North Carolina Aquariums, Fort Fisher

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_12 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

View Book Page: Book Viewer
About This Book: Catalog Entry
View All Images: All Images From Book
Click here to view book online to see this illustration in context in a browseable online version of this book.

Text Appearing Before Image:
PEOPLE & PLACES Saving Snails... and other steps toward a healthy planet By Odile Fredericks ^spite the clutter in his office at the N.C. Aquarium at Fort Fisher, Andy Wood seems to know where everything is. Reconstructed fossil bones compete for attention with pieces of driftwood from the beach outside, frog-crossing signs, stacks of books and tanks of water where he's creating habitats. A telescope lets him keep a watchful eye on the ocean. From his window, he monitors the loading of alligators that he'll take to Florida tomor- row. Order exists amid the chaos, as in the natural world. Education curator for the aquarium, Wood is a lifelong environmen- talist who works quietly to rectify the damage he sees destroying the planet. His penchant for stewarding the smallest of creatures reveals his philosophy that everything is interconnected. "Unlike most people's perceptions, the dominoes begin to fall with the little teensy things that you don't see," says Wood, who carries a beeper at all times so he can be available to callers with environmental concerns.
Text Appearing After Image:
Andy Wood admires the magnificent rams-horn snail, a species that may be confined to his backyard. For Wood, activism is a way of life that begins in his back yard. Six years ago, when a friend in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asked him to take in some vulnerable snails, he agreed. Today, his yard may be the breeding ground for the last of the magnificent rams-horn snails. No more than an inch and a half long, the snails are on the state's endangered species list and could be federally listed if Wood's research pans out. A freshwater creature, the snail is sensitive to changes in salinity. "It's now possible that it is no longer in the wild, which means the entire species is in my back yard in captive propagation," he says. Once thought extinct, the magnificent rams-horn has been found in the wild in only two locations, both in southeastern North Carolina, says Bill Adams, a biologist with the Corps of Engineers in Wilmington, who rediscovered the snails about 20 years ago. And it is possible that the snails may now have disappeared from these locations since no one has been able to verify their existence there lately. The principal investigator for a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service propagation study of the snails, Wood has spent the past few years trying to find out what they need to survive. Their demise, he believes, is linked to the disappearance of their habitats, which concerns him. By the mid- 19th century, the beaver ponds where they used to live practically vanished as beaver populations dwindled due to trapping. Now development encroaches on the freshwater ponds where the snails were also found, and runoff from construction changes the surrounding landscape. 30 SPRING 1999

Note About Images