. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. vironment and the estuary's fertility is due to that freshwater system. But there's a fine line between an ade- quate amount of nutrients and an excess," says Paerl. An excess of nutrients can cause undesirable levels of algal North Carolina's Pamlico Sound is one of the most productive estuaries in the world. If Pamlico Sound were a bank, it would have one of the richest stockpiles of assets in the world. But the assets in Pamlico Sound are measured in terms of pounds of fish, bushels of she
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. vironment and the estuary's fertility is due to that freshwater system. But there's a fine line between an ade- quate amount of nutrients and an excess," says Paerl. An excess of nutrients can cause undesirable levels of algal North Carolina's Pamlico Sound is one of the most productive estuaries in the world. If Pamlico Sound were a bank, it would have one of the richest stockpiles of assets in the world. But the assets in Pamlico Sound are measured in terms of pounds of fish, bushels of shellfish and acres of marsh grass. The dividends from the production of fish and shellfish are easy to calculate. But dividends also accrue from more obscure things like benthic worms, seagrass beds, phytoplankton and bacteria. They are all part of a simple, but lucrative food chain that adds up to a system rich in productivity. Sea Grant researcher Charles Peterson wanted to com- pare productivity in two different estuarine systems to see how they stacked up. He chose a creature common to both systems—the clam—to test in estuaries located in southern California and in North Carolina's Back Sound, part of the overall Pamlico Sound estuarine system. Using wire-mesh cages to exclude predators, Peterson laid one layer of clams "cheek to ; On the shoulders of the first layer, he laid another layer of clams to double the den- sity. Peterson wanted to learn if a change in density would affect the clam's growth rate. "I wanted to get an idea whether the availability of resources were a limiting factor in growth," Peterson says. In similar studies in California, Peterson had found that the growth rate of clams was cut in half when their density was doubled. But in Back Sound, double density meant double production. Why the difference? Food availability. The North Carolina clams had all the food they could eat. The California clams didn't. The physical propert
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
