RlTTSCH F IS FAMOUS FOR LEADING FIELD TRIPS INTO THE ESTUARIES AND MARSHES NEAR DUKE MARINE LAD. 



His students' research focuses on 

 everything from fish to invertebrates. 

 Previous proteges have studied hormonal 

 control in fiddler crabs and the aerosol 

 filtering apparatus in mole crabs. Rittschof 

 will follow his curiosity, and his students, 

 anywhere. "He lives what he teaches," says 

 Orbach. 



And what Rittschof teaches is the 

 organic complexity of nature, as revealed 

 in a set of chemical systems that have 

 evolved to shape animal behavior. When 

 he says an estuary is like an organism, he is 

 serious: the estuarine habitat around Pivers 

 Island is his biggest, most complicated 

 research animal yet. 



From his third-floor office, Rittschof 

 can look across a narrow channel and see 

 one particular estuary — "his" estuary — 

 a square kilometer of sand, mudflats and 

 shallow water on Carrot Island. For the last 

 17 years, he has been getting intimately 

 aquainted with his estuary, fascinated by 

 the vital interconnectedness of its parts. 



Terns and killdeer sweep across the 

 embayment, island horses wade through it, 

 flounder skim along its bottom. Fresh 

 water seeps in from a spring on the eastern 

 shore. On very high tides, ocean water 

 spills across the dunes to flood the bay with 

 salt. Every inch of the estuary offers new 

 research possibilities. 



"All the male blue crabs sit in pits in 

 one tiny part," Rittschof says. "Are they 

 there because of physics or does it smell 

 good to them?" Though the bottom of the 

 estuary is crowded with thousands of tiny 

 snails, some patches are completely bare. 

 Why? 



For Rittschof and his students, the 

 estuary is an open-air laboratory that 

 provokes an endless stream of questions. 

 He leads nighttime canoe trips there, 

 catches its flounder by hand, tracks its 

 snails and sediments, measures its salinity. 

 With Jonathan Kool, a graduate student, he 

 is mapping the estuary in 10-meter 

 increments and digitizing all its flora and 



fauna, its sediments and waters, using the 

 Geographic Information System (GIS). 



'1 want to know how everything 

 works in this soft-bottom environment," he 

 says. "I'm doing this because I'm curious 

 about it and I like it. I want to know how 

 the world is put together." Rittschof hopes 

 to make a long-term database of all the 

 activity in the estuary to document and 

 publicize the animals' interactions with 

 each other and with the environment. 



The estuary project is merely the latest 

 and most ambitious in a line of research 

 projects that stretch back to Rittschof s 

 childhood. He has made a career of asking 

 "why." As a boy, he spent summers in 

 northern Michigan with his family. 'When 

 I wasn't picking cherries for money, I was 

 catching things," he says. "Usually I was 

 fishing. I was interested in anything that 

 moved." He was especially intrigued by 

 the creatures that crept and slithered and 

 flew at night. Nightcrawlers were a favorite 

 catch. 



20 AUTUMN 1999 



