Somewhere off Delaware’s shore, a black sea bass resides within a 7 train.<\/p>\n
Not in a metaphorical sense. An actual New York City subway car is positioned on the ocean floor 16 miles out, one of many lying in 80 feet of water, so heavily covered with mussels that the original advertising is no longer recognizable. Divers refer to it as the underwater train wreck. On navigational maps, it\u2019s designated Reef Site 11, while the rest call it Redbird Reef, named after the red-painted cars that comprise it. Atlas Obscura estimates 714 subway cars, along with 86 tanks, eight tugboats, and barges, plus around 3,000 tons of truck tires, scattered over 1.3 square nautical miles of sand.<\/p>\n
Sand is the crucial element that made it all possible.<\/p>\n
Why the underwater area off Delaware is not ideal<\/p>\n
Jeff Tinsman managed Delaware’s artificial reef program for several years, and he didn’t sugarcoat the local geology. Speaking to CBC\u2019s Day 6, he remarked that the mid-Atlantic \u201ckind of got the short end of the habitat stick.\u201d The entire shelf is primarily flat, devoid of features, and scoured by currents, with nearly no rock present.<\/p>\n
That may sound superficial, but it’s significantly important as it impacts the construction of a food chain from the ground up.<\/p>\n
At the foundation of any reef ecosystem are organisms that filter sustenance from the water while remaining stationary: blue mussels, barnacles, sponges. Each of them requires something sturdy to attach to. A mussel larva that lands on a piece of sand ends up anchoring to nothing and perishes. Thus, the water above Delaware is filled with larvae, yet the seabed below provides no surfaces for them to settle on.<\/p>\n
A subway car addresses that in the most basic manner possible. It is a sizable steel structure full of openings.<\/p>\n
What the 400 times figure genuinely indicates<\/p>\n
Mussels colonized the cars almost instantly. In an interview with CNN, Tinsman noted that the carbon steel cars were enduring well, presenting thousands of square feet of solid surface for invertebrates that couldn’t thrive on the adjacent sandy area. This led to the statistic often cited. By comparing the encrusted steel to the natural seabed nearby, Delaware\u2019s research observed approximately 400 times more food per square foot available for fish.<\/p>\n
This figure pertains to density on a surface and does not suggest that the state suddenly has hundreds of times more fish swimming nearby. Around the mussels are an additional 30 or 40 invertebrate species, including shrimp, crabs, and worms, precisely what a black sea bass or a hungry tautog seeks for a meal. Openings, like doors and windows, also contribute, as they allow smaller fish to pass through while larger predators are unable to enter.<\/p>\n
New Jersey wanted no involvement<\/p>\n
New York provided the steel at no cost, with one stipulation: the presence of asbestos in the flooring of the forty-year-old cars. Scientific American reported on the dispute in 2001, when Cindy Zipf from Clean Ocean Action argued that no proper assessment was conducted on the implications of asbestos-containing materials sitting in seawater with organisms growing on them. New Jersey withdrew, with acting governor Donald DiFrancesco stating that the state needed to prioritize safety and environmental concerns. Maryland initially volunteered to accept the rejected cars, but later retracted that decision.<\/p>\n
Delaware agreed to take 400 of them and began submerging them that August.<\/p>\n
Then came the stainless steel<\/p>\n
Not every car proved suitable for creating a reef. Starting in 2008, the transit authority began providing Brightliners, the R32s with the corrugated stainless steel exterior, which everyone believed would last longer than the painted carbon steel Redbirds by many years. They lasted mere months. In an article for Fast Company, Elissaveta Brandon reported the findings from environmental consultant Daniel Sheehy: spot welding formed a thin layer between the metals that facilitated corrosion, and the corrugated structure created areas for currents to grip and peel away.<\/p>\n
New Jersey\u2019s Division of Fish and Wildlife recorded the deterioration in a 2009 reef newsletter, noting that four out of five cars examined on one dive at the Atlantic City Reef displayed significant structural damage, with another dive at a separate cluster indicating the same. Deployments were halted. Other states inspected their own sites and discovered similar debris, including torn stainless sheets drifting into commercial trawl nets.<\/p>\n
The Redbirds, constructed from simpler carbon steel, remained precisely in their original positions.<\/p>\n
The debate the reef hasn\u2019t resolved<\/p>\n
Marine biologists have pondered for decades a question known as attraction versus production: does a structure like this create new fish, or merely accumulate fish that were already dispersed thinly in the area? A concentrated population is easier to capture, which could be beneficial for anglers but potentially harmful for the species’ stock. A simulation study published in Ecology and Evolution by Matthew Smith and his colleagues argued that attraction does not necessarily have to be detrimental and can sometimes distribute fishing pressure instead of consolidating it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somewhere off Delaware’s shore, a black sea bass resides within a 7 train. Not in a metaphorical sense. An actual New York City subway car is positioned on the ocean floor 16 miles out, one of many lying in 80 feet of water, so heavily covered with mussels that the original advertising is no longer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375611,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-375610","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=375610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/375611"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=375610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=375610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=375610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}