The New York Times has an article today on the 4000 artificial reefs sunk off the coast of New York and New Jersey. Barges, cranes, subway cars, army tanks, ice cream trucks, human ashes lovingly encased in concrete: they're all down there, providing footholds for coral and tiny shellfish and havens for bigger fish and lobster, which in turn draw anglers and scuba divers by the thousands.
The article has some useful historical information about arificial reefs:
Man has been creating reefs to make the seas more productive since at least the 17th century, when the Japanese sank building rubble for kelp to latch onto.
The local reef tradition is strong. A fishing club in Cape May began sinking concrete chunks and bathroom fixtures in 1935. In New York, Al Lindroth, a 77-year-old party-boat captain, recalled the first generation of reefs off the South Shore of Long Island in the 1950s.
And artificial reefs (even ones made with asbestos-filled subway cars) seem to be good for fishing:
Of the 30 million or so saltwater fish caught by recreational anglers off New Jersey each year, Mr. Figley said, one in five is reeled in off an artificial reef site, even though the sites cover less than half a percent of the 8,000 square miles of Continental Shelf off the state.
Undersea trash heaps, todays 'reefs'. Just another shifting baseline.
Environment
Comments
Just curious, but it seems to me that building artifical reefs does have some positive results, even though the process of doing it is distasteful, in that it is, when all is said and done, dumping trash. Am I to take it from your last comment that you oppose these artificial reefs? (I'm a new reader...)
Posted by: Grant "Curious" Canyon | September 10, 2007 6:57 AM
Hi Grant, Thanks for commenting. I am not opposed to artificial reefs and I do believe they bring some benefits. But you're right to point out that I did not do an adequate job of explaining myself (this post was written hastily). Thanks for keeping me honest! What I see as problematic is:
1) 'artificial reefs' have become a way of artificially enhancing fisheries growth, which is fine but all conversation on this topic should be prefaced with the fact that they are needed and beneficial due to overfishing
2) 'artificial reef' is merely a fancy way of saying 'undersea trash heap'--it's not like we manufacture some coralesque structure and sink it; instead, it's a bunch of industrial garbage around which fish will aggregate
3) These undersea trash heaps are replacing real reefs in people's mind. This is evdienced in this quote from the article: �There�s a lot of pressure on the reefs,� said Mr. Nagiewicz, 54, a veteran reef advocate who was leading a group of eight divers. Someday we'll open a text book on marine biology and it will show a string of sunken boats with a caption reading: New Jersey's reef system
Isn't it just like humanity to overfish a system, create a short-term solution with some technology (in this case undersea trash heaps), only to overfish and overcrowd those, too? This is the strongest trait common to both artificial reefs and real ones.
Posted by: Jennifer L. Jacquet | September 10, 2007 8:01 AM