new touch tank unveiled in Portsmouth

Young Annabella Haskell got acquainted with some of her home city’s native marine life last week as she checked out the Blue Ocean Society’s new touch tank on Market Street. With a little help from touch tank coordinator Katherine Lanzer, Annabella got to hold a European green crab, a northern sea star and a common periwinkle, and even touched the spines of a green sea urchin.

Blue Ocean unveiled the new touch tank, filled with local sea critters, on June 15. It is located on the Isles of Shoals Steamship Company’s dock at 315 Market St., and Blue Ocean tentatively plans to have it open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., seven days a week. It replaces an older tank that had been stationed at the dock since 2001 and was difficult to clean and maintain, according to Lanzer.
“This one’s a lot nicer,” Lanzer said.

The 100-gallon tank offers glass viewing panels that create 360 degrees of observation. The organisms inside, which normally dwell in the mouth of the Piscataqua River, include Jonah crabs, Acadian hermit crabs, blue mussels, Atlantic dogwinkle, southern kelp, frilled anemones and sea lettuce, among other species.

Lanzer said the touch tank is meant to educate visitors about the Seacoast’s marine life and encourage people to keep our coastal waters free of pollution. The tank is free and open to the public, welcoming guests to reach inside and touch or hold the creatures.

Blue Ocean purchased the new tank from Touch Tanks for Kids, of Biddeford, Maine, with support from the Society’s sponsors. The Steamship Company has donated the dock space. Blue Ocean is considering turning the old tank into a model of Jeffrey’s Ledge, an area about 25 miles offshore where whale watchers often spot humpbacks and finbacks.

UNH tests new technology for treating polluted river sediment

They’re sort of like Brita filters, except instead of filtering impurities from your faucet water, they filter pollution from sediment in coastal rivers. Scientists at the University of New Hampshire are in the process of testing their new creation in the Cochecho River near downtown Dover.

The tools are essentially patches that are buried under mud in river bottoms. The black, geotextile mats are designed to cap and stabilize pollution in place instead of dredging or capping sediment under sand. A UNH team placed these mats in a mudflat at the edge of the Cochecho this month and will monitor them over the next two years. During this time, UNH associate professor Kevin Gardner, research assistant professor Jeffrey Melton and UNH students will evaluate the effectiveness of the experiment and watch for unintended impacts on the river.

“We need to know how these mats behave when they’re buried under mud for a few years, compared to how they performed in the lab,” Melton said in a press release. “What will happen to them in this intertidal zone with boats, waves, birds and weather? How will they impact bugs and other aquatic life in the sediment?”

The mats, which are six feet square and one inch thick, contain reactive materials between two layers of geotextile fabric. The quilted texture captures pollution but allows water to flow through. Three different substances within the mats bind and stabilize different pollutants.

The first substance, patented by UNH, is designed to treat toxic heavy metals like lead, copper, zinc and cadmium, all of which are common industrial pollutants. The other two deal with a variety of chemicals, including petroleum products that commonly enter waterways through storm water runoff.

Although sediment pollution does not receive as much attention as other modern environmental threats, it is a nationwide problem that frequently manifests itself through fish consumption advisories and temporary closures of shellfish beds, which often result from contamination associated with polluted sediment. According to UNH scientists, about 20 percent of the top six inches of all sediment in U.S. rivers, lakes, streams and estuaries is contaminated.

Traditional ways of treating sediment pollution, such as dredging or using sand caps, are expensive and have questionable long-term effectiveness. Old technologies can also impact aquatic life and boat traffic.
The Cochecho was chosen as a test site because it is a heavily used tidal river that is close to UNH.

Researchers from the Contaminated Sediments Center, part of UNH’s Environmental Research Group, will also test new sampling technologies for measuring the scope and potential threat of sediment contamination.

The project is funded by N.H. Sea Grant and the Cooperative Institute for Coastal and Estuarine Environmental Technology, a partnership between UNH and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.