strike. Nothing he collects at Rose Bay goes 

 obediently into a box. Not the snakes; not the 

 data. 



He is here among the mosquitoes and pygmy 

 rattlers because this place, Rose Bay, harbors 

 life. It nurses things with fins, scales, warts and 

 wings. It shapes them, breeds them, multiplies 

 them all. This is where the oysters seem to fat- 

 ten overnight, bewitched. Over by Judith 

 Island, at the mouth of Rose Bay, there's a spot 

 called Drum Point. A sporting magazine has 

 called it the best red-drum fishing hole in the 

 country. 



But Rose Bay keeps its riches under wraps. 



"If you're just driving by on highway two- 

 sixty-four, all you'll see is an expanse of or- 

 dinary marsh grass," Miller says. "You don't 

 see a nursery ground. You don't see one of the 

 most productive estuaries in the state. But 

 when you set a crab pot, or pull a fine-mesh 

 trawl and find ten baby fish for every square 

 yard of bottom, then you see it." 



Rose Bay is a wedge-shaped notch of more 

 than 9000 acres in the western shore of Pamlico 

 Sound. Its tributary creeks drain a broad 

 swatch of forest and farms, and much of Lake 

 Mattamuskeet. The water is governed more by 

 wind than by the moon. Lunar tides distend the 

 bay a mere two inches, maybe three. Breezes 

 race into the funnel, squeezed between converg- 

 ing shorelines, piling water into three-foot wind 

 tides. 



The bay is mostly wild. It doesn't smell like 

 roses. Its muds have the sulfurous odor of 

 anaerobic decay. No one yet has made Rose 

 Bay a garden spot. There is one marina. Two 

 tiny towns nearby. Out on the bay, commercial 

 fishing boats heave crabs and oysters out of 

 water that is rough, opaque, secretive. 



There are fewer secrets here since Miller and 



his students came. They asked this place, 

 "What makes a nursery a nursery?" And it 

 began to tell them parts of what they asked. 

 About food chains, energy, overlapping 

 habitats. They asked what happens to that 

 nursery when it takes on sudden gluts of 

 rainwater runoff, carried by a man-made ditch. 

 It showed them abrupt swings in salinity, in- 

 terrupted cycles, young shrimp dying. 



"It turned out to be a better place for our 

 study than we imagined," Miller says. "In 

 many ways it's a typical nursery ground. But it 

 has a wider variety of sub-habitats, or habitat 

 types, than most bays do. And that's important 

 if you're trying to get a handle on nursery 

 grounds in general." 



The search for answers at Rose Bay goes on. 

 We need to know exactly what qualities make 

 an estuary a "nursery." It is a label we've 

 assigned largely by observation and intuition, 

 without reliable numbers and measures. North 

 Carolina may be able to keep her estuarine nur- 

 series in business, despite the drainage ditches, 

 the development, the overload of waste and 

 nutrients floating down from far upstream. But 

 it will take good, defensible definitions. It will 

 take a better understanding of just how much 

 of man's intrusion a nursery ground can stand. 



Of course there are more characters in this 

 story than scientists and the pink pygmy rat- 

 tler. Fishermen make a living in a place like 

 this. Boaters unwind with a rod and reel. And 

 more and more, people build and live nearby. 

 They won't be written out of the script. And 

 understanding an estuary means understanding 

 not only the resource, but those who use it. 



— Neil Caudle 



(John Miller is an associate professor of 

 Zoology at North Carolina State University) 



MmmmMMM 



