It was a beautiful late August day near Lower New York Bay. Bright sunshine, low humidity, and a refreshing northerly breeze. The air temperature reached into the comfortable low 80s and surface water temperatures were reading in the warm mid 70s.
Port Monmouth, a small coastal community located along Sandy Hook Bay in New Jersey and downstream from New York City, was the setting for an informal seining activity. The goal was to show off to some friends from Portland, Oregon a bit of the interesting life that swims in the tidal waters of Lower New York Bay, including Sandy Hook Bay and Raritan Bay.
From the beginning, there was the obvious skepticism from my friends that nothing other than some jellyfish and mud crabs would be found in the murky waters so close to New York City. How could anything of significance, they declared, live so near rows of parking lots, six or four-lane highways, strip malls and beaches littered with bottles and plastic bags.
Needless to say, there was surprise and excitement when our first haul with a seine net actually produced a diversity of fish and crabs. There were around a hundred Bay Anchovies, several Snappers or juvenile Bluefish, a Kingfish, a Fluke, and quite a few Sand Shrimp and tiny Blue-Claw Crabs. While my friends were thrilled, especially since they had never seen a flounder before, this find was nothing new to me. It was the usual cast of characters often found living in this urban estuary.
The catch-of-day for me arrived in the second haul of the seine net. There it was, a small, slender fish, about seven inches long and shaped like a tear drop. The mouth was small, the eyes were olive green in color and its body was yellowish. It was devoid of scales, but rather covered with abundant beautiful black blotches. It was a attractive looking fish. Yet, its most striking feature was that it could inflate like a balloon.
No doubt it was a Northern Puffer fish, also known as a blowfish or a swellfish. Down in the Carolinas, they call it a blowtoad fish. All these peculiar names referring to the one attention-grabbing morphologic aspect about this fish - its ability to increase in size several times with air or water.
The fish becomes almost spherical, with the skin of its belly stretching tight like a football. Even though I have seen puffer fish "puff up" numerous times, it's something I never get tired seeing, which is probably true for many people.
It's an amazing achievement for any animal to do, let alone a little estuarine creature. Puffer fish when alarmed or even touched will quickly expand to a very large size, protecting it from enemies. The fish will float, belly up at the water's surface, seemingly defenseless, but too large for most animals to swallow whole. Then when left alone, the fish will soon deflate, discharging the air or water inside its body to shrink back to a normal size.
About 20 to 30 years ago, you couldn't find a puffer anywhere in Lower New York Bay and Sandy Hook Bay. According to biologists Kenneth W. Able and Michael P. Fahay in their book entitled, "Ecology of Estuarine Fishes: Temperate Waters of the Western North Atlantic, during a population survey of fish in New Jersey between 1929 and 1933, the Northern Puffer fish "ranked fifth in frequency of occurrence and ninth by numerical abundance." The authors go on to state that by the 1970s, the same species of fish "failed to rank among the top 20" in similar populations studies. The fish just seemingly disappeared.
Yet today it's a different story. People who fish these local waters on a regular basis are saying they are catching puffers all the time. The little fish it seems is making a comeback. An amazing zeal of life for a fish that was nearly nowhere to be found.
When I was a kid in the mid 70's, I used to catch puffers now and then with friends in the Navesink River near Sandy Hook Bay. They would turn up all the time in our crab pots and fishing lines. A mysterious fanciful fish that looked like an extinct sea creature. It provided some excitement for sure to a bunch of silly seaside children.
It's anyone's guess why the puffers are making a comeback. It seems clear, though, that the fish have slowly been reproducing for the last several years. Living in shallow coastal waters and feeding on plentiful amounts of crabs, shrimps, amphipods, as well as on small mollusks, worms, and other invertebrates that live on the bottom of the bay. Cleaner waters maybe equaling more food and more puffers.
Come winter, the puffers will disappear again from our shallow waters in the bay. Don't worry, it's part of their natural cycle. The fish will try to escape the chilly water temperatures close to the shoreline by swimming to nearby deeper waters. They will spend the winter on the bottom of the bay or ocean in a more or less quiet and dormant state. With the onset of spring, the fish will become more active once more and swim closer to the shore to feed and reproduce.
Hopefully, the little puffers will be back in great numbers next year too. They illustrate the tremendous diversity of life that is slowly struggling to come back to Lower New York Bay after several decades of conservation, preservation, and hands-on restoration efforts.
You can help too. Please keep the puffer population going strong by keeping them wild and free. Do not take one as a pet for your aquarium. If a puffer is found in your crab pot or at the end of a fishing line, please do not try to puff up the fish too much. It's very stressful for the fish and you shouldn't surpass one puff before letting it go free.
In addition, please help clean up the aquatic habitat for the Puffer fish in local waters by making sure your trash, especially plastic, is thrown away properly, reduce, reuse, recycle, and please support the creation of new parks and open space areas. Please keep the bay and ocean wild and free from fossil fuel development projects, like LNG.
For more information, pictures and year-round sightings of wildlife in or near Sandy Hook Bay, please check out my blog entitled, Nature on the Edge of New York City at http://www.natureontheedgenyc.com
