larger one if you just look closer.
Which he did often with Pop-Pop, his grandfather. An
Italian immigrant and successful auto dealer, Pop-Pop took
him fishing off the New Jersey coast. His grandfather seemed
to be curious about everything in the water, which was
infectious to an already curious child.
“Pop-Pop, why do we catch flounder here but not over
there?” he asked his grandfather.
“That’s a good question!”
“Pop-Pop, what do the fish eat?”
“Let’s see.”
Gutting the fish, they found dead shrimplike animals in
the stomachs—not so different than those Amazing Live Sea
Monkeys.
Fast forward to the mid-1970s. Allen was a biologist by
now, working on his dissertation, trawling with a fine mesh
net off New Jersey, funneling zooplankton into a jar at the end
of the net. He pulled up the net and looked at the jar. It was
full of mysids, those shrimp-like animals he saw when gutting
fish with his grandfather. From a distance, the jar looked as
if packed with wild rice. But looking closer, you could see it
teemed with life. New questions formed in his mind as he
watched the mysids flit back and forth: What is their response
to light? How do they move with the currents? Years later, he
still keeps the jar on a shelf his office at the Baruch Institute.
He smiles. “It’s a reminder of my roots.”
A reminder of the sense of discovery that fueled his most
important work.
In January 1981, not long after he landed a job at Baruch,
he collected samples in the salt marsh creeks of North Inlet.
He recorded the water’s temperature, salinity and other
chemical characteristics. He collected the zooplankton with a
fine mesh net.
Then he kept at it, sampling every two weeks, using the
same nets and protocols.
And he kept going, even when the funding was barely
there.
As the decades passed, shelves filled with glass jars of the
samples, preserved in a pink fluid; data filled columns and
charts. Like a savings account, it slowly grew in value.
Today, this data is called a “time series,” and Baruch’s is the
longest continuous time series in an estuary in North and
South America, and perhaps the world.
Its rarity and scientific value can’t be overstated. With so
much data collected consistently over such a long period,
scientists can begin to understand how estuaries and salt
marshes change over time.
And on the johnboat in January, he’s shocked by what he
sees.
The Zooplankton Crash
It’s the 866th collection in the time series, the first of 2016.
The marsh is a winter palate of pale yellows and greens. A
bald eagle watches from the top branch of a dead tree. The jon
boat moves into the current. The water is brown, the color of
ice tea, and this is news.
“This time of year, it’s supposed to be grayish-green and
really clear,” Allen says, as Paul Kenny steers the boat. Kenny,
a research specialist, has been collecting samples with Allen
for 33 years.
The source of the unusual color is last fall’s torrential rains.
A record two feet fell in one weekend. It’s the kind of rain
bomb scientists think we’ll see more of as the planet warms
and the air holds more moisture. More rain fell in November,
fueled by one of the largest El Niño’s in recent history. This
morning, salt marshes have the salinity of freshwater ponds.
Strange weather, but Allen’s time series has revealed other
surprises that go far beyond any blips in the jet streams.
He grabs a net that looks like a windsock and tosses it
overboard. The net funnels zooplankton into a jar. He and
Kelly pull in the trawl, and Allen lifts the jar to the sky. A
translucent eel larva flickers amid the debris. It probably
migrated from the deep ocean, perhaps from the Sargasso
Sea.
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