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Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History
Tall green grass. Subtle melodies of songbirds. Sharp whines of muskrats. Rustles of water running through the grasses. And at low tide, a pungent reminder of the treasures hidden beneath the surface.All are vital signs of the great salt marshes' natural resources. Now championed as critical habitats for plants, animals, and people because of the environmental service and protection they provide, these ecological wonders were once considered unproductive wastelands, home solely to mosquitoes and toxic waste, and mistreated for centuries by the human population. Exploring the fascinating biodiversity of these boggy wetlands, Salt Marshes offers readers a wealth of essential information about a variety of plants, fish, and animals, the importance of these habitats, consequences of human neglect and thoughtless development, and insight into how these wetlands recover. Judith S. Weis and Carol A. Butler shed ample light on the human impact, including chapters on physical and biological alterations, pollution, and remediation and recovery programs. In addition to a national and global perspective, the authors place special emphasis on coastal wetlands in the Atlantic and Gulf regions, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area, calling attention to their historical and economic legacies. Written in clear, easy-to-read language, Salt Marshes proves that the battles for preservation and conservation must continue, because threats to salt marshes ebb and flow like the water that runs through them.
347 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 24, 2013
Salt marshes appear pretty simple from a distance. Just a flat broad expanse of grasses, cut by a few small creaks that lead into larger creeks, which in turn lead out onto either mudflats without vegetation or into the open waters of an estuary. There is a high marsh, which is only flooded by occasional spring tides, and a low marsh, which is submerged by most if not all tides. At least on the East Coast, the overwhelming tonnage of plant matter is dominated by two species, Salt Hay (Spartina patens) and Cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora). Doesn’t sound very exciting does it? Flat and just a few species? Who cares?
Here are three statistics from the book that might change your mind:
1. For every 3 square miles of salt marsh, a storm surge from a hurricane can be reduced by one foot. Think about this in terms of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, as Louisiana is losing on average 25 square miles a year in coastal wetlands.
2. The loss of 2.5 acres of salt marsh leads to a $33,000 increase in the cost of storm damage. Using this ratio, salt marshes provide $23 billion a year in storm protection.
3. The clams that once lived on Long Island’s Great South Bay salt marshes once filtered 40% of the water of the bay each day. 40% of the entire water of the bay, removing bacteria and preventing harmful algae blooms. Now that they only filter 1% of the bay’s water thanks to a severe decline in clams and their habitat, disgusting brown tides plague the bay and fish and clam catches have declined as has water quality.
Before you think this is a diatribe on preserving salt marshes and a boring book of statistics, it isn’t. It is very readable and doesn’t assume a lot of prior technical knowledge about different species, ecology, pollution, climate, etc. on the part of the reader. The description of the various native plants and animals with the accompanying photographs was wonderful (there were many great bird photos); even if you might want to avoid some or skim through the more detailed sections on how various pollutants affect the salt marshes. Personally though I found the section on invasive species much more interesting than the section on pollution and thought it one of the best parts of the book.
This book didn’t have quite the timeless, poetic feel of _Life and Death of the Salt Marsh_ by John and Mildred Teal but it did feel more modern, up-to-date, and a bit more technical (though not technical in a bad, unreadable, text bookish way). Aspects of individual pollutants were much better covered in this book than the Teals’ (though no one can match the Teals for DDT coverage) and the Teals didn’t really tackle invasive species at all that I remember (though I gather they weren’t the big problem back when they wrote _Life and Death of the Salt Marsh_). There were a few occasional pop culture references in _Salt Marshes_ that I found amusing and didn’t see anything like that in the Teals’ book, but then this book didn’t have some of the broad sweep of human history feel with our interaction with the salt marshes that the Teal’s book had.
The coverage of salt marsh crustaceans in _Salt Marshes_ was superb with great photos and wonderful information on their biology (they have horrible, horrible parasites, some being what are called parasitic castrators, parasites that actually physically prevent reproduction, all so the parasite has lots and lots of nutrients…shudder). Also, I didn’t know that hermit crabs weren’t true crabs and that they don’t kill snails for their shell, but rather can detect a new home by the smell of its decaying original inhabitant and/or detecting calcium, the major component of shells. Ok I like crabs and think they are pretty neat.
I was intrigued by the balanced approach taken to the Common Reed (Phragmites australis). Though it is native to the United States, the European strain is taking over mid and lower sections of many brackish marshes throughout the East Coast. At first thought of as horrible invasive (well it IS invasive) and the reed marshes as of low or no value, the authors through their investigations show that the reed marshes aren’t without value and are considerably better than no marsh at all.
It was also fascinating that Cordgrass is horribly invasive on the West Coast (while it is highly desired and planted on reclaimed marshes on the East Coast). Not only displacing native Pacific Coast salt marsh species, it colonizes mudflats to such an extent that animal species that are dependent upon them suffer real population losses.
The book is overwhelmingly on the East Coast salt marshes but Pacific Coast salt marshes are discussed as well, something I knew absolutely nothing about. The Teals’ though had much better coverage of mangroves, something just barely touched upon in _Salt Marshes_, though I really think that ecosystem so different as to diverse its own book.
The final chapter, “Death and Rebirth of an Urban Wetland: The Hackensack Meadowlands” was quite interesting and well written. Not as obscure as it might sound to people who don’t live in New Jersey or New York, it has been glimpsed in Broadway Danny Rose, Being John Malkovich, and The Sopranos. The authors wrote a surprisingly hopeful chapter about a place that was once a horrible dump and Superfund site. Oh, and once had pirates. Pirates!
A pretty quick read and not overly technical, the writing style was not dry or academic as I feared it might be.
Here are three statistics from the book that might change your mind:
1. For every 3 square miles of salt marsh, a storm surge from a hurricane can be reduced by one foot. Think about this in terms of Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans, as Louisiana is losing on average 25 square miles a year in coastal wetlands.
2. The loss of 2.5 acres of salt marsh leads to a $33,000 increase in the cost of storm damage. Using this ratio, salt marshes provide $23 billion a year in storm protection.
3. The clams that once lived on Long Island’s Great South Bay salt marshes once filtered 40% of the water of the bay each day. 40% of the entire water of the bay, removing bacteria and preventing harmful algae blooms. Now that they only filter 1% of the bay’s water thanks to a severe decline in clams and their habitat, disgusting brown tides plague the bay and fish and clam catches have declined as has water quality.
Before you think this is a diatribe on preserving salt marshes and a boring book of statistics, it isn’t. It is very readable and doesn’t assume a lot of prior technical knowledge about different species, ecology, pollution, climate, etc. on the part of the reader. The description of the various native plants and animals with the accompanying photographs was wonderful (there were many great bird photos); even if you might want to avoid some or skim through the more detailed sections on how various pollutants affect the salt marshes. Personally though I found the section on invasive species much more interesting than the section on pollution and thought it one of the best parts of the book.
This book didn’t have quite the timeless, poetic feel of _Life and Death of the Salt Marsh_ by John and Mildred Teal but it did feel more modern, up-to-date, and a bit more technical (though not technical in a bad, unreadable, text bookish way). Aspects of individual pollutants were much better covered in this book than the Teals’ (though no one can match the Teals for DDT coverage) and the Teals didn’t really tackle invasive species at all that I remember (though I gather they weren’t the big problem back when they wrote _Life and Death of the Salt Marsh_). There were a few occasional pop culture references in _Salt Marshes_ that I found amusing and didn’t see anything like that in the Teals’ book, but then this book didn’t have some of the broad sweep of human history feel with our interaction with the salt marshes that the Teal’s book had.
The coverage of salt marsh crustaceans in _Salt Marshes_ was superb with great photos and wonderful information on their biology (they have horrible, horrible parasites, some being what are called parasitic castrators, parasites that actually physically prevent reproduction, all so the parasite has lots and lots of nutrients…shudder). Also, I didn’t know that hermit crabs weren’t true crabs and that they don’t kill snails for their shell, but rather can detect a new home by the smell of its decaying original inhabitant and/or detecting calcium, the major component of shells. Ok I like crabs and think they are pretty neat.
I was intrigued by the balanced approach taken to the Common Reed (Phragmites australis). Though it is native to the United States, the European strain is taking over mid and lower sections of many brackish marshes throughout the East Coast. At first thought of as horrible invasive (well it IS invasive) and the reed marshes as of low or no value, the authors through their investigations show that the reed marshes aren’t without value and are considerably better than no marsh at all.
It was also fascinating that Cordgrass is horribly invasive on the West Coast (while it is highly desired and planted on reclaimed marshes on the East Coast). Not only displacing native Pacific Coast salt marsh species, it colonizes mudflats to such an extent that animal species that are dependent upon them suffer real population losses.
The book is overwhelmingly on the East Coast salt marshes but Pacific Coast salt marshes are discussed as well, something I knew absolutely nothing about. The Teals’ though had much better coverage of mangroves, something just barely touched upon in _Salt Marshes_, though I really think that ecosystem so different as to diverse its own book.
The final chapter, “Death and Rebirth of an Urban Wetland: The Hackensack Meadowlands” was quite interesting and well written. Not as obscure as it might sound to people who don’t live in New Jersey or New York, it has been glimpsed in Broadway Danny Rose, Being John Malkovich, and The Sopranos. The authors wrote a surprisingly hopeful chapter about a place that was once a horrible dump and Superfund site. Oh, and once had pirates. Pirates!
A pretty quick read and not overly technical, the writing style was not dry or academic as I feared it might be.
December 18, 2011
Salt marshes are the predominant coastal wetland ecosystems throughout much of the United States. They stretch unbroken—or did at one time—along the more than 2,300 miles of the Atlantic coast stretching from Maine all the way to Florida and parts of the Gulf Coast, where they are replaced by mangrove ecosystems better suited to subtropical temperatures and conditions. They rise in patches again in southern and central California—notably San Francisco Bay—give way to the rocky coasts of northern California, Oregon, and southern Washington, and pop-up again, seemingly from nowhere, in Puget Sound and its environs. They are, by anyone’s definition, an ecological success story.
And yet, note Judith Weis and Carol Butler in their excellent primer, Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History, they have been under assault since the first European colonists hit American shores. Regarded as fallow and unproductive at best, pestilential at worst, salt marshes have been farmed, filled-in, burnt off, polluted, built on, and used as dumping grounds for toxic chemicals too numerous to list. Only in the last half-century or so, have they begun to be appreciated for their many services and critical importance to the ecological (and economic) health of the United States.
As the title implies, Weis, a professor of biology at Rutgers University and an expert in estuarine biology, leads us through both halves of the equation, starting with a brilliant and concise natural history of salt marshes, everything from their basic hydrogeology to the plants and animals that call them home, to the litany of human intervention, mistreatment, and mismanagement of these extraordinary and vital ecosystems over the past few hundred years. Included is a chapter on “Marsh Restoration and Management for Environmental Improvement” that neatly outlines many of the techniques and philosophies guiding coastal wetlands restoration.
The final chapter, “The Death and Rebirth of an Urban Wetland,” gives hope to those of us involved in coastal habitat restoration. It chronicles the long decline, virtual death, and renaissance of New Jersey’s Hackensack Meadowlands. Seven Superfund sites fed into the Meadowlands. It was used for decades as one of the largest garbage dumps for northern New Jersey and southern New York. Yet, beginning in 1969, the Meadowlands began to rise from the dead, saved by their desirability for development and the beginnings of the environmental movement. Today, while still far from pristine, the Meadowlands stand as a model for urban wetlands restoration.
Weis’ deep knowledge of and obvious affection for her subject shine through in thoroughly readable and non-technical prose (aided, one suspects, by co-author Butler). Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History is an ideal reference for lay readers, students, naturalists, and educators.
And yet, note Judith Weis and Carol Butler in their excellent primer, Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History, they have been under assault since the first European colonists hit American shores. Regarded as fallow and unproductive at best, pestilential at worst, salt marshes have been farmed, filled-in, burnt off, polluted, built on, and used as dumping grounds for toxic chemicals too numerous to list. Only in the last half-century or so, have they begun to be appreciated for their many services and critical importance to the ecological (and economic) health of the United States.
As the title implies, Weis, a professor of biology at Rutgers University and an expert in estuarine biology, leads us through both halves of the equation, starting with a brilliant and concise natural history of salt marshes, everything from their basic hydrogeology to the plants and animals that call them home, to the litany of human intervention, mistreatment, and mismanagement of these extraordinary and vital ecosystems over the past few hundred years. Included is a chapter on “Marsh Restoration and Management for Environmental Improvement” that neatly outlines many of the techniques and philosophies guiding coastal wetlands restoration.
The final chapter, “The Death and Rebirth of an Urban Wetland,” gives hope to those of us involved in coastal habitat restoration. It chronicles the long decline, virtual death, and renaissance of New Jersey’s Hackensack Meadowlands. Seven Superfund sites fed into the Meadowlands. It was used for decades as one of the largest garbage dumps for northern New Jersey and southern New York. Yet, beginning in 1969, the Meadowlands began to rise from the dead, saved by their desirability for development and the beginnings of the environmental movement. Today, while still far from pristine, the Meadowlands stand as a model for urban wetlands restoration.
Weis’ deep knowledge of and obvious affection for her subject shine through in thoroughly readable and non-technical prose (aided, one suspects, by co-author Butler). Salt Marshes: A Natural and Unnatural History is an ideal reference for lay readers, students, naturalists, and educators.
August 13, 2025
This was assigned to me by my grad advisor. I think it’s a great book for an intro to salt marsh ecology. It does a good job explaining the problems we have created for marshes and the ways we are now trying to fix them. The writing is really clear and nice to read (can’t be said for all nature books). I definitely appreciated the way they repeat key facts a couple of times, but in interesting ways, to really cement them.
Only reason I gave it a 4/5 instead of 5/5 is because my rankings are based off fun and this was still an assigned science book even though I liked it.
Only reason I gave it a 4/5 instead of 5/5 is because my rankings are based off fun and this was still an assigned science book even though I liked it.
July 16, 2014
The closing chapter, a profile of the New Jersey Meadowlands past and present, is particularly worthwhile. Also helpful, in the chapter on non-native "troublemakers:" the balanced assessment of the European strain of Common Reed (Phragmites australis), a near-ubiquitous visitor from across the ocean; and the reminder that our cherished mid-Atlantic cordgrass, Spartina alterniflora, is considered to be an alien invasive on the West Coast.
June 5, 2016
A good introduction to this crucial place which has been overlooked and attacked for too long.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews