Transcript:

music; ambience: Boat Sounds, Subway cars being dumped into Delaware Bay We're listening to the sound of a New York City subway car being dumped into Delaware Bay. In a moment, we'll find out why. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet. Delaware Bay's population of Black Sea Bass feeds on Blue mussels and other invertebrates. Those animals like to live on reefs, which are in short supply in these waters. The answer is to give the mussels and fish an artificial reef in the form of an old subway car. Jeff Tinsman is artificial reef coordinator for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources. "The black sea bass is an important recreational and commercial species. The reef program has been very instrumental I think in helping these sea bass come back. We have eight artificial reef sights in Delaware Bay. These reefs support millions and millions of these juvenile fish and I've seen that personally in my uh scuba diving over the years. We have some really good year classes of juvenile sea bass uh that have been spawned in the last three or four years and now this subway car reef will support some of the larger adults and support the fish that are doing the spawning. We've seen a great increase in amount of legal size sea bass available for harvest this year. So were we're having a positive impact on uh all of life stages of the black sea bass. I tell you, I never would've guessed we'd be working with subway cars but uh nothing would surprise me at this point." Please visit our website at pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet is presented with support provided by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner. music