A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



Nature Remembers 



A f\ f By David Cecelski • Photos courtesy of Sherri Cooper 

 V Vhen 



'hen I was growing up by the Neuse 

 River, we already knew something wasn't right. Fish 

 had not yet started dying by the millions, and nobody 

 would hear of Pfiesteria piscicida for another 25 

 years. But we knew not to swim in the river. The shad 

 fishery, once the state's largest, had disappeared. And 

 I still remember how, after a sudden thunderstorm 

 capsized our boat off Minnesott Beach, I found my 

 clothes soggy with a dull brown silt that I'd never 

 seen in nature. 



As I got older, 

 the Neuse screamed 

 that it was dying. 

 Fish kills, algal 

 blooms and dead 

 zones became 

 annual events. I 

 even found signs 

 posted at Slocum 

 Creek, a Neuse 

 tributary near our 

 home, warning us 

 not to eat the fish 

 because of the 

 dangers of nickel, 

 cadmium and other 

 heavy-metal 

 poisoning. 



How did the 

 water quality in the 

 Neuse and our other 



estuaries get so bad? The cast of culprits is pretty 

 clear: corporate hog farming, agricultural runoff, land 

 development, industrial wastes, municipal sewage. 

 But with the exception of corporate hog farming, a 

 recent phenomenon, we really don't know their 

 impact on water quality before monitoring began in 

 earnest in the 1970s. 



What was water quality like before urban growth 

 and phosphate mining? Before chemical factories and 

 pulp mills? And, in the case of the anoxia (oxygen 



After diatoms and pollen are extracted from the sediment 

 samples, Sherri Cooper makes slides of the material. 

 She spends hours at the microscope identifying 

 the diatoms and pollen grains and logging counts. 



depletion) and eutrophication (nutrient overloading) 

 that precipitate many fish kills, how can we sort out 

 climatic influences from human causes? 



Until I met Sherri Cooper, I assumed that these 

 were unanswerable questions. Cooper, a paleoecolo- 

 gist at the Duke University Wetland Center, got 

 interested in the North Carolina coast as a young girl, 

 when she visited her grandmother's home at Core 

 Point on the Pamlico River. Now she believes that the 



emerging science 

 of paleoecology 

 can provide at least 

 some of the 

 answers about 

 what we've lost, 

 how we lost it — 

 and what we might 

 regain if our 

 estuaries can be 

 saved. 



Paleoecology 

 is the study of 

 living things and 

 their environment 

 in the past. The 

 word itself sounds 

 arcane, but it really 

 expresses a 

 common- sense 

 idea: Nature 

 remembers. Most 



people are aware of at least a few of the clues used by 

 paleoecologists to decipher ecological history. Tree 

 rings are one. By studying a core sample from the 

 venerable bald cypresses that grow, say, in the Three 

 Sisters Swamp along the Black River, a paleoecolo- 

 gist can recover a memory of rainfall as far back as 

 when Jesus walked the earth. In the spacing and 

 thickness of the cypress's rings, a trained eye can see 

 hurricanes and droughts, fires, floods and the rise and 

 fall of rivers. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 25 



