as 

 heavily on the health of a coastal 

 estuary. 



"Basically, everything east of 

 Raleigh has to be coordinated to 

 keep the nurseries up to par,' ' says 

 Taylor, manager of the division's 

 four-county central district. 



Bob Hines, a Sea Grant agent in 

 nearby Atlantic Beach, agrees. 



"Every time a housewife flushes 

 a commode in Raleigh, a certain 

 amount of it ends up down here,' ' 

 Hines says, standing amid the 

 marsh grasses along the Newport 

 River in Carteret County. 



Farmers and fishermen have 

 talked for 10 years about ways to 

 curb field runoff of sediment and 



chemicals that, in the end, are 

 going to find their way to the sea. 

 Although Taylor believes ' 'a whole 

 lot of work' ' remains unfinished in 

 controlling inland pollution, Sea 

 Grant Director B.J. Copeland sees 

 evidence of progress in the past 

 decade. 



' 'We have done a better job of 

 identifying primary nurseries,' ' 

 Copeland says of an estuary's up- 

 permost reaches that are more 

 likely to house the youngest fish 

 and shellfish. 



More than 80,000 coastal acres 

 are labeled primary nurseries, 

 while another 48,000 acres carry 

 designations of secondary or spe- 

 cial secondary nurseries, down- 

 stream waters that fish move to on 

 their way back to the open ocean. 



In the sprawling Albemarle and 

 Pamlico sounds, almost all pro- 

 tected nurseries are concentrated 

 along the shallow, brackish waters 

 of embayments opening out into 

 the saltier sounds. 



Nurseries — defined in part by 

 their salinity as well as temperature, 

 bottom type and food — typically in- 

 clude waters one-third as salty as 

 the ocean. At about 10 parts salt 



