Southold’s waters are in crisis

In the town of Southold, we are surrounded by a marine ecosystem, and there are a number of serious issues affecting it. I am running as a conservative for Southold Town Trustee, and if elected, I will do everything I can to address them, because that is the job of a trustee in this town.

We live in a very diverse marine environment on the North Fork — from the giant boulder fields left by the last ice age, scattered across the Long Island Sound, to our many bays, creeks, salt marshes, tidal wetlands, and inlets. Much of this beauty — in ecological time — is disappearing in the blink of an eye. Our bogs within our creeks, which can take thousands of years to build up from organic matter and serve as one of the best filtration systems for our bays and creeks, are melting down to piles of dead muck and ooze. Also disappearing are the salt marsh grasses and many of the ribbed mussels that live within the grass — another big natural filtration system, vanishing more and more every year. Ninety percent of the eelgrass in the Peconic Estuary System is gone. Even Codium (aka spaghetti grass) has been in rapid decline for the past decade.

Now let’s talk about shellfish. But there is nothing to talk about, because there aren’t any. Just because you go into a fish market or a farmers’ market and see clams doesn’t mean they came from the North Fork. They are still local to Long Island — we just seem to be the only place on the island that does not have any clams. Hard clams have not been spawning or setting in these waters for years. Steamers are basically extinct, and we’ve seen little to no Peconic Bay scallops for six years — and not many wild oysters either, with the exception of Mattituck Inlet. But even shellfishing there has been moving in the same direction as all the areas in the Peconic Estuary System, even though it is a different body of water. We’re seeing the same decline of everything in the inlet as well.

Now let’s move on to the HABs (harmful algal blooms) that occur in some of our town waters and can cause paralytic or diarrhetic shellfish poisoning. This past spring, Jockey Creek had the highest level of Alexandrium concentration (one of the harmful algal blooms) ever recorded. We also saw Neoplasia found in soft clams from one of our local creeks years ago, and it may now explain why, since then, they all died off and there have not been any in this area ever since. Neoplasia is a leukemia-like cancer that, once it infects clams, kills them. The good news is that it is harmless to humans.

These are just some of the problems we have in our waters that I see firsthand, as a lifelong bayman who has been making a living off the water for more than 30 years in the Town of Southold. However, I do believe that with true environmental conservation practices, as a town, we can get our waterways back on the right track. In the near future, I will writing and talking more about how, if I am elected trustee, I would go about doing this, and what I would ask from the community and the town — so that in the future, we have a sustainable shellfish population that every resident in the town can enjoy and be proud to have been a part of rebuilding.

Nathan Andruski is a Republican running for Southold Town Trustee.