Marine scientists, innovators and benefactors Laurie Landeau and her husband, Bob Maze, were honored by Stony Brook University last weekend in Manhattan at the annual Stars of Stony Brook Gala in New York City.
They were honored for their contributions to the Stony Brook School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences and, especially, the Shinnecock Bay Restoration Program, which has helped restore water quality and shellfish stocks.
In 2012, the couple, themselves pioneers in marine animal medicine, contributed $3 million to the university to fund the restoration program in the western portion of Shinnecock Bay. At the time, it suffered from chronic “red tide” and “brown tide” algae blooms and was devoid of wild shellfish and seagrass beds.
Last year, a decade into the implementation of a strategy developed by Stony Brook scientists, the bay was designated a “Global Hope Spot,” for its turnaround and example of the potential of resurrecting stressed marine ecosystems, by the international environmental organization Mission Blue.
The couple met when they both landed at a science research station in downeast Maine when they were in college — she was studying bird populations for Princeton, he was doing cetacean counts tracking the ecological impacts of a nearby power station to pay his way through Texas A&M.
They now run AQUAVET, a pioneering marine animal medicine training program based in Rhode Island that they started in the 1980s, and which remains the premier program of its kind. The couple lives in dormitories with their students during the five-week courses.
They beam with admiration, when they talk about the work that the Stony Brook University scientists have done in Shinnecock Bay — from how they devised the approach to how they have tinkered with it to the astounding results it has produced.
The program has relied on a massive speeding effort of millions of hard clams in specific corners of the western portion of the bay, west of Ponquogue Bridge, where the Stony Brook researchers determined the power filtering capabilities of a huge clam population might actually be able to overcome the deleterious effects of pollution from the septic systems of nearby homes. In addition, they forecast that by loading millions of adult clams into the western bay, the offspring of those clams would be carried by currents and settle in the eastern portion of the bay, sparking a resurgence of the wild clam stocks there.
They hit the nail on the head with both plans.
“At the time, there was a lot of focus on what you could do to stop nutrients from coming into the bay — and there was all the talk of reducing septics and sewers, and that’s all good, but it’s going to take so long,” Landeau, who called the honor from Stony Brook the greatest honor she’s ever received in her storied career, recalled last week. “To get to the day we have a sewer system, and then it takes years to see improvements from that — it was all very far in the future. If you’re waiting until the nutrients are reduced, it’s going to be 50 years.”
Her husband picked up the thought: “We liked that they were talking about what can be done right now to deal with the problem, and they had some wonderful ideas about how they would approach it,” he said of the Stony Brook scientists who helped plan the program’s strategy. “And over the course of the years though the program, they’ve been able to assess what’s working and what isn’t, almost in real time, and decide what direction should be taken next. It was very impressive.”
“A lot of people, scientists, will tend to say that something sounds good and ought to work, and then just proceed — they don’t take the time to actually see if it’s working, midstream, and say, ‘This isn’t working, let’s do something else,” Landeau said, the two speaking in nearly a single sentence.
“They did that,” Maze chimed in. “Their innovation was spectacular.”
The successes of the Shinnecock restoration has peaked interest in exploring similar strategies to tackling water quality problem on the Chesapeake Bay, where Landeau and Maze own an oyster hatchery and shellfish farm on the Choptank River.
Maze and Landeau discovered the Stony Brook Southampton campus in 2009, when the facilities in Woods Hole where they had based the aquatic medicine course since 1977 was undergoing renovations and they were “wandering,” in search of a temporary home and landed at the lightly populated campus with the celebrated marine science program.
“I’m from Long Island, I grew up on the North Shore near Northport, so we knew about the LIU campus and the marine program and that Stony Brook had recently taken it over,” Landeau recalled. “It worked out well, and that’s when we got to the know the faculty, like Christopher Gobler. We tend to lift faculty for whatever school we’re at to teach at our program.”
AQUAVET is now based at Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island.
The gala, attended by more than 500 guests, Stony Brook said, raised $2.1 million for scholarships that will benefit hundreds of students.
Michael Wright on Apr 19, 2023