Wednesday, January 20, 2010

We say 'hey!' to a frozen Barnegat Bay






As we turned the corner on Bayshore Drive last Thursday, my ears began to ring after hearing Lori say: "Are those birds STANDING on the water?" Sure enough, a 1.5 hour drive, 45 min of packing, and 5 min of trailering the Lowe boat after leaving Drexel, Claire, Lori and I had arrived at the boat dock greeted by a frozen Barnegat Bay.

The intended mission? We journeyed to B-gat for a data download from my underwater sonic receivers which are currently logging movement data from three overwintering terrapins in Arnold's Pond. It's important to check these receivers to ensure that they are not damaged from the weather or boating activity, and also so the memory is not overloaded (they can hold up to 100,000 data points)!

While upset that our initial quest would have to be postponed, the three of us were still excited to see the bay in this condition. As ecologists, it is fascinating to observe our focus ecosystem in such a dynamic state from that which we are used to experiencing in June! We stayed for a bit at the dock to measure temperature and salinity at various depths with the YSI (below). The temperatures ranged from 1.2C at the surface to 0.7C about half a meter deep! Also, it was convenient that we had the stick pole (about 8ft long, used to stabilize the boat while downloading data normally) to poke at the ice from the dock, to see how thick it really was.

It seems like ice would be an obvious deterrent to our mission, and probably something we should have considered before venturing to Barnegat with a boat. However, my personal communication with locals varies in how 'normal' it is for the bay to freeze. Prior to leaving my receivers out over the winter, many people swore that the bay 'never' freezes. A local at the dock last week said that he didn't remember this ever happening, for instance. Since asking around more, I have heard from some locals that the bay always freezes at least in part, but never in entirety. This makes more sense, as you can see above, that not all of the bay was completely frozen...only where we needed to go with the boat, unfortunately.

Overall, returning to Barnegat in the winter turned into an incredibly informative venture for the three of us. Don't worry, the terrapins are fine - as reptiles, they can adjust very well to temperature changes! Next time, us humans will just have to check the weather first!