What Good Is a Salt Marsh?

By George W. Frame

This shore is the watery home of many creatures.
The rising sun looked like a huge red face peeking over the edge of the New Jersey salt marsh. Light glinted off diamond-bright drop-lets of dew on the long grasses.

A salt marsh, or tide marsh, lies right next to the ocean and gets its name because it is flooded twice daily by the ocean’s high tides. It is a special place, with plants and animals adapted to a salty environment that is alternately wet and dry.

“What good is a salt marsh?” I heard people say many years ago, when I was a boy. My friends at school thought marshes were smelly wastelands you had to drive past to get to the beach. “They should fill them in, build houses on them,” I heard grown-ups say.

Indeed, many salt marshes were filled in before laws were passed to stop it, about thirty years ago.

What good is a salt marsh? Well, for me on this particular morning, it was good for food. I carried my crab trap toward the creek.

In a salt marsh, a creek is an inlet of ocean water. When the tide comes in, the creek fills up. If it is an especially high tide, such as at full moon, the creek overflows its banks and the entire marsh is covered with water. When the tide goes out, the marsh drains and the creek looks like a little river flowing back into the ocean. Creeks accumulate many nutrients, and because they are almost never completely dry, they are home to creatures such as the delicious blue crabs.

	Diamondback terrapin.
	Blue crab.
	"Minnies."
	Green crab.

The tide was low now, the creek very shallow. I interrupted an egret in its fishing, and it waded away from me quickly. I looked into the water and saw several large blue crabs half-hidden under sea lettuce. “Lunch,” I said to myself happily.

I lowered a trap into the creek and startled a school of Atlantic silverside fish (“shiners”). They leaped into the air, their silvery flanks flashing in the sunlight before they plopped back and swam away. Shiners are food for flounder, bluefish, and bass.

My Uncle Bill used to say, “If they filled in the marsh, I could build a house here and catch flounder every day!” He wouldn’t have caught much. He didn’t understand that flounder depend on food chains that begin in the salt marsh.

After setting the trap, I went looking for clams. It is always better to leave a trap alone, because crabs notice any movement overhead. I followed the creek to its mouth, and waded out toward the ocean, where a sandbar lay in the shallows.

I dug up two dozen hard-shell clams in twenty minutes. Then I walked to the ocean side of the sandbar and quickly picked up a dozen surf clams uncovered by the swift currents. The tide was coming in now, already up to my knees. I turned to face the marsh.

What good is a salt marsh? I gazed at the water rising in the mouth of the creek and at the lovely green cord grass waving along its banks. I heard a mud hen clack-clacking its call. At this moment, I felt as if the salt marsh had been preserved just for me. Hoisting my bag of clams, I made for the creek.

I pulled up my trap. Dozens of “minnies,” little mummichogs and striped killifish, had gone in for the bait. Now they dropped through the wire back into the creek and vanished. My captives, nineteen blue crabs, danced excitedly and stabbed at one another with their pincers.

I hastily removed a docile green crab and a common spider crab before they were hurt. An oyster toadfish and a diamondback terrapin had gone into the trap, too, probably for the minnies. The bait was covered with carnivorous mud snails. Everybody was hungry!

I released the fish and the turtle. I let most of the crabs go because they were just babies. If you don’t give the little ones a chance to grow up, there won’t be big crabs later. I opened the trap, and they tripped into the water, plop, plop, plip, plop!

As I stood and gathered trap, bucket, and bag, a voice behind me nearly gave me a heart attack.

“Good morning!

He was a friendly-looking man. And he wore the uniform of the state Department of Fish and Game.

“May I please see your license to crab?” he asked courteously.

I showed it to him, and because he had noticed the clams, I produced my clamming license, too.

“Wonderful day for it,” he said, gesturing toward the sandbar. “Plenty of clams this year. Found a guy at dawn with a thousand clams in his boat and no license at all. Made him drop every one overboard.” He shook his head. Then he said, “Have a nice day!” He smiled and waved. He made me remember that the salt marsh was not really mine.

I looked again at my crabs. Although they were of legal size, they were not very big. They crouched on the bucket’s bottom, trying to hide. I tipped them into the creek, plop, plop-plop. “Have a nice day!” I called to them.

The water in the creek, flowing in swiftly from the ocean now, reflected the blue, blue sky overhead. This is what a salt marsh is good for. I picked up the clams and headed home.