This was no ordinary fishing trip. Aboard the Morning Star I had two engineers and over $350,000 worth of Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipment from VideoRay, a Pottstown, PA, company that does underwater inspection, recovery, and locating work for first responders and our allies around the world. Jason and Liam were here to not only test new equipment, but to look at some of our natural and artificial reefs while doing so. I've been trying to determine if our greening sea has stymied sea whip colonization off the DelMarVa coast, and our first stop was on natural reef in 115’ of water. The area has produced millions of sea bass across the decades for commercial traps and recreational fishers. Though still quite productive, the reef we saw there was not as healthy as shallower ones. We found sea whip there growing more sparsely than anticipated.
Sea whip is a zooxanthellae-driven gorgonian; a soft, orange coral that uses sunlight to feed in the way many shallow water corals do. They contain photosynthetic cells (called zooxanthellae) in their tissue which provide the coral with sugars and proteins used to build calcium carbonate and other building blocks of growth and reproduction. A healthy colony will look like an orange meadow—I call’ em whip meadows—which flounder and sea bass love as habitat.
We have sea whip in great numbers from 55’ to 90’. They get thinner as you go deeper. Is sunlight the critical factor?
Consider: where, say, the hull of a barge is collapsed yet the deck is standing on its uprights, it will leave a large empty void. You will find sea whip where light strikes the deck substrate. But underneath? Where there's no sun? There’s no whip.
Here many sessile animals that cannot move or swim will colonize these shaded places. But there’s no whip or star coral to be found. Similarly, if it’s too deep there will be no whip.
I believe the oyster collapse of the 1970s led to the Mid-Atlantic ocean’s eutrophication. That’s just fancy science talk for too many nutrients in the water, which feeds rapidly growing algae populations. That algae then makes the ocean and estuaries green. Once this takes place, sunlight, and thus photosynthesis, is degraded. Eutrophication has, I believe, caused our offshore sea whip habitat footprint to shrink. To contract. They are not as far off as they once were. It's going to take some digging, but I’m 90 percent sure I have VHS tape from 2004 of whip growing on the deepest reef we looked at with VisionRay’s ultra-advanced ROV equipment. The same exact reef where we saw sea whip in 2004, now looking in 2024? Not. One. Sea. Whip. And I do mean none.
More work is required and there are many more reefs to compare, but this shows exactly what I've been thinking. The sea whip’s habitat is shrinking. I sure hope the fellows from VideoRay will help with further explorations. If I put Nick Caloyianis and his team down there they’d only have a few minutes and one dive. When divers are looking at inshore reefs in much shallower water we do multiple dives with a good amount of bottom time, which isn’t an option on deeper reef.
In truth, if bottom could be destroyed, it was. Some areas completely, some at least partly, all post-WWII into the late 1970s when the commercial trawl industry really sprang to life with cheap surplus diesels. Corals on our Bass Grounds reef grew on a soft marsh-like peat, a substrate easily crumbled in the hand and very easily crushed with 15-ton clam dredges that liquify the bottom. The Bass Grounds were destroyed by surf clam boats in the early- to mid-1970s.
I had no idea what he was talking about back in 1981 when Capt. Ward Brex said to me, “We had the best sea bass fishing on the coast and let them destroy it.”
We’ve had virtually no trawling on hardbottom reefs here in nearly 15 years, (Maryland summer flounder quota is largely leased to large companies in upper New Jersey), and commercial impacts from stern-towed gear on soft substrates have been nonexistent. And although a bottom trawl will dern sure give a reef a haircut, I don’t think what we saw on the deepest reef was trawl damage—I think the absence of whip in 130’ is an artifact of a greening ocean.
-By Capt. Monty Hawkins
Editor’s note: If you fish anywhere out of OCMD you already vastly benefit from the work of the OC Reef Foundation and Captain Monty’s efforts. Joining the foundation is a no-brainer for coastal anglers—if you haven’t already please click on that link and head for that website, today!