The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science lab in Beaufort is celebrating its 125th year in November.
Waves lap at the shoreline of the shallow, calm waters of the Pamlico Sound in Beaufort, where the NOAA lab has stood for more than 120 years. It began as a U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries field station in 1899 -- originally on Front Street -- and moved to its current location on Pivers Island in 1902.
It is the second oldest federal marine laboratory in the U.S., after Woods Hole.
Dr. Larisa Avens is a sea turtle research biologist at the lab. Part of her work involves necropsies – autopsies on animals, often sea turtles that have died along the eastern North Carolina coast.
"To get all of the tissue off for further processing we need to simmer them for a little bit to clean them and then let them dry," she said, "So, I find this to be a very strange part of my job that I end up simmering sea turtle bones in in crock pots. Definitely can put you off a slow cooker dinner.”
There are no outward signs of how old a sea turtle may be, so Dr. Avens uses a saw to cut into the humerus – a bone in the front flipper.
"The bones have growth rings in them that are similar to tree rings that we can count to estimate how old they are, and then, of course, each of those rings is related to a calendar year," Avens explained.
But for the largest species of sea turtle, she checks out its eyes instead of the flipper.
"One cool thing about sea turtles is that they have bones in their eyes, which was very surprising to me. When I first started studying them, I did not realize that," she said, "So, these tiny little bones form a ring around the pupil and they're called scleral ossicles. And it turns out that those scleral ossicles for leatherbacks contain many more rings, and those are the bones that we use for aging.”
Biologist Andy Ostrowski performs some very similar research, but on fish.
"We have aged red snapper up into the 50s and that's not even our oldest fish we've had here. We've had a snowy grouper aged between 70 and 80 years old, so it's a lot older than you would expect.”
Biologists in the field collect the samples Ostrowski studies and send them to him in the mail. Sometimes it’s the fish’s spines or scales – but it’s often its ear bone. It’s about the size of an adult human fingernail in the snapper.
"This is an otolith from a four pound red snapper. It's about 19 inches versus a Marlin that we usually get here like in the Big Rock (Blue Marlin) Tournament," he said, "Those are over 500 pounds and their otolith is smaller than your pinky. So, not all otolith shapes and sizes are the same.”
The data he gathers from studying that otolith helps determine whether the stock is healthy or struggling. Ostrowski said, "This information is then provided to stock assessment models, they predict how well the populations doing and they can combine our age data with a bunch of other information and get an estimate about the fish population.”
Research Ecologist Dr. Chris Taylor said the lab used divers for many years to study underwater habitats, and, "Those scuba divers collected some very valuable information that are telling us things about the status of populations, how fish are associated with different types of habitat in the ocean, and how those habitats and populations are changing over time. But putting divers underwater is costly. They can only stay underwater for 30 minutes. For an hour at a time, they can only go so deep in the ocean, typically about 100 feet below the surface, and it takes a long time for them to transit from the surface down to the bottom and then back up again.”
"We're using a lot more robots and the robots are getting are getting smarter … we don't think that they're going to take over the world.”
The robots are autonomous underwater vehicles – a drone, like you may have seeing flying overhead, but made for use in the water. They look a little like the missiles you see in old cartoons. Initially they were about 15 feet long, but with advances in technology they’re now only about four feet.
Taylor said the drone, "Basically, becomes our eyes underwater, so we can collect the same richness and detail and high-resolution images and videos that, when downloaded from the vehicle after we recover it, we can make those same characterizations that we used to use with divers back in the 60s and 70s.”
Those images captured by the drone, he says, show the beauty that exists under the waves along the eastern North Carolina coast, and many people who see them first think the images were taken in a tropical location.
People are surprised, Taylor said, "That this video showing a diverse habitat of corals and sponges and algae with snappers and groupers and triggerfish was taken 30 miles off of our coast here.”
And that’s just a small sampling of the research performed at the lab for well over a century.
