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Newsday > Columnists > Jennifer Smith

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Stony Brook team studying oxygen depletion in Sound

September 7, 2009 By JENNIFER SMITH  mailto:[email-masked]?subject=Newsday.com
Article

Photo credit: Newsday / Jennifer Smith | Kamazina Lwiza, an
associate professor of oceanography at Stony Brook
University, and crew on the R/V Seawolf prepare a water sampling device to
be lowered into Long Island Sound. (September 2009(

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In
The Field: Long Island Sound water samples

With a clank and a whirring of gears, a metal
frame loaded with water-sampling equipment swung out over the side of the R/V
Seawolf, then slowly lowered into Long Island Sound.

The vessel, anchored near Execution Rocks about a mile off Sands Point,
carried a team of Stony Brook
University scientists intent on learning more about why oxygen levels in the
western Sound plummet as the weather warms.

The condition is called hypoxia, and it can damage - and sometimes kill -
fish, lobsters and other marine life.

"It's stressful to animals that live at the bottom," said Gordon Taylor, an
oceanography professor at the university. "It affects habitat quality and the
distribution of animals that we care about, so we're trying to understand the
dynamics."

Scientists understand the basic factors that drive hypoxia: boom and bust
cycles of aquatic plant growth. Fueled in part by nitrogen from sewage and storm
water runoff, algae and plankton bloom, then die, sucking oxygen from the water
as they decompose.

But the interactions are complex. Attempts to predict future hypoxia based on
the volume of plankton produced in the spring have largely failed.

Taylor and Kamazima Lwiza, an associate professor of oceanography, hope to
shed new light on hypoxia by measuring how fast planktonic microbes that live in
the waters of the Sound take up oxygen.

They are also collecting detailed information about the structure of the
water - the way temperature, salinity and oxygen levels vary at different
depths, and how mixing by tidal currents and winds affects the intensity and
extent of hypoxic zones in the Sound.

The two-year research project is mostly paid for by the Long Island Sound
Study, a federal-state estuary program. The New York and Connecticut Sea Grant
programs, which support research and environmental stewardship, also contributed
money to the research, now in its first year.

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"We are interested in looking at how hypoxia evolves over the season. . . .
We think the bacterial respiration rates are the key," Lwiza said as he readied
equipment in the Seawolf's onboard lab. Translation: The faster tiny microbes in
the water use oxygen, the less is available in the surrounding water for fish
and shellfish.

On deck, Taylor set up an electronic monitor to track those rates by
analyzing water samples taken that day.

He filled a cooler with water from the Sound to maintain the ambient
temperature of the samples, then checked the slim rubber tubes that connect
special plastic sample bags to the monitor. It will tell Taylor which component
of the water column is taking in oxygen most rapidly - tiny plants, protozoa or
bacteria.

After some minutes underwater, the water sampling gear was winched up and
placed back on deck. Scientists' students sprang into action, filling containers
with water for experiments.

Lwiza's brow furrowed as he checked the oxygen level of a sample taken near
the floor of the Sound, about 72 feet below the Seawolf. Estuaries need about 5
milliliters of oxygen per liter of water to sustain healthy ecosystems. This
sample had only .5 milliliters per liter.

"We've gone beyond it being hypoxic," Lwiza said. "It's almost anoxic,"
meaning without oxygen at all - a condition that, if it persisted, could
seriously damage marine life.

Inside the lab, Taylor's students filtered samples from the Sound to prep
them for testing.

As the boat zigzagged across the Sound, Lwiza checked readings from a sonar
instrument mounted on the boat that measures the direction and magnitude of the
current. Back at Stony Brook, the data will tell researchers "how the hypoxic
area spreads and contracts with the tide, and also with the wind-driven
currents," Lwiza said. "That will allow us to figure what the hypoxic zone is
doing."

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