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Hermaphrodite Frogs Found in Suburban Ponds
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
Just as frogs’ mating season arrives, a study by a Yale professor raises a troubling issue. How many frogs will be clear on their role in the annual springtime ritual?
Common frogs that make their homes in suburban areas are more likely than their rural counterparts to develop the reproductive abnormalities previously found in fish in the Potomac and Mississippi Rivers, according to the study by David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Dr. Skelly’s research found that 21 percent of male green frogs, Rana clamitans, taken from suburban Connecticut ponds are hermaphrodites, with immature eggs growing in their testes.
The study is the latest in a decade’s worth of research that has found intersex characteristics in water-dwelling species like sharp-tooth catfish in South Africa, small-mouth bass on the Potomac and shovelnose sturgeon in the Mississippi.
Previous studies, particularly those by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the West Virginia office of the United States Geological Survey, suggested a strong link between the abnormalities and agriculture, as well as a possible link to atrazine, a common herbicide. But the Yale study found that intersex frogs were more concentrated in suburban and urban areas.
Dr. Skelly’s study, presented at a seminar at the University of Connecticut, is being submitted for publication. He looked at a common amphibian, the green frog, what he called the “Look, Mom, I found a frog” frog. He analyzed the landscapes within the Connecticut River Valley, where abnormalities were more likely to be found.
In 2006, a Geological Survey study of small-mouth bass in the Upper Potomac Basin found that male fish from the most densely inhabited and farmed sites had the greatest likelihood of having immature eggs in the testes. This year, scientists from the agency identified chemicals present in the effluent discharged in the areas where the abnormalities were found.
“Looking upstream and downstream from wastewater-treatment plants, we see there’s obviously been an impact by some of the chemicals discharged in the wastewater,” said Vicki S. Blazer, an author of the Geological Survey study. “Things like pesticides, herbicides and flame retardants.”
She added that although the Potomac Basin study did not measure high levels of estrogen in the water, either from pharmaceutical waste or other sources, “that’s certainly a concern.”
The research was in part drawn up to identify endocrine disruptors, or compounds that can interfere with reproductive hormones.
It focused on specific chemicals, including atrazine, a herbicide used in agriculture and on suburban lawns and gardens, and chemicals used to give fragrance to soap and cosmetics.
The latest Geological Survey study, while suggesting possible links, did not directly correlate the prevalence of intersex fish and the presence of these chemicals in wastewater, Dr. Blazer said. The effects of those chemicals remain unclear.
A study in 2002 led by Tyrone B. Hayes at Berkeley found that leopard frogs exposed to atrazine in the laboratory had retarded testicular development and, in some cases, immature eggs in the testes.
Atrazine, manufactured by Syngenta of Basel, Switzerland, had the Environmental Protection Agency renew its approval in 2003. At the request of the agency, Syngenta has been studying atrazine levels in some watersheds. The European Union has banned it.
The environmental agency and the company have been criticized by environmental groups that contend atrazine is harmful to fish and amphibians and may have consequences for other species. The company says the chemical is safe.
Asked what might have caused the reproductive changes found in the new Yale study, Dr. Skelly said, “I don’t know.”
He noted that many suburban areas in his survey used septic systems and that there had been scant investigation of the chemicals or pharmaceutical residue in them or the likelihood of leaching into streams or ponds. Suburban areas are also associated with using herbicides and pesticides.
In contrast to the Geological Survey study, which implicated agricultural runoff, the frog study found that the more agricultural an area, the lower the rate of abnormalities.
In an interview, Dr. Skelly said of the intersex phenomenon: “This is the first evidence that I think anyone has provided that agriculture is doing anything but pushing those rates higher. I wouldn’t say it’s definitive by any means, but it’s certainly not part of the choir.
“I wouldn’t want to go out and tell the world that converting landscapes to agriculture is going to prevent us from facing risks from agricultural contaminants. What we found in most of the agricultural ponds we sampled was no evidence of reproductive deformity.”
Dr. Skelly divided his survey into undeveloped, agricultural, suburban and rural components, based on frogs collected from 23 ponds. That was out of 6,000 ponds surveyed and 136 visited in the Connecticut River Valley.
Of the 233 frogs whose reproductive organs were analyzed, 13 percent had abnormalities.
In urban areas, 18 percent of the collected frogs were intersex; in suburban areas 21 percent. Just 7 percent of the frogs from agricultural areas were intersex.
The more suburban the land cover, Dr. Skelly said, the more likely were abnormalities. Frogs from undeveloped, often forested areas showed no intersex traits.
The question of the reproductive health of intersex fish is one that Dr. Blazer said she returned to in a follow-up to her 2006 study.
“We know the intersex males produce sperm,” she said. “The question is whether the sperm is as good” as the sperm of normal males.
So far, she said, the sperm of the intersex males has shown some decrease in the ability for self-propulsion, but the males remain able to reproduce.
A New York City subway car being added to an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware. The reef’s success has led to crowding for marine life and fishermen.
Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars
By IAN URBINA, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. — Sixteen nautical miles from the Indian River Inlet and about 80 feet underwater, a building boom is under way at the Red Bird Reef.
One by one, a machine operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York City subway cars off a barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.
“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,” Jeff Tinsman, artificial reef program manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said as one of 48 of the 19-ton retirees from New York City sank toward the 666 already on the ocean floor.
But now, Delaware is struggling with the misfortune of its own success.
Having planted a thriving community in what was once an underwater desert, state marine officials are faced with the sort of overcrowding, crime and traffic problems more common to terrestrial cities.
The summer flounder and bass have snuggled so tightly on top and in the nooks of the subway cars that Mr. Tinsman is trying to expand the housing capacity. He is having trouble, however, because other states, seeing Delaware’s successes, have started competing for the subway cars, which New York City provides free.
Crisscrossing over the reef, commercial pot fishermen keep getting their lines tangled with those of smaller hook-and-reel anglers, and the rising tension has led the state to ask federal marine officials to declare the area off limits to large commercial fishermen.
As the reef has become more popular, theft and sabotage of fishing traps and pots has more than doubled in the last several years, said Capt. David Lewis of the Delaware Bay Launch Service. “People now don’t just steal the fish inside the pots out here, they’ve started stealing the pots, too,” he said.
The reef, named after New York City’s famous Redbird subway cars, now supports more than 10,000 angler trips annually, up from fewer than 300 in 1997. It has seen a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the last seven years, according to state data.
Mr. Tinsman said his department was doing everything it could to expand the capacity, noting that last year, when subway cars were unavailable, he sank a 92-year-old tugboat and the YOG-93, a 175-foot decommissioned Navy tanker built in 1945 for the planned invasion of Japan. Fifty subway cars are due this month, he said.
“The secret is out, I guess,” said Michael G. Zacchea, the Metropolitan Transit Authority official in charge of getting rid of New York City’s old subway cars.
Mr. Zacchea added that Delaware’s prospects for expanding the reef looked grim because New York State has said it wanted all of the city’s retired subway cars once the United States Army Corps of Engineers updates the state’s reef permit this summer. Mr. Zacchea said he would soon stop shipments out of state, saving perhaps $2 million in transport costs. As a good faith gesture, the city probably will provide about 100 cars to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey before out-of-state deliveries are halted.
While New York State works to get its permit in place, other states are pushing hard to get what they can from the city, Mr. Zacchea said.
Last month, for example, New Jersey, which stopped taking the cars in 2003 because of environmental concerns, asked the city for 600 of them.
Tim Dillingham, the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group based in Sandy Hook, N.J., said natural rock and concrete balls were far safer and more durable materials for artificial reefs.
“Those materials also cost more, and we’re sensitive to the realities of budget crunches in many states,” Mr. Dillingham said.
The American Littoral Society and other environmental groups opposed the use of the Redbird cars because they have small levels of asbestos in the glue used to secure the floor panels and in the insulation material in the walls.
State and federal environmental officials approved the use of the Redbirds and other cars for artificial reefs in Delaware and elsewhere because they said the asbestos was not a risk for marine life and has to be airborne to pose a threat to humans.
Mr. Dillingham said his group had pushed New Jersey to use only New York City’s cars, which have only stainless steel on the outside, contain less asbestos and are more durable. Delaware, which oversees nine artificial reef sites in state waters and five, including Red Bird Reef, in federal waters, was the first state to get subway cars from New York City, in August 2001.
In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift open-ocean fish, like tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars, said Mr. Tinsman, the Delaware official.
States have experimented with other types of artificial reef materials, including abandoned automobiles, tanks, refrigerators, shopping carts and washing machines.
Mr. Tinsman particularly favors the newer subway cars with stainless steel on the outside to create reefs. “We call these the DeLoreans of the deep,” he said.
Subway cars in general, he said, are roomy enough to invite certain fish, too heavy to shift easily in storms and durable enough to avoid throwing off debris for decades.
“The one problem I see with them,” Mr. Tinsman said, “is that just like the DeLoreans, there are only a limited number.”
The ruins of an Anasazi home near the Chimney Rock buttes in southern Colorado.
Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.
Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.
“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.
These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.
“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.
For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?
Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.
Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.
“The late 1200s was a time of substantial social, political and religious ferment and experimentation,” said William D. Lipe, an archaeologist at Washington State University.
“You can’t have a situation where it just happens that hundreds of local communities for their own individual, particularistic reasons decide to either die or get up and move,” Dr. Lipe said. “There had to be something general going on.”
When scientists examine the varying width of tree rings, they indeed see a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of the 13th century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had been severe droughts before.
“Over all conditions were pretty darn bad in the 1200s,” said Timothy A. Kohler of Washington State University. “But they were not maybe all that worse than they were in the 900s, and yet some people hung on then.”
Even in the worst of times, major waterways kept flowing. “The Provo River didn’t dry up,” said James Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University. “The San Juan River didn’t dry up.”
“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”
Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”
Hopi was far from an anomaly. “The whole abandonment of the Four Corners, at least in Arizona, is people moving to where it’s even worse,” said Jeffrey Dean, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
Some archaeologists have proposed that colder weather contributed to the downfall. Measurements of the thickness of pollen layers, accumulating over decades on the bottom of lakes and bogs, suggest that growing seasons were becoming shorter. But even when paired with drought, the combination may have been less than a decisive blow.
Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”
Though the rains returned, the people never did.
“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”
In the remains of Sand Canyon Pueblo, in the Mesa Verde region, Kristin A. Kuckelman of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., sees the story of a tragic rise and fall. As crops withered, the inhabitants reverted from farming maize and domesticating turkeys to hunting and gathering. Defensive fortifications were erected to resist raiders.
The effort was futile. Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.
But violence was not always an obvious factor. Throwing a wrench into the theories were those curious wanderers from Kayenta. They thrived in their pueblos until about 1290 — some 15 years after the Great Drought began. And when they finally departed for the San Pedro Valley and other destinations, the evacuation was orderly.
“I don’t see any evidence of violence, cannibalism or even defensive posturing,” Dr. Dean said. “The abandonment seems to be different. You get lots of evidence that people intended to come back.”
At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a large wooden beam.
“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.
Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.
By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.
Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.
But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.
Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.
Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.
In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.
Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.
When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.
“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the whole culture unwinds.
Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed they moved on.
By FELICITY BARRINGER, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
Just as frogs’ mating season arrives, a study by a Yale professor raises a troubling issue. How many frogs will be clear on their role in the annual springtime ritual?
Common frogs that make their homes in suburban areas are more likely than their rural counterparts to develop the reproductive abnormalities previously found in fish in the Potomac and Mississippi Rivers, according to the study by David Skelly, a professor of ecology at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
Dr. Skelly’s research found that 21 percent of male green frogs, Rana clamitans, taken from suburban Connecticut ponds are hermaphrodites, with immature eggs growing in their testes.
The study is the latest in a decade’s worth of research that has found intersex characteristics in water-dwelling species like sharp-tooth catfish in South Africa, small-mouth bass on the Potomac and shovelnose sturgeon in the Mississippi.
Previous studies, particularly those by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the West Virginia office of the United States Geological Survey, suggested a strong link between the abnormalities and agriculture, as well as a possible link to atrazine, a common herbicide. But the Yale study found that intersex frogs were more concentrated in suburban and urban areas.
Dr. Skelly’s study, presented at a seminar at the University of Connecticut, is being submitted for publication. He looked at a common amphibian, the green frog, what he called the “Look, Mom, I found a frog” frog. He analyzed the landscapes within the Connecticut River Valley, where abnormalities were more likely to be found.
In 2006, a Geological Survey study of small-mouth bass in the Upper Potomac Basin found that male fish from the most densely inhabited and farmed sites had the greatest likelihood of having immature eggs in the testes. This year, scientists from the agency identified chemicals present in the effluent discharged in the areas where the abnormalities were found.
“Looking upstream and downstream from wastewater-treatment plants, we see there’s obviously been an impact by some of the chemicals discharged in the wastewater,” said Vicki S. Blazer, an author of the Geological Survey study. “Things like pesticides, herbicides and flame retardants.”
She added that although the Potomac Basin study did not measure high levels of estrogen in the water, either from pharmaceutical waste or other sources, “that’s certainly a concern.”
The research was in part drawn up to identify endocrine disruptors, or compounds that can interfere with reproductive hormones.
It focused on specific chemicals, including atrazine, a herbicide used in agriculture and on suburban lawns and gardens, and chemicals used to give fragrance to soap and cosmetics.
The latest Geological Survey study, while suggesting possible links, did not directly correlate the prevalence of intersex fish and the presence of these chemicals in wastewater, Dr. Blazer said. The effects of those chemicals remain unclear.
A study in 2002 led by Tyrone B. Hayes at Berkeley found that leopard frogs exposed to atrazine in the laboratory had retarded testicular development and, in some cases, immature eggs in the testes.
Atrazine, manufactured by Syngenta of Basel, Switzerland, had the Environmental Protection Agency renew its approval in 2003. At the request of the agency, Syngenta has been studying atrazine levels in some watersheds. The European Union has banned it.
The environmental agency and the company have been criticized by environmental groups that contend atrazine is harmful to fish and amphibians and may have consequences for other species. The company says the chemical is safe.
Asked what might have caused the reproductive changes found in the new Yale study, Dr. Skelly said, “I don’t know.”
He noted that many suburban areas in his survey used septic systems and that there had been scant investigation of the chemicals or pharmaceutical residue in them or the likelihood of leaching into streams or ponds. Suburban areas are also associated with using herbicides and pesticides.
In contrast to the Geological Survey study, which implicated agricultural runoff, the frog study found that the more agricultural an area, the lower the rate of abnormalities.
In an interview, Dr. Skelly said of the intersex phenomenon: “This is the first evidence that I think anyone has provided that agriculture is doing anything but pushing those rates higher. I wouldn’t say it’s definitive by any means, but it’s certainly not part of the choir.
“I wouldn’t want to go out and tell the world that converting landscapes to agriculture is going to prevent us from facing risks from agricultural contaminants. What we found in most of the agricultural ponds we sampled was no evidence of reproductive deformity.”
Dr. Skelly divided his survey into undeveloped, agricultural, suburban and rural components, based on frogs collected from 23 ponds. That was out of 6,000 ponds surveyed and 136 visited in the Connecticut River Valley.
Of the 233 frogs whose reproductive organs were analyzed, 13 percent had abnormalities.
In urban areas, 18 percent of the collected frogs were intersex; in suburban areas 21 percent. Just 7 percent of the frogs from agricultural areas were intersex.
The more suburban the land cover, Dr. Skelly said, the more likely were abnormalities. Frogs from undeveloped, often forested areas showed no intersex traits.
The question of the reproductive health of intersex fish is one that Dr. Blazer said she returned to in a follow-up to her 2006 study.
“We know the intersex males produce sperm,” she said. “The question is whether the sperm is as good” as the sperm of normal males.
So far, she said, the sperm of the intersex males has shown some decrease in the ability for self-propulsion, but the males remain able to reproduce.
A New York City subway car being added to an artificial reef off the coast of Delaware. The reef’s success has led to crowding for marine life and fishermen.
Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars
By IAN URBINA, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
SLAUGHTER BEACH, Del. — Sixteen nautical miles from the Indian River Inlet and about 80 feet underwater, a building boom is under way at the Red Bird Reef.
One by one, a machine operator has been shoving hundreds of retired New York City subway cars off a barge, continuing the transformation of a barren stretch of ocean floor into a bountiful oasis, carpeted in sea grasses, walled thick with blue mussels and sponges, and teeming with black sea bass and tautog.
“They’re basically luxury condominiums for fish,” Jeff Tinsman, artificial reef program manager for the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, said as one of 48 of the 19-ton retirees from New York City sank toward the 666 already on the ocean floor.
But now, Delaware is struggling with the misfortune of its own success.
Having planted a thriving community in what was once an underwater desert, state marine officials are faced with the sort of overcrowding, crime and traffic problems more common to terrestrial cities.
The summer flounder and bass have snuggled so tightly on top and in the nooks of the subway cars that Mr. Tinsman is trying to expand the housing capacity. He is having trouble, however, because other states, seeing Delaware’s successes, have started competing for the subway cars, which New York City provides free.
Crisscrossing over the reef, commercial pot fishermen keep getting their lines tangled with those of smaller hook-and-reel anglers, and the rising tension has led the state to ask federal marine officials to declare the area off limits to large commercial fishermen.
As the reef has become more popular, theft and sabotage of fishing traps and pots has more than doubled in the last several years, said Capt. David Lewis of the Delaware Bay Launch Service. “People now don’t just steal the fish inside the pots out here, they’ve started stealing the pots, too,” he said.
The reef, named after New York City’s famous Redbird subway cars, now supports more than 10,000 angler trips annually, up from fewer than 300 in 1997. It has seen a 400-fold increase in the amount of marine food per square foot in the last seven years, according to state data.
Mr. Tinsman said his department was doing everything it could to expand the capacity, noting that last year, when subway cars were unavailable, he sank a 92-year-old tugboat and the YOG-93, a 175-foot decommissioned Navy tanker built in 1945 for the planned invasion of Japan. Fifty subway cars are due this month, he said.
“The secret is out, I guess,” said Michael G. Zacchea, the Metropolitan Transit Authority official in charge of getting rid of New York City’s old subway cars.
Mr. Zacchea added that Delaware’s prospects for expanding the reef looked grim because New York State has said it wanted all of the city’s retired subway cars once the United States Army Corps of Engineers updates the state’s reef permit this summer. Mr. Zacchea said he would soon stop shipments out of state, saving perhaps $2 million in transport costs. As a good faith gesture, the city probably will provide about 100 cars to Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New Jersey before out-of-state deliveries are halted.
While New York State works to get its permit in place, other states are pushing hard to get what they can from the city, Mr. Zacchea said.
Last month, for example, New Jersey, which stopped taking the cars in 2003 because of environmental concerns, asked the city for 600 of them.
Tim Dillingham, the executive director of the American Littoral Society, a coastal conservation group based in Sandy Hook, N.J., said natural rock and concrete balls were far safer and more durable materials for artificial reefs.
“Those materials also cost more, and we’re sensitive to the realities of budget crunches in many states,” Mr. Dillingham said.
The American Littoral Society and other environmental groups opposed the use of the Redbird cars because they have small levels of asbestos in the glue used to secure the floor panels and in the insulation material in the walls.
State and federal environmental officials approved the use of the Redbirds and other cars for artificial reefs in Delaware and elsewhere because they said the asbestos was not a risk for marine life and has to be airborne to pose a threat to humans.
Mr. Dillingham said his group had pushed New Jersey to use only New York City’s cars, which have only stainless steel on the outside, contain less asbestos and are more durable. Delaware, which oversees nine artificial reef sites in state waters and five, including Red Bird Reef, in federal waters, was the first state to get subway cars from New York City, in August 2001.
In the last several years, the reefs have drawn swift open-ocean fish, like tuna and mackerel, that use the reefs as hunting grounds for smaller prey. Sea bass like to live inside the cars, while large flounder lie in the silt that settles on top of the cars, said Mr. Tinsman, the Delaware official.
States have experimented with other types of artificial reef materials, including abandoned automobiles, tanks, refrigerators, shopping carts and washing machines.
Mr. Tinsman particularly favors the newer subway cars with stainless steel on the outside to create reefs. “We call these the DeLoreans of the deep,” he said.
Subway cars in general, he said, are roomy enough to invite certain fish, too heavy to shift easily in storms and durable enough to avoid throwing off debris for decades.
“The one problem I see with them,” Mr. Tinsman said, “is that just like the DeLoreans, there are only a limited number.”
The ruins of an Anasazi home near the Chimney Rock buttes in southern Colorado.
Vanished: A Pueblo Mystery
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times, April 8, 2008
Perched on a lonesome bluff above the dusty San Pedro River, about 30 miles east of Tucson, the ancient stone ruin archaeologists call the Davis Ranch Site doesn’t seem to fit in. Staring back from the opposite bank, the tumbled walls of Reeve Ruin are just as surprising.
Some 700 years ago, as part of a vast migration, a people called the Anasazi, driven by God knows what, wandered from the north to form settlements like these, stamping the land with their own unique style.
“Salado polychrome,” says a visiting archaeologist turning over a shard of broken pottery. Reddish on the outside and patterned black and white on the inside, it stands out from the plainer ware made by the Hohokam, whose territory the wanderers had come to occupy.
These Anasazi newcomers — archaeologists have traced them to the mesas and canyons around Kayenta, Ariz., not far from the Hopi reservation — were distinctive in other ways. They liked to build with stone (the Hohokam used sticks and mud), and their kivas, like those they left in their homeland, are unmistakable: rectangular instead of round, with a stone bench along the inside perimeter, a central hearth and a sipapu, or spirit hole, symbolizing the passage through which the first people emerged from mother earth.
“You could move this up to Hopi and not tell the difference,” said John A. Ware, the archaeologist leading the field trip, as he examined a Davis Ranch kiva. Finding it down here is a little like stumbling across a pagoda on the African veldt.
For five days in late February, Dr. Ware, the director of the Amerind Foundation, an archaeological research center in Dragoon, Ariz., was host to 15 colleagues as they confronted the most vexing and persistent question in Southwestern archaeology: Why, in the late 13th century, did thousands of Anasazi abandon Kayenta, Mesa Verde and the other magnificent settlements of the Colorado Plateau and move south into Arizona and New Mexico?
Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.
Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.
“The late 1200s was a time of substantial social, political and religious ferment and experimentation,” said William D. Lipe, an archaeologist at Washington State University.
“You can’t have a situation where it just happens that hundreds of local communities for their own individual, particularistic reasons decide to either die or get up and move,” Dr. Lipe said. “There had to be something general going on.”
When scientists examine the varying width of tree rings, they indeed see a pernicious dry spell gripping the Southwest during the last quarter of the 13th century, around the height of the abandonment. But there had been severe droughts before.
“Over all conditions were pretty darn bad in the 1200s,” said Timothy A. Kohler of Washington State University. “But they were not maybe all that worse than they were in the 900s, and yet some people hung on then.”
Even in the worst of times, major waterways kept flowing. “The Provo River didn’t dry up,” said James Allison, an archaeologist at Brigham Young University. “The San Juan River didn’t dry up.”
“Climate probably explains a lot,” Dr. Allison said. “But there are places where people could have stayed and farmed and chose not to.”
Some inhabitants left the relatively lush climes of what is now southern Colorado for the bone dry Hopi mesas. “Climate makes the most sense for this big pattern change,” Dr. Lipe said. “But then you think, So they went to Hopi to escape this?”
Hopi was far from an anomaly. “The whole abandonment of the Four Corners, at least in Arizona, is people moving to where it’s even worse,” said Jeffrey Dean, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona’s Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research.
Some archaeologists have proposed that colder weather contributed to the downfall. Measurements of the thickness of pollen layers, accumulating over decades on the bottom of lakes and bogs, suggest that growing seasons were becoming shorter. But even when paired with drought, the combination may have been less than a decisive blow.
Soon after the abandonment, the drought lifted. “The tree-ring reconstructions show that at 1300 to 1340 it was exceedingly wet,” said Larry Benson, a paleoclimatologist with the Arid Regions Climate Project of the United States Geological Survey. “If they’d just hung in there . . .”
Though the rains returned, the people never did.
“Why didn’t they come back?” said Catherine M. Cameron, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. “Why didn’t anyone come back to the northern San Juan? It was a fine place, and apparently by 1300 it was very fine.”
In the remains of Sand Canyon Pueblo, in the Mesa Verde region, Kristin A. Kuckelman of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., sees the story of a tragic rise and fall. As crops withered, the inhabitants reverted from farming maize and domesticating turkeys to hunting and gathering. Defensive fortifications were erected to resist raiders.
The effort was futile. Villagers were scalped, dismembered, perhaps even eaten. Families were slain inside their dwellings, and the pueblo was burned and abandoned. Curiously, as was true throughout the region, the victors didn’t stay to occupy the conquered lands.
But violence was not always an obvious factor. Throwing a wrench into the theories were those curious wanderers from Kayenta. They thrived in their pueblos until about 1290 — some 15 years after the Great Drought began. And when they finally departed for the San Pedro Valley and other destinations, the evacuation was orderly.
“I don’t see any evidence of violence, cannibalism or even defensive posturing,” Dr. Dean said. “The abandonment seems to be different. You get lots of evidence that people intended to come back.”
At Kiet Siel, a cliff dwelling now part of Navajo National Monument in northeast Arizona, people sealed the openings of granaries with carefully fitted rock slabs, caulking the edges with a collar of clay. Finally the evacuees blocked the entranceway to the settlement with a large wooden beam.
“It’s pretty clear that these people weren’t freaking out or weren’t in a hurry when they left,” Dr. Dean said.
Ultimately the motivation for the abandonments may lie beyond fossils and artifacts, in the realm of ideology. Imagine trying to explain the 19th-century Mormon migration to Utah with only tree rings and pollen counts.
By studying changes in ceremonial architecture and pottery styles, Donna Glowacki, an archaeologist at the University of Notre Dame, is charting the rise of what may have been a new puebloan religion. For more than a century, the established faith was distinguished by multistory “great houses,” with small interior kivas, and by much larger “great kivas” — round, mostly subterranean and covered with a sturdy roof. Originating at Chaco Canyon in northwest New Mexico, the formidable temples seem designed to limit access to all but a priestly few.
Though Chaco declined as a regional religious center during the early 1100s, the same architecture spread to the Mesa Verde area. But by the mid 1200s, a different style was also taking hold, with plazas and kivas that were uncovered like amphitheaters — hints, perhaps, of a new openness. At some sites, serving bowls became larger and were frequently decorated with designs, as though intended for a ritual communion. If the pueblo people had left a written history perhaps we would read of the Anasazi equivalent of the Protestant reformation.
But the analogy can’t be pushed too far. The new architecture also included multiwalled edifices — some round, some D-shaped — that might have been chambers for secret rituals.
Though the dogma may be irrecoverable, Dr. Glowacki argues that it rapidly attracted adherents. A center of the movement, she said, was the McElmo Canyon area, west of Mesa Verde. Excavations indicate that the population burgeoned along with the new architecture. An influx of different pottery designs suggests immigrants from the west were moving in. Then around 1260, long before the drought, the residents began leaving the pueblo, perhaps spreading the new ideology.
Other archaeologists see evidence of an evangelical-like religion — the forerunner, perhaps, of the masked Kachina rituals, which still survive on the Hopi and Zuni reservations — appearing in the south and attracting the rebellious northerners. Salado polychrome pottery may have been emblematic of another, possibly overlapping cult.
In an effort to draw together the skein of causes and effects, Dr. Kohler and members of the Village Ecodynamics Project are collaborating with archaeologists at Crow Canyon on a computer simulation of population changes in southwest Colorado from 600 to around 1300. Juxtaposing data on rainfall, temperature, soil productivity, human metabolic needs and diet, gleaned from an analysis of trash heaps and human waste, the model suggests a sobering conclusion: As Anasazi society became more complex, it also became more fragile.
Corn was domesticated and then wild turkeys, an important protein source. With more to eat, the populations grew and aggregated into villages. Religious and political institutions sprung up.
When crops began dying and violence increased, the inhabitants clustered even closer. By the time the drought of 1275 hit, the Anasazi had become far more dependent on agriculture than during earlier droughts. And they had become more dependent on each other.
“You can’t easily peel off a lineage here and a lineage there and have them go their own way,” Dr. Kohler said. “These parts are no longer redundant. They’re part of an integrated whole.” Pull one thread and the whole culture unwinds.
Amid the swirl of competing explanations, one thing is clear: The pueblo people didn’t just dry up and blow away like so much parched corn. They restructured their societies, tried to adapt and when all else failed they moved on.
