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TUCKERTON - The research vessel Arabella departs from the Rutgers University Marine Field Station carrying an array of scientific equipment and a crew determined to change the way we look at our oceans.

The team swats greenheads in the cabin as they head out the Little Egg Harbor Inlet, seeking a clearer picture of humanity's impact on marine life through the tiny creatures on the sea floor.

They are part of the ambitious Coastal Ocean Assessment project. Funded by $1 million in grants, scientists from Rutgers are working with the state Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to create a national model for assessing pollution's effects along the country's coasts.

The key is a mechanical claw hanging from a metal frame attached to the Arabella's stern. The device plunges to the ocean floor and grabs a sample of the muck to be analyzed, along with the worms, crabs, clams and microscopic creatures living there.

Collectively referred to as benthic organisms, these animals do not move much, so water conditions in certain areas affect them more than other sealife, such as fish, that moves constantly. The sizes, abundance and types of species the scientists find say a lot about an ecosystem's health.

"They're the guinea pigs that are telling us what's going on," said Mike Kennish, the lead Rutgers researcher on the project.

Kennish has spent about three decades studying the state's waterways and can talk almost nonstop about the intricate factors affecting the marine life here.

To hear him talk creates the impression that the oceans are thoroughly understood, mapped to the tiniest crustacean.

But the truth is scientists know very little about the effects of pollution along the shore, Kennish said. He expects this study to change that.

"This is cutting-edge science," Kennish said "It's going to redefine how we assess the health of our coastal ocean."

The tests

For years, scientists have relied on imprecise tests that, at best, only indirectly indicate how an ecosystem is functioning. The most common are water column tests, which measure chemical compositions, such as the amount of dissolved oxygen in samples.

Too little dissolved oxygen prevents sea life from thriving, and the DEP has said the state's coastal oceans are "100 percent impaired" due to low amounts of dissolved oxygen.

Surface runoff and 14 offshore sewage pipes that pump pollutants into the ocean up and down the state's coast contribute to the problem, but researchers only have a vague idea of what effects those factors have.

Water moves, so the results can fluctuate from one day to the next. And they say even less about how plant and animal life are coping with those conditions.

So in 2007, researchers started sampling benthic life, stopping at 100 locations along the coast, as far as three miles out to sea, from Sandy Hook to Cape May.

In the past two weeks they also collected samples from another 50 sites, some duplicates and others new sites up and down the shoreline.

Kennish, his fellow researchers at Rutgers and a team of experts he assembled from the University of Massachusetts, Old Dominion University and the Virginia Institute of Marine Studies will cross-reference what they find living in the seabed with the chemical compositions of the water to show how marine life is reacting to their conditions.

The EPA then plans to mimic these methods to examine the coastal health of several other states to conduct a more uniform and accurate assessment for its biennial Clean Water Act analysis.

"To do something, you have to know what's going on," Kennish said, "and essentially we're rewriting how it's done."

The big grab

On a breezy morning, the Arabella stopped at the mouth of the Little Egg Harbor Inlet, a few hundred yards from the Rutgers Marine Field Station where it departed. Atlantic City's casinos were visible a dozen miles in the distance.

The crew got to work. Rose Petrecca, a senior marine scientist, and John Paoli, a diver, walked to the stern to prepare the Van Veen grab - the device that would sample the bottom. They guided the machine as the A-shaped frame it hung from mechanically tilted backward over the water.

"Give me some more slack on the cables, Jim," Petrecca yelled to Capt. Jim Hughes.

Behind Hughes was Gina Petruzzelli, a field researcher, who watched a live video feed from the camera attached to the Van Veen on a small screen in the cabin. The grab dangled briefly over the waves and then dropped.

As it descended, water rushed past the video screen and four red lasers appeared, pointed toward the center, sensing what was below. Not much was visible except for a few bubbles, until after about 15 seconds it finally landed and kicked up a cloud of sediment 20 feet below.

"Oh, we hit the bottom," Petruzelli yelled to the people outside, a few tiny crabs scattering away on the screen.

The sample was quick, like a metal mouth chomping the mud, and the cables pulled it back up again. Petrecca and Paoli grabbed it as it dripped and swayed, and they swung it onto a table to open the sample.

An episode of "Deadliest Catch" it was not - a few hermit crabs no larger than nickels were visible, plus the shell-like casings left from worms.

Petruzelli brought out a clipboard and worksheet, looked over the sample and checked boxes marked "gray," "muddy," "soft" and "no smell." The crew separated the visible organisms to be preserved and examined, while the rest of the sample was taken to a table on the port side to be further separated.

Jen Smith, a volunteer, waited there with one yellow rubber glove and one blue rubber glove in front of a series of sieves set up on a table. She and Petruzelli poured the mud through progressively smaller sieves, washing the leftover water and sand off the boat.

"The interesting part is, if you look at it, it looks like nothing's there," Petrecca said. "But if you look at it under a microscope, you see all kinds of little things."

As the sample was examined, Bob Schuster, an environmental specialist with the DEP, and Justin Ash, a Rutgers intern, plunged different devices off the side of the boat. Schuster sampled the water's salinity, Ph, temperature and dissolved oxygen content, while Ash sampled the water's chlorophyll content.

"This has been done in places like the Chesapeake Bay," Schuster said, "but never in the coastal waters."

The crew also recently deployed a Slocum glider, a device essentially like an unmanned drone that will glide underwater from one side of the Atlantic coast to the other collecting more chemical samples.

Once those results are compiled in laboratories, they will be put in a comprehensive index along with the characteristics of benthic life in each location. From that index, researchers will be able to compare how one area of ocean ecosystem is maintaining compared with another.

Almost done

When the team finished doing its work, Hughes powered up the boat again and steered it back to the field station. The day was short, only about two hours compared with the 12- to 14-hour days they usually logged. The Arabella also never left the inlet, whereas some days the crew will head as far as three miles out to sea.

The team is mostly finished collecting this year's samples, except for four more sites far off the coast of Sandy Hook they plan to visit in a few weeks.

In the future, they plan to do similar work in Barnegat Bay, the Little Egg Harbor estuary and the bays behind Atlantic City, and that work could be extended to the Delaware Bay as well.

Kennish and Schuster expect the results from the 2007 samples to be released later this year, while this year's results will be released sometime in 2010.

"People don't know enough about what's going on," Kennish said back on the field station's dock. "That's why this is important."

E-mail Lee Procida:

LProcida@pressofac.com

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