fish
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Fish
Gasping at the surface near the pier, this fish was in trouble. Or so I thought. But it seemed to successfully dive back into the deeps, so it might have been feeding at something I couldn’t see on the surface. About 14″ long: what is it? And here, soon after low tide way up the…
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River of Milky Jade
Signs of life in the Superfund Gowanus, which has a weird milky jade color (and, oy, the stink!) this time of year.
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Everywhere
Nature is everywhere, and representations of nature are likewise. This is one of Deborah Brown’s mosaics at Houston Street, part of a work called “Platform Diving,” which envisions the station underwater — not so hard to do anymore — with turtles, dolphins, and this octopus swimming through the old rattle and roll.This I found in…
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Summer Flounder
D’oh! Forgot to take my camera when we took Nora to the Maria Mitchell Aquarium. Next time. But in the meantime, on the porch of the MMA administrative building, next to the whale bone, I found this dessicated Summer Flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), classic example of a flatfish with both its eyes on the top side.…
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Sheepshead Bay
Ten piers, ten local creatures of the sea.
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Pelham Bay Park
“Only the dead know Brooklyn…” but you can say the same thing for the rest of NYC. Five massive boroughs: it’s a full-time job to explore them all. Last Saturday, we journeyed up to the eastern Bronx to visit Pelham Bay Park. Pharaoh — or should I say “Tyrant,” based on the Greco-design of the…
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Skates
Sun-dried, the remains of a skate repose on that great depository of all things, the beach, Jamaica Bay branch. This may be the Little or Common Skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Cartilaginous like their relatives the sharks, skates reproduce by laying eggs, unlike their near look-a-likes the rays, who bear live young. Rays also have longer, more…
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Gowanus Fish
Life in the Gowanus, and I don’t mean the mythological Carroll Gardens flipper-baby frogmen that are supposedly heard plopping and flopping in the greasy water on still moonless nights.
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Coney Island’s Endemic Species
You have to be a certain age to remember when Coney Island Whitefish teemed off of Brooklyn’s shores in such massive schools that beach-goers wouldn’t dare go into the water. Today, however, they’re a rare sight. Although sometimes mistaken for the pallid Manhattan eel (Mentula brevus), the Coney Island Whitefish is a unique species. Sitts coneius…
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Strange Fish
Back in March, I found a perfectly preserved northern pipefish on the coast of Brooklyn. When I found it, I didn’t know what it was, but I thought it looked like a straightened seahorse. It turns out that seahorses and pipefish are related, in the Syngnathidae family along with the seadragons. I’ve never seen a…
Backyard and Beyond 