Setauket Mill Pond

In September, I met with a faculty member at the Stony Brook University currently teaching in the department of Ecology and Evolution.

He brought me (and a few others) to the Setauket Mill Pond near the university, where he explained that the ecology of the pond was currently in a crisis. He has been monitoring the state of the pond, and in the past few months, the number of fish in the pond have been drastically decreasing. He says the causes are still unknown, but he predicts it's because people are introducing other species that are not indigenous to the area, therefore effecting the local ecology. That combined with overfishing has helped to reduce the population of the pond to an alarmingly low state. If we leave the pond alone for about two years though, he says the problems can be alleviated, but that doesn't seem likely.

We did some fishing, but we released everything for obvious reasons. We caught largemouth bass, bluegill sunfish, a frog, and some seaweed. We did see two large turtles about 4~5 feet in length. The faculty member told us he had never seen those before, and have probably come in recently.