Estuaries

Sixty-five percent of U.S. estuaries and coastal water bodies are moderately to severely degraded by excessive nutrient inputs, which lead to algal blooms and low-oxygen (hypoxic) waters that can kill fish and seagrass and reduce essential fish habitats.

Eutrophication is a big word that describes a big problem in the nation's estuaries.

Estuaries experience change many times a day due to tides.

Located at the northern end of the Ten Thousand Islands on the gulf coast of Florida, the Rookery Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve represents one of the few remaining undisturbed mangrove estuaries in North America.

Estuarine organisms can adapt quite well to changing conditions in estuaries. For example, fish or crabs are mobile and can move as needed throughout the day to adjust to changes in the estuary.

Estuaries are home to unique plant and animal communities that have adapted to brackish water.

Ocean acidification is affecting the entire world’s oceans, including coastal estuaries and waterways.

Sometimes in the course of our adventure we came upon worlds inhabited by intelligent beings, whose developed personality was an expression not of the single individual organism but of a group of organisms. In most cases this state of affairs had arisen through the necessity of combining intelligence with lightness of the individual body. A large planet, rather close to its sun, or swayed by a very large satellite, would be swept by great ocean tides. Vast areas of its surface would be periodically submerged and exposed. In such a world flight was very desirable, but owing to the strength of gravitation only a small creature, a relatively small mass of molecules, could fly. A brain large enough for complex "human" activity could not have been lifted. In such worlds the organic basis of intelligence was often a swarm of avian creatures no bigger than sparrows. A host of individual bodies were possessed together by a single individual mind of human rank. The body of this mind was multiple, but the mind itself was almost as firmly knit as the mind of a man. As flocks of dunlin or redshank stream and wheel and soar and quiver over our estuaries, so above the great tide-flooded cultivated regions of these worlds the animated clouds of avians maneuvered, each cloud a single center of consciousness.

The Galician estuaries are famous for their seafood.

Mud crabs are found on the western side of the island near mangrove-lined estuaries.