Hey I'm Adam from the band Guster and
I'm here with Dave Wiley who's the
research coordinator for Stellwagen Bank
National Marine Sanctuary. It's home of
some of the best whale watching in the
world and it's right off the coast of Boston here.
So what exactly is a national marine sanctuary?
National marine sanctuaries
you can think of as like most special
places in the United States in the water
environment. They're a network of underwater
parks incorporating more than 170,000
square miles of marine and Great Lakes waters.
It's a network that includes 13
national marine sanctuaries and two marine national monuments.
The National Marine Sanctuary System protects America's most
iconic natural and cultural marine resources.
Stellwagen Bank is apparently
one of the best places in the world
to see whales? Yeah it really is.
Humpback whales are probably the main one;
you can come out here sometimes and
see 30, 40, even 50 humpback whales
feeding in a group, which is pretty
spectacular. So it's a really great
great spot to to look at marine life for sure.
What about Stellwagen makes it such
a draw for all this sea life? Food.
It's like a gigantic restaurant.
The main thing on the menu is this
little fish called the sand lance. They're maybe
six inches long and about as big around as
your thumb. And when they're here they're
here by the millions and everybody's
eating them. You know, the commercial fish, the
recreational fish, the whales, the
seabirds, everything's here to eat
those guys. So what else happens in the
Stellwagen Bank?
Oh boy what does happen here? Actually a
lot of stuff happens here. We've got a
really active program of research and
resource protection at Stellwagen Bank
National Marine Sanctuary.
We also run education and volunteer
programs so we can get people involved with
the sanctuary. We can actually go visit
our education partner, the New England
Aquarium, and see some of the exhibits
they have that will give you an idea of what's going
on in the sanctuary. Particularly, you can
see what's going on the bottom of it,
which is pretty hard to do.
So this is the cold water tank
at New England Aquarium. So this is
basically a replica of what's going on at Stellwagen Bank?
Right. If you're going to portions of the bank that have
these big boulder reefs, just a bunch of
rocks all piled on top of each other, and
this is the type of assemblage of
marine life you'd find there.
So you're seeing a lot of soft bodied
invertebrates such as these anemones
and sea cucumbers and then these fish
are redfish, which are in the rockfish family.
We just had a really cool wolffish swim by
a minute ago, and of course you've got
this giant 15 pound lobster sitting here.
So you'd find this in portions of the
sanctuary, but then lots of the sanctuary
is really covered by more of a sandy
gravel mix of substrate. You find a very
different assemblage of marine life hanging out there.
And it's just teeming with all this life. This is crazy
to see all this one place and that's what it's like out there, huh?
That's what it's like in some parts but in other parts
you can put a camera down and go for long distance
without seeing much at all. But it is a
hotspot for biodiversity. So if you look at
all the Gulf of Maine, Stellwagen Bank
kind of stands out as having lots and lots of life.
So we all can visit our own national
marine sanctuary, so check it out, go
online, find out where the one is closest
to you. They're all over the country, even
in the Great Lakes and they're there for
us to enjoy so let's take advantage.