The sea nettles of Barnegat Bay are back with a vengeance, and this summer's bloom of the stinging jellyfish has people looking for progress on the state government's pledge to reduce nutrient overenrichment in the bay.
"They've been in the Chesapeake Bay for years, and now they're here. I can't believe they're here. It makes me so mad," said Robert Warner, a lifelong boater and fisherman from Toms River. "We were taking the grandkids tubing a few weeks ago, and they had to come out of the water, it was so bad."
In a June 1 address at Island Heights, state Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Lisa Jackson announced the agency would take steps toward reducing an overabundance of nitrogen compounds flowing into the bay, such as encouraging towns to mandate limits on fertilizer, thought to be an important nitrogen source.
That work has begun as the DEP, the Barnegat Bay National Estuary Program and Rutgers University scientists try to quantify and trace nitrogen in the bay watershed, said Michael Borgatti, a science researcher for the environmental group Save Barnegat Bay.
Last February, internal meetings among DEP workers and other experts outlined a work plan for dealing with the nitrogen issue, which is not measured by the agency's usual suite of water-quality tests.
"The start of those biological indicators is a big step," said Karen Hershey, a DEP spokeswoman.
Since the 1990s, standard water-quality criteria such as bacteria counts and oxygen levels showed things were getting better in Barnegat Bay — even as key elements of its ecosystem like underwater eelgrass meadows and clam beds declined. The culprit there is nutrient pollution, but nitrogen levels are so transient that biological indicators and modeling are needed to measure its true impact, according to Michael Kennish, a research professor who heads bay research at Rutgers.
"There are conflicting ideas about where the pollution is coming from," said Borgatti, whose group is participating in those discussions. "I'd say surface runoff and shallow ground water that flows right under the lawns are the biggest contributors."
Save Barnegat Bay activists cite research suggesting that 858,000 pounds a year of nitrogen goes into the bay, 30 percent of it from suburban lawn fertilizer.
The emergence of sea nettles in Barnegat Bay since 2004 is linked by scientists to the bay's eutrophication, a process triggered by overdoses of nitrogen compounds that fertilize the bay and feed great blooms of microscopic plants. Sea nettle numbers are influenced by water temperature and other factors, but a number of Barnegat and Chesapeake scientists and environmental workers think the jellyfish swarms are symptomatic of massive shifts in the bay ecology, brought on by nutrient pollution from land.
"I got that one an hour ago in Lavallette. I just reached down from a dock and grabbed the first one I saw," said educator Jim Merritt, who arrived to give a talk in Bay Head last week toting a big pickle jar with a sea nettle pulsing inside.
With their stinging tentacles 3 to 5 feet long, sea nettles are one problem making Barnegat Bay "unfishable and unswimmable" in some places, said Merritt, who runs environmental education workshops at the Sedge House near Island Beach State Park.
Excess nitrogen comes from many sources ranging from air pollution to lawn fertilizer, and Barnegat Bay is especially susceptible because its has only three small, widely separated outlets to the sea, Merritt said.
"It takes about 75 days in the summer for the bay to flush. That's a long, long time," Merritt said. Meanwhile, "we still have really, really big overdevelopment. Barnegat Bay to me is starting to look like a bathtub, surrounded by bulkheads."
Members of the Ocean County chapter of the Sierra Club got a sobering look at those effects July 19, when the group held a picnic at Brick's Windward Park beach. The swimming area was empty because sea nettles were so thick in the Metedeconk River, said Jeff Tittel, the group's state executive director.
"We've had watershed studies, estuary studies and now it's literally biting us on the bottom," Tittel said angrily of the stinging jellyfish. "We're going to study it to death. It's time to do something. . . . We should have ordinances to make people pick up their pet waste, require low-nutrient fertilizers like they're doing in the Passaic River watershed."
Failing that, Tittel said, environmental groups should go to court. The bay's biggest tributaries, the Toms River and Metedeconk, have been designated for Category 1 protections by the DEP, "yet every day the DEP is allowing that bay to get dirtier and dirtier," he said.
The agency's own Coastal Area Facility Review Act regulations can make the problem worse, Tittel added. "If you look at the (development) density that CAFRA would allow in the watershed, there would be 100,000 more units," he said.
One goal is to develop safe maximums for nitrogen in tributary streams, a standard known as total maximum daily loads or TMDLs, said Borgatti of Save Barnegat Bay. Once those are established, DEP regulators can "work backward" to identify and control local sources on the bay's rivers and creeks, he said.
With the Barnegat Bay task force, "the DEP is doing a great job of organizing this," Borgatti said. But, he added, "it's a question of the time frame" before action is taken.
But there are actions to be taken in the meantime, like passing fertilizer ordinances, Borgatti added. "You've got to look at industries you can regulate," he said. "We need to find the best, readily available ways of doing this."
Warner said it can't happen fast enough for him: "It seems to get worse every year. When I get in the water to scrub my boat, I put on a full-length track suit."
Jellyfish and sea nettles invasion
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