The Trouble With Gribbles

True Star Trek aficionados are going to realize where the title of this post came from. In the episode The Trouble With Tribbles, the Enterprise is overrun with cute fuzzy animals called tribbles. I won't spoil it for those who have never seen it. But it's the being overrun with critters that brought the name to mind.

Gribbles are tiny (around 1/17th of an inch long) shrimp-like crustaceans that attack wood. Why are they important? Because they are wreaking havoc on the New York City waterfront. Between them and the shipworms, wooden structures are being endangered rapidly. The reason these little beasties are suddenly a problem is because the water has become so clean.

The waters were once so filthy that early 20th-century sailors could be sure their boats would be safe from such threats — because organisms simply couldn't survive in the muck. But scientists are now seeing a resurgence in gribbles, shrimp-like crustaceans that grow to about one-17th of an inch in length and attack wood from the outside, and shipworms, which latch onto the outside of wood and burrow inward, growing up to several feet long as they devour the material.

"As the river gets cleaner, it's easier for things to live in it," Chris Martin of the Hudson River Park Trust said of the return of the tiny mollusks and crustaceans. "We don't make the piers out of wood anymore because of them."

But many of the region's older waterside structures remain, and from the South Street Seaport to the Jersey City waterfront, wooden piers have had to be expensively refitted or abandoned entirely.

The city's floating Waterfront Museum fell victim recently, springing leak after leak, and the holes were getting so bad that they couldn't be plugged.

Captain David Sharps sent the antique wooden barge upriver for repairs, then discovered another big problem when he went looking for the museum's dock.

"Lo and behold, there was no dock," Sharps said, recalling a trip to the Brooklyn pier with his daughters on a sunny summer weekend. "Practically the entire pier had fallen into the water … We had fixed up this old barge and she was basically all dressed up and nowhere to go."

Years ago, captains would actually park in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal — not far from where the museum was docked — to kill off any marine growth on their ships, thanks to water so polluted it could change color daily, said John Waldman, a Queens College professor who has studied the environmental history of New York Harbor.

"It had this legendary smell that you could smell for blocks, even miles," he said. "The harbor was quite dead."

With human waste being dumped directly into the waterways, wildlife — including shipworms and gribbles — died off, Waldman said.

This is one of those good news/bad news stories. The water has been cleaned up tremendously so some nasty little pests are coming back as a result. The same thing has happened in other places. Black flies are back in Upstate New York because of improving water quality. Remember that when you hear the latest doom and gloom pronouncement form some environmental organization or other.

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » Global Arachnophobia! — Friday, 17 November , 2006 @ 8:49 am