Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Salps: Not in Long Island Sound Apparently

About salps in Long Island Sound, Mickey Weiss, the head of Project Oceanology, at Avery Point, told me:

There are no scientific reports of salps occurring in LIS according to my LIS data base (Weiss, et.al. 1995. Plants and animals of Long Island Sound: A documented checklist, bibliography and computer data base. Project Oceanology, Avery Pt., Groton, CT). However, these planktonic critters can be quite common in southern New England (i.e. Cape Cod) during the late summer months, sometimes carried there by the Gulf Stream.

Rick Damico, a marine biologist who used to work for the New York State DEC, told me:

In the past, I've seen them while diving off Block Island. I strongly suspect that they're more common offshore (at least around here). Remember, Block Island is offshore, with respect to LIS. Furthermore, I've never seen them in inshore plankton samples--again, my personal experience.

The Block Island Times published a story online yesterday about boat owners in the Great Salt Pond having problems with salps clogging their intake pipes , which you can read here (it's an interesting story but in general I consider a clogged air conditioning pipes on a pleasure boats to be one of life's problems I'm least sympathic towards).

Labels: ,

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

We did a plankton sampling lab on the Thames and I swear we had one teeny tiny salp in our sample b/c I could see the two siphons.

8:55 PM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

eXTReMe Tracker