Bamboo Worms And Their Improbable SCIENTIST
Dr. Agnes Mittermayr of Austria has Found a Home on the Wellfleet Flats
Austrian scientist Dr. Agnes Mittermayr doing what she loves most.
There’s something wonderfully serendipitous about Agnes Mittermayr’s presence on the Wellfleet flats, which have been visited by hundreds of marine scientists since Dr. David Belding opened Cape Cod’s first marine laboratory on Mayo Beach at the turn of the 20th Century.
What is so pleasantly improbable is the path she’s taken to become an important part of the local shellfish industry and community. Her improbability in Wellfleet is not only what she studies, but how far she has traveled to become a marine biologist at Provincetown’s acclaimed Center for Coastal Studies.
Dr. Mittermayr studies, as she describes it, “all the little critters that live in the sand, mud and silt” beneath Wellfleet Harbor’s abundant shellfish flats. It’s not just that few people are as fascinated as she is by the mostly unseen and often unknown marine invertebrates that coexist with the area’s oysters and clams. It’s that her fascination developed while growing up in a small landlocked Austrian village hundreds of miles from any marsh or beach. Mittermayr says she first became enraptured by marine life as a child watching nature programs on TV. “It’s always the things we don’t have that fascinate us the most,” she said. Once enthralled, she adds, “the fascination never stops.”
Mittermayr is leading a study, financed by the Wellfleet Oyster Alliance (WOA), to better understand the growing presence of a little known, little studied and potentially disruptive invertebrate known as the bamboo worm. It’s not that this relatively common inhabitant of tidal flats is a threat to Wellfleet’s shellfish. But it could become a challenge in years to come.
“We’re always faced with the dilemma in terms of the science we fund,” said Nancy O’Connell, WOA board president. “Do we invest in the bigger issues our shellfishermen face, or do we try to get ahead of a potential threat even before they are fully recognized?”
The bamboo worm, long and segmented, lives in sand-encrusted tubes that inhabit silty tideland in the cooler waters of both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. The pinkish creature with a bamboo-patterned skin is not a threat to human health, but its tendency to form large beehive-like colonies on the seabed does pose a threat to baby clams, as they grow their first shells and settle into the tidal soil. The clustered “hives” create significant cracks or fissures in the bottom, into which infant clams can fall and suffocate.
A bamboo worm emerges from its sand-encrusted home.
While the growing number of bamboo worms might not pose catastrophic consequences for Wellfleet shellfish, their expanding presence might be indicative of other issues that do pose a threat. The four changes she believes are possible reasons for the growing bamboo worm population are warmer winters (more favorable spawning conditions), the diminishing population of worm-eating horseshoe crabs, the increase of fine-particle sediment of Indian Neck and an increase in the bamboo worms’ preferred food source (organic matter). All four theories are directly or indirectly linked to climate change, Mittermayr said, adding the study’s results won’t be available until the end of August.
The research is interesting to her on many different levels, Mittermayr says. She hopes to shed light on any number of critical changes to Wellfleet Harbor’s geology, topology and biology. In particular, she suspects the long stretch of seawall lining the east shore of Indian Neck might play a role in the kind of sediment that finds its way onto the flats.
And then, there’s always the complex and mysterious panoply of life in the sediment itself. So far in her research in and around Wellfleet she has been able to catalog 400 different bottom-dwelling critters. “I have a bucket list of worms I still want to see.”