Falmouth High School juniors Tim Studley and Ted Nixon were awarded this year's OPET prize for the best science project related to Oyster Pond.The OPET Board of Directors established this prize to encourage students to take on some aspects of the chemisty, physics, or biology of Oyster Pond and its surrounding watershed as the topic of their science fair project.
Studley and Nixon's project, entitled Testing Water Quality and Nutrient Levels of Oyster Pond was chosen by OPET's three judges, Jason Hyatt, Bill Kerfoot, and Eric Davidson to receive the award at the science fair held at the high school in early March 2002. Under the guidance of their...
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Some of you may wonder whether Oyster Pond is either salty or fresh. Well, it's somewhere
in between, or brackish. Fresh water has about .5 parts per thousand of salt, while Vineyard Sound has about 32 ppt. Oyster Pond has between 2 and 5 ppt. The amount of salt is important to the ecology of the pond in many ways, including the herring run.
So how does the salt get into the Pond? Well, if you take a walk down Oyster Pond Road, and turn left towrd the Shining Sea Bike Path, you will notice a small parking area on your left, with a mini-waterfall, or weir. Water flows over this weir out of Oyster Pond through a pipe under the road,out to a lagoon, and then through the Trunk River under the Bike Path and finally into Vineyard Sound. If you are lucky you may see herring swimming in or out. The weir is what allows water to flow in or out of the Pond. When the tide in Vineyard Sound rises high enough, water will flow over the weird into the Pond. At low tide, water can flow out of the pond. Thus one can set the height of the weir |
according to how much salty water we would like to allow into
the Pond. Sounds simple, right? Well, it's not!
The height of the pond varies with rainfall and groundwater discharge, and the height of the weir varies with the tides, but also with the geometry of the lagoons. To make a long story short, it's complicated and does not do exactly what one might expect at first glance. So how do we know if the weir is letting in the right amount of water to keep the pond healthy? Well, I put together some electronics consisting of a temperatur sensor, pressure sensor, conductivity sensor (which indicates salinity), and a flow meter (acoustic travel time), along with a data logger and battery pack. I put this setup in the culvert and eavesdropped on the salt flux. It looks like the weir is working properly. However, I am still monitoring the salt flux with the help of a $2000 grant from The Sounds Conservancy to maintain the system. |
What can you do to help? First and foremost, do not build dams in the Trunk River. Kids love to do this, and fisherman do it to gaive them an unfair advantage in catching herring in order to liveline them for striped bass fishing. Building dams is illegal. If you see one, [do the fish and the pond a favor and] break it.
You can also help me protect my monitoring equipment, which people do vandalize in the summer. The instruments are in the culvert. Please don't climb in there, and if you see someone messing up the setup, kindly ask them to stop, and explain that it is scientific equipment. If you have any questions about my project, send me an email at jhyatt@whoi.edu, especially if you know something about electronics or digital signal processing! Do you like Matlab? Do you have a basement full of old oceanographic equipment? Let me know. Get involved before Oyster Pond gets all gooey. --By Jason Hyatt |
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