Portuguese Man O' War reportedly washed up on a Jersey beach
Updated on July 12, 2017 at 11:32 AM Posted on July 11, 2017 at 8:31 AM
By Chris Franklin
cfranklin@njadvancemedia.com,
For NJ.com

HARVEY CEDARS -- A venomous fish washed up on a beach in Long Beach Island Friday.

According to Harvey Cedars Beach Patrol Captain Randy Townsend, a Portuguese Man O'War was found around 10 a.m. Friday. It appears as if it had washed up on the shore.
The Portuguese Man O' War is known for its dangerous tentacles that if stung, it can be extremely painful.

It is not the first time the jellyfish has been found on the beach at the Harvey Cedar Beach. One Man O' War was found towards the end of the summer last year and more were found in 2015.

Meet Hilton: Another great white shark swimming along N.J.'s coast
Updated on July 23, 2017 at 2:35 PM Posted on July 21, 2017 at 5:17 PM
By Spencer Kent
skent@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

While Mary Lee, the famed great white shark with a massive twitter following, continues her more than monthlong break from the limelight, another great white is heading toward New Jersey's coastal waters.

Hilton, a 12-1/2-foot long, 1,326-pound male great white shark, surfaced at 8:07 p.m. Thursday off the southern Maryland-Delaware border, according to a real-time GPS tracker monitored by OCEARCH, a nonprofit group which researches great whites.

Hilton -- which was tagged by the group in March -- has traveled more than 151 miles in the last 72 hours, and was off the Cape May shoreline Friday afternoon. Since leaving the coastal waters of South Carolina last week, the shark has been heading north at a steady pace, according to the group's tracker.

Sharks were spotted at a Coney Island beach today
By Rebecca Fontana
​Posted: Saturday July 8 2017, 4:57pm
TimeOut New York 

New Mascot for the Hamptons: Mary Lee, the Great White Shark
By VALERIYA SAFRONOVA
JULY 11, 2017
​The New York Times

She is somewhere in her 40s or 50s, has more than 119,000 followers on Twitter (where she can sometimes be quite flirtatious) and enjoys summering along the Jersey Shore and the Hamptons.

She weighs about 4,000 pounds and is around 17 feet long. If you’re a seal or a squid, you had better be careful when she comes around.

Meet Mary Lee, a great white shark identified in fall 2012 by Ocearch, an organization that researches and tracks marine species. In the five years since the team first pulled Mary Lee out of the waters near Cape Cod, in Massachusetts, to tag her and collect blood and tissue samples, she has traveled nearly 40,000 miles.

Ocearch traces the path by plotting the pings that occur every time Mary Lee’s dorsal fin surfaces; it is tagged with a device linked to a satellite. During the past three summers, Mary Lee has been a regular on the Northeastern Seaboard, cruising along the Jersey Shore and the Hamptons, Fire Island and Montauk, in New York, attracting the attention of residents and tourists with each visit.
​
“She has become sort of a mascot,” said Andy Brosnan, the chairman of the Eastern Long Island chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. “Even before she showed up last time, people were like, ‘Has anybody seen anything about Mary Lee?’”

Evidence may point to great white shark nursery off NJ
Dan Radel, @DanielRadelAPP
Published 7:52 p.m. ET July 17, 2015 | Updated 1:18 p.m. ET July 20, 2015
​Asbury Park Press

SANDY HOOK – A small party of friends and family were leisurely fishing for fluke Saturday when they hooked into something unexpected — a 4 1/2-foot juvenile great white shark.

They were nine miles northeast of the Sandy Hook tip, an area that is part of the New York Bight. After a short fight on rod and reel the shark was brought along side the boat and let go.

“It was released very quickly. We didn’t want to harm it,” said Robert Latore of Middletown, on whose boat the catch occurred.

In 25 years of fishing, this was Latore’s first encounter with a great white shark. But these brushes with juveniles may prove that the sharks are birthing their pups off the coast here.

“The New York Bight has long been known to be a nursery area — based on historic incidental catches of young-of-the-year,” said Michael L. Domeier, president of the Marine Conservation Science Institute, located in Hawaii.
The New York Bight is an area of the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May to Montauk Point on Long Island.
​
Domeier said research on the New York Bight is lacking, but what he knows from white shark pups on the West Coast is they often remain in a fairly localized area for the summer and then migrate to warmer water in the winter.

Coast Guard rescues 2 boaters from shark-filled water near Sandy Hook
Updated on July 22, 2017 at 11:41  Posted on July 22, 2017 at 10:51 AM
By Marisa Iati
miati@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

SANDY HOOK -- U.S. Coast Guard crews and a fishing boat saved two people from shark-filled waters Friday after their boat sank near Sandy Hook, the Coast Guard reported.

The First Coast Guard District command center in Boston got a distress alert at about 9:40 a.m. from a console boat 40 miles off the New Jersey shore.

An aircraft from Coast Guard Air Station Cape Cod went to the area of the distress signal and found two people in a life raft near an overturned boat and its debris.

A helicopter from Air Station Atlantic City arrived but could not send down a rescue swimmer because there were visible sharks in the water. 

Did a fishing crew catch the biggest shark in state history? 
Updated on July 23, 2017 at 1:06 PM Posted on July 22, 2017 at 12:20 PM
​By Chris Franklin
cfranklin@njadvancemedia.com,
For NJ.com

BRIELLE -- A fishing boat named the Jenny Lee caught a 926-pound Mako shark Saturday morning and it could be the largest shark catch in New Jersey history.

The crew was fishing 100 miles off of the coast of New Jersey in an area known as Hudson Canyon. It took the crew a little over an hour to reel in the shark and hour and a half to get him into the boat, Kevin Gerrity, captain of the Jenny Lee, said.

"It's a pretty awesome feeling," Gerrity said. "We saw him swimming up to the boat. We didn't think we were going to get him but we got him."
​
"We were able to get him with a skipjack fillet with a squid combo as his last meal," Gerrity added jokingly. 

A Running List of How Trump Is Changing the Environment
The Trump administration has promised vast changes to U.S. science and environmental policy—and we’re tracking them here as they happen.
By Michael Greshko
Laura Parker
Brian Clark Howard
PUBLISHED JUNE 14, 2017
National Geographic

The Trump administration’s tumultuous first months have brought a flurry of changes—both realized and anticipated—to U.S. environmental policy. Many of the actions roll back Obama-era policies that aimed to curb climate change and limit environmental pollution, while others threaten to limit federal funding for science and the environment.

The stakes are enormous. The Trump administration takes power amid the first days of meaningful international action against climate change, an issue on which political polarization still runs deep. And for the first time in years, Republicans have control of the White House and both houses of Congress—giving them an opportunity to remake the nation’s environmental laws in their image.
​
It’s a lot to keep track of, so National Geographic will be maintaining an abbreviated timeline of the Trump administration’s environmental actions and policy changes, as well as reactions to them. We will update this article periodically as news develops.

There is no better illustration of gilded, internet-age New York than the High Line. Anchored on the south by the relocated Whitney Museum and on the north by the high-rises of Hudson Yards, the elevated park sits at the center of a real estate frenzy that has uprooted earlier generations of gentrifiers, art galleries, and even the city’s sense of who should control public space.
​
The story of how we got here, however, has evolved over time. Before it opened with a series of ribbon-cuttings between 2009 and 2014, the High Line spent a decade in gestation, developing as the idea of a group of Chelsea residents, then spreading to the city’s gala-hopping elites, and eventually winning the embrace of the Bloomberg administration. During this era, much of the public discussion about the park was old-fashioned boosterism, gushing about its high-design, post-industrial aesthetic, its magnetic pull on tourists, and its role as lynchpin for the mushrooming art, restaurant, retail, and condominium scene in West Chelsea and the Meatpacking District.

This type of cheerleading is epitomized by New York Post restaurant and real estate writer Steve Cuozzo, who earlier this year called the park a “masterpiece” and “true wonder of our age” that has enabled “limitless popular pleasure.” Anyone who has misgivings about the High Line, he said, implies “that the High Line is somehow a racist creation” and is sympathizing with “reactionary leftists who prefer the crime-and-decay-ridden New York of the 1980s.”

​What Trump is doing to allow oil drilling near N.J. beaches
Updated on July 3, 2017 at 3:51 PM   Posted on July 3, 2017 at 3:00 PM
BY JONATHAN D. SALANT 
jsalant@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Interior Department said it will begin rewriting the five-year oil drilling plan that currently excludes the Atlantic Ocean.

The first stage is a request for comments, which was published Monday in the Federal Register and began a 45-day period for interested parties to weigh in. It will take two to three years to develop a new plan.

The action helps fulfill a pledge made by President Donald Trump to increase the production of fossil fuels such oil and coal, whose emissions contribute to rising temperatures. Trump has called climate change a Chinese hoax.
​
"We're creating a new offshore oil and gas leasing program," Trump said Thursday at an event held at the U.S. Energy Department. "America will be allowed to access the vast energy wealth located right off our shores. And this is all just the beginning -- believe me. The golden era of American energy is now underway." 

A Call for a Hippocratic Oath on Protecting the World’s Oceans
In a Yale Environment 360 interview, scientist Nathan Bennett explains why he and other marine experts are calling for a a code of conduct for ocean conservation to ensure that local communities benefit from newly created marine reserves.
BY DIANE TOOMEY • JUNE 1, 2017
Yale Environment 360

In a provocative paper released last month, an international group of marine conservation experts called for the creation of a code of conduct for their profession to ensure that the rights of local people are not trampled as the number of marine protected areas grows worldwide. The two-dozen scientists and conservationists proposed what they called a Hippocratic Oath for marine conservation, which would involve local people in the establishment of marine protected areas, would create mechanisms for conflict resolution, and would ensure equitable distribution of benefits from marine reserves. 

The lead author of the paper, published in the journal Marine Policy, is Nathan Bennett, a geographer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and the University of Washington. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Bennett describes the backlash to what some communities view as “ocean grabbing” by conservation organizations, discusses why working closely with local people will pay environmental dividends in the long run, and explains why the need to develop a set of ethical standards for creating marine reserves is urgent. ​

Trump's alarming environmental rollback: what's been scrapped so far
Since January, the White House, Congress and EPA have engineered a dizzying reversal of regulations designed to protect the environment and public health
Oliver Milman
The Guardian 
Tuesday 4 July 2017 06.00 EDT

Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate deal may have followed months of anguished division amongst his closest advisers, but his administration has proceeded with quiet efficiency in its dismantling of other major environmental policies.

The White House, Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency have dovetailed to engineer a dizzying reversal of clean air and water regulations implemented by Barack Obama’s administration.

Unlike the travel ban or healthcare, Trump has faced few obstacles in sweeping away what he has called “job-killing” environmental rules that address problems such as climate change, water pollution and smoggy air. 

“I’ve been very concerned by what I’ve seen – this is about people’s health,” said Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who was the EPA administrator under George W Bush, and also served as governor of New Jersey. “They are undermining science and people’s respect for science. They don’t seem to care.”

Trump’s agenda has been enthusiastically spearheaded by Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the EPA, who promised in February that he would be rolling back regulations “in a very aggressive way”. Pruitt has repeatedly decried the economic cost of green strictures, especially on the coal industry, which he said was the target of a “war” from the Obama administration.

Pruitt, who previously sued the EPA more than a dozen times as attorney general of Oklahoma, and has had unusually close ties to the fossil fuel industry, has helped withdraw or postpone a raft of regulations and has steered the EPA away from climate change work.

​It’s that time of year again. Male white-tailed deer, known as a buck, are growing a set of new antlers that are looking very velvety and bulbous.
 
For the last several days I have spotted have a half-a-dozen bucks with antlers that have grown almost full size. It’s a good sign our local deer population are healthy. Developing antlers every year is a stressful and demanding activity that would be difficult to carry out if males were sick or skinny.  
 
The growth of antlers is such a taxing and unique phenomenon that is only done by members of the deer family, classified as Cervidae. Members of this family include moose, elk, key deer, and white-tailed deer.
 
Antlers are not horns. Sheep, cattle, goats, and bison have horns that are permanently established on the animal’s head. Antlers, on the other hand, are the only mammalian appendages that annually replace themselves.

​For male white-tailed deer around New York Harbor, it all begins in April or May with increasing amount of daylight. This causes changes in growth hormones in their pituitary gland, which stimulates antler growth. Buds start to sprout out on the buck’s brow.
 
By the end of June or early July, nearly all the primary points will have started to grow and the soft growing antler is covered with hairy skin, called "velvet.” When antlers are in the velvet stage they are full of blood vessels, cartilage and nervous tissue.
 
Usually by the end of July, rising testosterone levels will harden antlers and the velvet will begin to dry and fall off. A buck will help take velvet off by rubbing his antlers on trees, shrubs and saplings.
 
The size of the antler is not determined by age, but by nutrition. A poor diet will produce spikes or forkhorns, but a well-nourished buck will grow an average of two to four points on each antler. As a rule, only male deer grow antlers. But one female (doe) in several thousand will grow antlers because of a hormone imbalance.
 
By September a male deer is ready again to seek out a female to breed by showing off his antlers.  No two sets are ever strictly identical, which adds to the whitetail’s individuality, the most common hoofed wild animal around New York Harbor. 

​Come July, as sunny ocean beaches are jam-packed with a sea of people shrouded in oiled skin, skimpy bathing suits, and with the scent of suntan lotion, thousands if not millions of fiddler crabs along the muddy edges of an estuary busy themselves day and night with the needs of reproduction.
 
It’s not an easy task. Fiddler crabs do their courting not in the water, but on flat open spaces where hungry passing predators, including raccoons, herons, egrets, and gulls pose great danger. The little crabs also have to tackle the regular rush of water from each day’s tidal cycle flowing over their underground burrows or homes where copulation takes place. With hormonal cues pushing them onward, the crabs ignore the hurdles to create another generation of fiddler crabs once more.
 
When not breeding, the little crabs are quick to take advantage of feeding opportunities. Using their unique mouth as a sieve, fiddler crabs will feed on small food particles of algae, bacteria and decaying marsh plants by separating this detritus from mud and sand. It’s a similar way of feeding as many worms, by ingesting sand and mud along with food and later excreting what was not consumed.
 
Fiddler crabs are tiny crustaceans that can grow to less than two inches long. Their body is square in shape with males having a distinctive enlarged claw that can weigh as much as the rest of the crab’s body. Females have small claws that are equal in size. Fiddler crabs have gills for breathing in the water, but also have a primitive lung that allows them to live on land.

​Fiddlers are named for the appearance and behavior of the males. When male crabs wave their large powerful claw back and forth to defend territory or attract mates, the action sort of resemble people playing a fiddle. 

When and where to see this week's 'Manhattanhenge' sunset
Updated on July 11, 2017 at 4:12 PMPosted on July 11, 2017 at 8:35 AM
​BY LEN MELISURGO 
lmelisurgo@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

New Yorkers and visitors to the Big Apple are hoping to catch a glimpse of what could be a stunning "Manhattanhenge" sunset on Wednesday, July 12, after two earlier renditions of this rare sky show both fizzled out.

Heavy cloud cover blocked the view of the two Manhattanhenge sunsets during Memorial Day weekend, so this week will be the last opportunity to see this colorful astronomical event until next spring.
​
Manhattanhenge occurs only four times every year -- twice in May and twice in July -- when the setting sun aligns perfectly with the city's street grid, creating a giant ball of orange light that reflects on the windows and facades of tall buildings lining the streets running east and west.

​40 turtles meandering across JFK Airport runway delay flights
Updated on July 8, 2017 at 5:19 PM  Posted on July 8, 2017 at 5:18 PM
BY MARISA IATI 
miati@njadvancemedia.com,
NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

QUEENS -- Dozens of turtles took their sweet time crossing the runway at JFK Airport Friday afternoon, briefly delaying flights, reports say.
​
The 40 or so diamondback terrapins meandered out of Jamaica Bay and onto the airport's runway at about 4:45 p.m., NBC4 New York reported.

Nassau-  LONG ISLAND 
State bill would expand beach access for disabled
Updated July 3, 2017 4:14 PM
By Robert Brodsky  robert.brodsky@newsday.com 

Two state legislators from Long Island will introduce legislation this week to help provide disabled and elderly residents with greater access to New York State beaches.

The bill, sponsored by Assemb. Melissa Miller (R-Atlantic Beach) and Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport), would require beaches across the state to be handicapped-accessible all the way to the high tide water lines, unless there is a physical barrier.

Currently, many area beaches are accessible for the disabled and elderly only to the sand, Miller said.
​
“This legislation is for the people who have no other way to get down to the water,” said Miller, whose son, Oliver, has a severe form of epilepsy and is largely confined to a wheelchair. “It is their right to get to the ocean.”

Over 7 million tonnes of mollusc shells are discarded by the seafood industry each year as unwanted waste -- and the vast majority of these shells are either thrown in landfills or dumped at sea. Dr James Morris and a team of CACHE researchers from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences are looking at environmentally and economically sustainable options for these biomaterials.

"Mollusc shells are viewed by the aquaculture and seafood industries as 'nuisance waste' and largely disposed of in landfills," says Dr Morris. "Not only is this an expensive and ecologically harmful practice, it is a colossal waste of potentially useful biomaterials."
​
One of the most exciting applications proposed by Dr Morris is the use of discarded shells to restore damaged oyster reefs and cultivate the growth of new oysters. The restoration of these reefs requires little money and effort, but can have huge ecological advantages. "Healthy shellfish populations can have many benefits to the environment: cleaning the water, providing a complex structure for other organisms to call home, and also acting as a coastal protection structure," explains Dr Morris.

​Saving Queens’ Secret Wetlands
by RYAN GOLDBERG
JUNE 27, 2017
​The Village Voice

One early-March afternoon in 2007, Rob Jett climbed through a hole in a chain-link fence and thought he had entered a lost world.

He and two fellow bird-watchers rappelled into a dense swamp forest of birch and sweetgum, mosses and lichens. They were standing in ankle-deep water in the west basin of the 160-year-old Ridgewood Reservoir, the last vestige of Brooklyn’s old waterworks, smack on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. Inside this wilderness, the sounds of the city faded away above the reservoir’s stone levees.

“We were like, ‘Holy shit,’ ” Jett told the Voice.

Jett, 61, had never seen a place like it, even though he had grown up only two miles away and for years had been writing about bird-watching throughout the city.
The reservoir was once important to the growth of Brooklyn as it became one of the largest cities in the country. Steam engines pumped the water into the three reservoir basins and then gravity carried it downhill as it traveled under city streets, into people’s homes.

But the reservoir was drained and abandoned in 1989, and within a single generation nature had reclaimed the basins and transformed them into a swamp-forest mix unlike any in the city.

Jett and his companions — married couple Steve Nanz and Heidi Steiner — crawled underneath vines straddling the path between the west and central basins.

They saw signs of paintball matches and tire tracks from dirt bikes and ATVs. All the lampposts were smashed. They daydreamed about the possibilities for the fifty-acre site: boardwalks through two of the basins and a nature center inside one of the two derelict redbrick gatehouses.
​
Their ideas conjured something similar to the High Line project, which was then being designed: a piece of obsolete urban infrastructure integrated with nature.
​
Until Wednesday, June 21, the city had never held the same view as the bird-watchers. Originally, the parks department, which acquired the reservoir from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection in 2004, presented $50 million plans that would have bulldozed it for athletic fields. The reservoir remains standing because of a small group of naturalists, preservationists, and community activists who rallied to defend it as a nature preserve and historic jewel.

Claims Over Shellfish Fuel a Battle in the Bay
A dispute pits baymen on Long Island Sound who hand-rake for clams against a
shellfish company that uses dredge boats to mechanically harvest clams and oysters.
COREY KILGANNON
JUNE 30, 2017
​The New York Times

OYSTER BAY, N.Y. — The bounteous shellfish here in this hamlet on the North Shore of Long Island are so iconic, they were extolled by Cole Porter in his song “Let’s Do It,’’ with its line about oysters down in Oyster Bay doing it.

While the lyric connotes cozy relations between the famously fertile shellfish of this bivalve capital, feelings among shellfishermen themselves are decidedly less friendly.
​
Locals describe them as the clam wars, with two sides waging a public battle for decades over rights and practices in Oyster Bay Harbor, which remains the most productive shellfishing habitat in New York State.

The dispute pits the baymen who hand-rake for clams against the Frank M. Flower & Sons shellfish company, which uses dredge boats to mechanically harvest the clams and oysters it farms on a swath of 1,800 acres leased from the Town of Oyster Bay.

​Although the Eastern or American oyster (Crassostrea virginica), a native mollusk with two rough elongated whitish shells, has been declared by many people around New York Harbor to be “functionally extinct”, the bivalve just doesn’t want to give up. In this arm of the ocean, the will to live seems to be strong in the little sea creature.
 
The evidence for life is among the flotsam and jetsam along the edge of the estuary. Last October, baby oyster larvae, known as spat, were discovered living on a healthy Eastern oyster shell attached to a mushroom anchor in the Navesink River in New Jersey. Farther upstream, in 2013 a large living oyster reef in the Hudson River was removed near the Tappan Zee Bridge before construction began on a new bridge. A three-man crew spent a week removing almost 200,000 oysters near the bridge and sending them to New York City waters at a cost of nearly $100,000.
 
Perhaps the best sign of recovery came from the tidal waters near the Statue of Liberty in 2016. Oysters can now be found growing in Upper New York Bay. Around the Statue of Liberty are some of the plumpest and fastest growing in the whole of New York Harbor,” according to Peter Malinowski, founder and director of the Billion Oyster Project, a recovery program from the non-profit New York Harbor Foundation that hopes to restore oyster populations throughout the tidal waters of New York City.
 
Within this program, members have added nearly 50,000 adult oysters in Jamaica Bay, making it the largest single installation for breeding oysters in the city. The program also has over 19.5 million oysters growing in New York Harbor, with 1.05 acres of reef area restored. Albeit a far cry from the 220,000 acres of oyster beds that once existed when Europeans first arrived in 1609, but it’s an important start. 

​The work seems to be paying off. Remarkably, I’m finding more and more adult oyster shells washed ashore along Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay with juvenile oysters or spat attached to the surface. The other day while walking along the edge of Sandy Hook Bay in Port Monmouth I discovered a large oyster shell about seven inches long with five young oysters or spat fixed to the shell. One of a few notable finds this year.
 
Will more spat be found on large oyster shells, perhaps as long at 10 or 12 inches? It all depends on how well the ensuing spawning season goes.