Idea Book about the Beaches

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BJ2
New Jersey has 44 beaches, half of which are situated in the north and closer to New York City while the other half are south of Long Beach Island and closer to Philadelphia. A number of these beaches such as Atlantic City, Asbury Park, Wildwood, and Seaside Heights are notorious for jam-packed boardwalks and alcohol-fueled local scenes. On the other hand, others like southern Ocean City or northern Point Pleasant are distinctly more family oriented. To avoid large crowds, I plan on going south since the further one leaves the city, the less likely one is to meet day-trippers. I think that the fewer the people there are on the beach, the more likely it will be to enforce social distancing.
I also think that a more exclusive beach allows one to better appreciate the seashore with all its beauty and life. Cape May is just the place to carry out my site visit owing to its low number of beach goers and vendors. Most beaches with lifeguards are likely to charge $5 to $10 for a daily beach tag and I plan on getting one as early as possible. Cape May sells beach passes on Viply (a ticketing app) and I plan on picking mine the evening before the visit. Although some beachside parking lots tend to fill up quickly, I think that if I get there by 9 am I can find some space to park my car.
I have come to a sense of peace with my safety on my local beach this summer from my long experience of going to the seashore and observing beach safety tips. One of the most important safety tip I have practiced over the years is avoiding dehydration and sunburn. I realize the importance of drinking plenty of fluids (except alcoholic beverages) and regularly reapplying sunscreen to protect oneself from harmful UV rays especially after a swim. I plan on bringing some UV certified sunglasses and avoiding the intense midday sun. Rough and rocky coastline can also injure one’s bare feet and so I will bring a pair of reef shoes to prevent scrapes from tide pools, broken coral, and other sand hazards. It is important to observe swimming advisories, if one decides to take a swim, and avoid sections of the beach with red, yellow, and purple flags.
At the same time, one must be careful to be in tune with current events: it is very easy to go for a swim and end up some blocks away from a lifeguard and in much deeper water. I will strive to ensure that when venturing into the ocean, I am in front of a lifeguard and there are no rough surfs or undertow currents. If a rip current happens to find me in water, I will break the grip of the tide by remaining calm and swimming out of the current and in the direction following the coastline. It is always advisable to watch the weather and get off the beach if a storm is approaching and avoid swimming after a heavy rain since water runoff often results in contaminated water at the beach.
The CDC cautions against overcrowding and recommends that people stay at least 6 feet away from one another in and out of the water and wear face masks when one is not swimming. Children younger than 2 years of age or persons with breathing difficulties or incapable of removing the mask without assistance are discouraged from wearing one. Beach goers are also advised to wash hands often and avoid sharing items with people they do not know. CDC recommends that before planning the visit, I should check online if the water quality in the swim area is monitored and therefore safe to swim. I should also be careful to stay away from water with bloom which are known to produce toxins. Water that is discolored, smelly, or cloudier than usual is often an indication that the water is either contaminated or contains harmful algal bloom.
At the same time, any pipes draining into or around the beach could be depositing animal or human waste into the swim area, especially after a downpour or heavy rain after a lengthy period of drought. If one’s ability to fight infections is already compromised by other health complications or medicines, one should check with their health provider before swimming in oceans. On the other hand, injuries to beachgoers caused by ocean waves has been shown to be more severe and common than previously supposed, even in shallow water. Some of the common but serious ocean-wave related injuries include broken bones, neck fractures, blunt organ trauma, and sprains. Before swimming, it is important to ask the lifeguards about surf conditions and avoid turning one’s back to the waves.
Surf performance is often determined by use of musculature, balance, aerodynamics, and water dynamics. The key to improving surf performance is understanding one’s surfing actions and muscle groups that power those movements. Surfing is a complete physical sport and the action of riding waves involves the use of various muscle groups for flexibility and endurance. For instance, when paddling, a wave of multiple muscles drive the action including biceps, triceps, trapezius, latissimus dorsi, rectus abdominis, and obliques.
Given the strenuousness of surfing, these muscles need pre-surf warm-up exercises for excellent performance. Most first stretching exercises include duck diving, catching the first waves, and paddling out. When taking off on a wave, the muscles used include the biceps, deltoids, pectoralis major, and triceps. These muscles lift the upper body before one’s legs can start surfing. As one’s feet touch the surfboard, the muscles in the lower body kick into action: these are the gluteals, quadriceps, and gastrocnemius. The hip muscles are also critical in surfing as they will be used in torso rotations to complete aerials, bottom-turns, roundhouse cutbacks, carves, and snaps.
Balance is an imperative part of surfing and involves two primary variables: the base of support and the centre of mass. It refers to the capacity to stay in the correct position and to maintain the same even when performing stunts, over and above, the ability to successfully maneuver the surfboard sufficiently without falling off. Discounting hours of practice in balancing, bigger surfboards with stiffer panels provide a large and firm base of support and are therefore easier to balance. Elite surfers are able to maintain their balance even while concentrating on the wave and their stunts while less skilled surfers are unable to balance well while concentrating on their next maneuver. They have also trained their bodies to react and correct to circular movements and can therefore maintain the desired position amidst crushing waves.
Surfing also demands training inertia which involves learning to adjust one’s balance when both the person and the surf is moving. Two other important aspects of surfing include aerodynamics and water dynamics: only about a quarter of the board surface area is ever in contact with water while the other three quarters is subject to aerodynamics as the surfer tries to descend and ride the crashing waves to the bottom. The shape of the surfboard as well as its fin affects not only how water moves around the board but also the surfer’s capacity to control the same in water. During surfing, buoyancy and weight work against one another while thrust and drag influence surfing maneuverability.
The shape of the board affects the balance of all four forces. For instance, double-concave boards tend to give a smoother ride while v-bottom boards allow quick steering. On the other hand, the board must be aerodynamic enough to allow coordinated powerful surfing movements: the board is essentially cutting through air and sometimes water at high speeds of up to 50 mph. The aerodynamic properties of the board determine the surfer’s speed and ability to perform stunts that require specific drive angles and wave speeds.
A naturalist sees the shoreline as an eco-system with interconnected relationships between plants, birds, and marine creatures. Naturalists are primarily concerned with identifying the association between different species and their surroundings. While biologists and naturalists are both scientists whose studies help to improve understanding of the natural world, the former tends to focus on one of the many different features of living organisms like development, anatomy, origin while the latter is more interested in how living things impact each other and the environment. For instance a biologist may see a crab on the shore and decide to investigate its reproductive biology while the ecologist will see the crab and investigate its relationship with other animals in the same shoreline such as the sea gull, chiton, shrimp, sea weed, sea anemone, rock cod, mussel, plant plankton, and the environment in general.
Similarly, a naturalist’s perception of the shoreline may differ remarkably from that of an ecologist in that the former will lean towards observational methods of study while the latter will prefer a more experimental approach. At the same time, an eco-activist’s will see the shoreline from an urban movement viewpoint (mostly founded on intrinsically defensive politics) while the naturalist will see the same shoreline from an affinity for nature and the desire to preserve the diversity of life on the beach. In the same way, naturalists also differ from meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, as well as other cross-discipline specialists who study the natural environment.
Generally, naturalists have a broad comprehension of and relationship with nature and tend to apply observational techniques to understand nature in all of its aspects. A typical naturalist on the beach will study and recognize the various plants and animals on the shoreline as completed organisms, each contributing to the stability of their eco-system. He or she will take an interest in establishing levels of structure from individual organism to the biosphere, and stress identification, distribution, life history, inter-relationships, and abundance of the various organisms on the shoreline.
Unlike the biologist, ecologist, eco-activist, meteorologist, or even the atmospheric scientist, the naturalist will base his investigations on emotional attachment, natural curiosity, and enthusiasm toward flora and fauna. Rather than adopting a scientific attitude towards natural phenomena, the naturalist has an aesthetic and passionate interest towards all organisms in the ecosystem and is therefore best placed to bridge the gap between the various specialties and the sciences of biology in general to the non-scientific public. It is this emotional attachment and willingness to carry out investigations in the field rather than in the laboratory that gives naturalist as much credibility as other specialists with the public on critical issues surrounding conservation as well as environmental policies on beaches and marine life.
Naturalists provide priceless and timeless information for the biologists, ecologists, eco-activists, meteorologists, and even the atmospheric scientists to answer extensive, synthetic problems in conservation biology and ecology. Unfortunately, the preference of naturalists to study plants and animals in their natural environments and their less rigorous scientific approaches of doing so has drawn the disapproving connotation of a lack of conceptualization and intellectualism. Other specialists tend to regard naturalists as mere nature lovers and their methods of inquiry as inferior, old-fashioned, and unsophisticated.
However, this is not true since the typical naturalist will, for instance, observe the shoreline with a deep and extensive familiarity with several ecological communities or groups of organisms on the beach. With this foundational knowledge, the naturalist is capable of accurately hypothesizing distribution, behavior, systematics, life histories, and sometimes even the morphology and physiology of the flora and fauna on the shoreline. More importantly, the naturalist’s emotional enthusiasm for biological diversity will prevent him or her from viewing the organisms on the beach as mere models or vehicles for biological or ecological theories, but rather as the reason for further understanding and preservation of flora and fauna on our beaches.
Of course, naturalists cannot by themselves advance understanding of shoreline biodiversity and they require the help of other specialists. Most of the ecological and biological problems need to be guided by theory, some of it developed by people with a deep background in biology, ecology, eco-activism, meteorology, or even atmospheric science despite little field knowledge or observational skills of organismal diversity. The importance of new and different approaches to these problems is critical to improving understanding of shoreline biodiversity and its conservation. However, these studies also rely on the naturalist’s enthusiasm and field knowledge of diversity, idiosyncrasies, and phylogeny of the various flora and fauna found on the beach to test general hypothesis.
For this reason, the naturalist’s longstanding intellectual curiosity and fascination with nature will continue to be a central pillar of any problem-solving enterprise seeking to increase understanding of the shoreline together with the plants, birds, and marine creatures that live on it. On the whole, a naturalist feels connected with the environment and the bio-diversity in it, and draws upon his or her naturalist intelligence and observational skills to understand how each organism relates with one another and the environment. The naturalist has an outstanding broad knowledge of the living world, as compared to other biology and ecology specialists, and recognizes flora and fauna together with other consequential distinctions on the shoreline. He or she then uses this capacity to promote the study and conservation of marine life and their habitats.
One naturalist who has particularly excelled in studying the flora and fauna along the Jersey shore with the enthusiasm and interest of understanding and preserving the biodiversity of New Jersey shoreline is Joanna Burger. In her book “A Naturalist along the Jersey Shore” her investigations of the Jersey shoreline habitat revealed several animals including the spring chorus, fiddler crabs, cattle egrets, killifish, horseshoe crabs, shorebirds, fowler’s toads, peregrines, ospreys, harriers, mussels, ghost crabs, diamond terrapins, mosquitoes, monarch butterflies, hawks, herring gulls, herons, and egrets. She also lists several plants that are unique and essential to the shoreline’s biodiversity including salt hay, cord grass, reeds, forbs, algae, beach plum, and etcetera.
The book describes the intertwined lives of the flora and fauna as well as the ever-changing edge of Jersey’s shoreline. The various organisms highlighted in the book are described in relation to one another and the environment as a whole. For instance, the shoe birds come in great flocks to Jersey shores to feed on horseshoe crab eggs at Cape May while the cattle egrets favor the marshy shores to breed and raise their young. Not only does the author paint a vivid picture of the natural habitat, she also describes the coastal ecosystem. The book narrates the history and heritage of the Jersey shore including the economic and environmental issues threatening its biodiversity.
COBWEB, a community of naturalists who wish to improve understanding of Baltic Sea flora and fauna and solve environmental problems in the Baltic sea, published the newsletter “Baltic Sea Flora and Fauna”. The newsletter discusses the divers...