New Science Center Provides a Much-Needed Resource to the Coastal Science Community
The St. Mary by-the-Sea Retreat House was at a crossroads. Since 1909, the U-shaped, red-roofed building was a retreat house owned by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who decided to shutter it in the wake of the pandemic. In the center of the courtyard stands a statue of the Virgin Mary, palms held out piously against the sea breeze. “The whole town is of a belief that St. Mary has protected Cape May Point,” says Bob Mullock. Indeed, the retreat house and the town of Cape May have weathered more than their fair share of nor’easters. Mullock and a group of residents formed a plan to save the property and provide an incredibly important resource in the process. “The Cape May Point Science Center is in the heart of the Atlantic Flyway and sits between the Delaware River, Delaware Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. At the tip of Cape Island, this expansive building is one of the best situated locations in the world for avian and marine life studies. We are at the crossroads of freshwater that is the Delaware River, saline of Delaware Bay and the rich environment of the Atlantic Ocean. This unique setting provides for the study of the interaction between avian and marine life which we wish to explore” says Mullock.
By Air
David LaPuma calls himself a “migration junkie.” “And there's no better place to get your fix than Cape May. One of the best places in the world for visible migration,” says La Puma, VP of Sales, Marketing and Customer Service for Cellular Tracking Technologies, a tech firm that specializes in making transmitters for tracking wildlife.
LaPuma has been doing research in Cape May for years. First for the Cape May Bird Observatory and now for the company started by his best friend Mike Lanzone. Cellular Tracking Technologies was born in a pre-iPhone era when GPS technology was bulky and unreliable, making data collection on bird behavior and migration more like archeology than observation, piecing together a story from five or six disparate data points. Lanzone teamed up with a Seattle-based inventor named Casey Halverson and launched their product in Pennsylvania, a lightweight tracker that used the cell network instead of satellites.
Cape May has a very rich ontological research history and LaPuma invokes Witmer Stone to demonstrate it. Stone was one of the “last great naturalists,” a turn-of-the-century scientists who served as president of both the American Ornithologists’ Union and the American Society of Mammologists. Stone first set foot on the sands of Cape May in 1890 and a decade later was a summer resident. His most famous work, Bird Studies at Old Cape May, focused on a charming ornithological profile of Cape May County.
In the days of Witmer Stone, Cape May was a stopover. Stone took up summer residence in 1916 but largely, he was coming down from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and then returning to the comfort of the city. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that the Wetlands Institute and the Audubon Society set up shop, establishing Exit Zero as more than the staging ground for weekend birding expeditions.
When the Sisters of St. Joseph divested from their centenarian home, LaPuma was operating out of a bunkhouse on some land that was donated to the state and was agog on what he says was a “Field of Dreams mentality.” If you build it, they will come. The problem with Cape May, he believed, was an abundance of research to be done and a lack of space. “The limitation on a nonprofit that's focused on conservation research is that there's just no affordable place for people to be here and do work, especially in the summer months, which is when we were doing most of our migration monitoring.” When they acquired the small bunkhouse, suddenly they could support visiting researchers and conduct programs revenue research all year round. Then Bob Mullock approached Lanzone and LaPuma with the idea for a more substantial hub for research in Cape May.
It is often lamented in conservation, that unnecessary silos are created, these kinds of organizational boundaries that don’t allow for collaboration. If the natural world is a pie, it is as if conservation nonprofits believe that if they must share slices piece of the pie sparingly, lest they get a smaller piece. For Mullock, LaPuma, and the other conservationists manifesting this opening space in Cape May, the genesis of the science center was to abandon this school of thought. To think about how to bake more pies.
By Sea
Melissa Laurino is the Director of Research for the Cape May Marine Mammal Research Center, as well as a professor of biology at Stockton University. She was an early addition to the CMPSC science council. Her research center is part of Cape May Whale Watch, which has been spotting whales off the coast since 1987. The organization’s research arm got started in 2011 by collecting data on whales and dolphins as individuals, differentiating them with photo identification of the underside of their tail or dorsal fin. They have documented over 500 individuals since then, including bottlenose dolphins, pilot whales, an increasing number of grey and harbor seals, and even 210 humpbacks, which are known to venture as far south as the Dominican Republic and as far north as Nova Scotia. “We’re a small piece of the puzzle but the data we collect is extremely important and our relationship with the Science Center is only going to expand upon our research on board, and also help us expand our dedicated opportunities and survey efforts,” says Laurino.
They are partnered with organizations across the East Coast interested in studying marine mammal migration patterns. Laurino, though, is largely interested in health assessments. “We have a lot of dolphins that have scoliosis of the spine, as well as skin lesions.” Lesions are common in dolphins, circular marks on the skin that can express viruses and other minor irritations or graver ailments.
Cape May is an extremely important staging ground for this work. Especially where bottlenose dolphins are concerned, because as Laurino puts it, “They're coming here for a prolonged period during the spring, summer, and fall. This is their feeding ground, their mating ground, and their breeding ground. They raise their babies here throughout the entirety of the summer months before the pod starts the winter migration.”
These waters are also rife with baitfish like Atlantic menhaden, also known as bunker, making it fertile for the ocean’s picky eaters like the humpback. “It can’t be understated the importance of the ground the Science Center stands on,” Laurino says, “it is literally where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Delaware Bay, two distinct bodies of water that are extremely nutrient rich and support the heavy diversity of marine mammals, fish, and seabirds.
By Land
The spring also brings horseshoe crabs from their thalassic homes to the beaches of the Delaware Bay where they lay their eggs, as they have since before Cape May had a name. They are beset upon by thousands of red knot, ruddy turnstone, sanderling, and other shorebirds hoping to gorge on the eggs for the long northern migration. The American Littoral Society, Cellular Tracking Technologies, Conservation Science Global, and other groups are there now though tracking the horseshoe crabs, attempting to learn their movements and patterns to better protect those patterns in the future.
The salt-pocked soil on which the Cape May Point Science Center now stands was trodden at various intervals by Kechemeche tribesmen escaping the summer heat, Black fugitives escaping slave states on the underground railroad, Philadelphia haute monde escaping the stifle and muck of the city, the sick, the infirmed, and the faithful. As a crossroads not just for species migration but human gathering, the space has an important duty.
The potential for collaboration means nothing if it happens in a vacuum. The focus is on connecting people to nature. As Mullock puts it, “The health of marine life and of birds and butterflies gives us a measurement of our human environment. Appreciation of nature must lead to the appreciation of protecting our own health”.
