Just about every school kid in the East knows about gypsy moths. If you asked them what one looks like, though, they’d be hard pressed to describe it. What they know more than the moth itself is the two-to-three-inch dark-colored caterpillar covered with hairs that can sting. Depending upon their ages they may have even witnessed the destruction of woodlands and landscape trees by these moths in their neighborhoods.

The last such mass defoliations of deciduous trees around these parts occurred in 2009, 2001, and 2000. Oaks are the favorite of this caterpillar, and the white oak is preferred above the others. In the last infestation, a mature white oak’s 3,000 or 4,000 leaves were stripped to the midrib in a matter of two weeks or less, and when the caterpillars were about to eat themselves out of house and home in one area, say, in the Northwest Woods or the woods of Noyac and Wainscott, what did they do? They crossed roads in droves to get to those areas where trees still had leaves. Ultimately, they ate themselves to death, i.e., they starved or were attacked by a virus that preys on gypsy moth caterpillars before they were able to pupate, and the population collapsed.

The destructive gypsy moth story is not so different from the one of the wooly adelgid, or emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle, and the Japanese beetle. All of these came from foreign shores, but sometimes the culprit can come from another part of our country. Such is the case with the southern pine borer now wreaking havoc on our pitch pines and the Colorado potato beetle, which had to be killed off with very toxic chemicals like DDT and Temik, or aldicarb. Produced by Union Carbide, those chemicals eventually got into eastern Long Island’s groundwater aquifer and from there into many North Fork and South Fork water supplies. The introduction of harmful insects from other countries continues despite stricter controls on imports.

I’ve been keeping track of gypsy moth infestations here since the mid-1970s. There was a giant one in 1982 that hit the entire East End and Gardiner’s Island, as well. Fortunately, a record-setting June raincame along and washed most of the caterpillars out of the trees and onto the ground and so stressed them out that they died en masse — possibly from the rain and an ever-present natural enemy, the nucleopolyhedrosis virus, or NPV — before all of the hardwoods and some white pines were totally defoliated. That rain so irrigated local woodland areas that most of the injured trees were able to refoliate, which is one recovery strategy of local hardwoods after suffering defoliation.

Then in 1989, hordes of gypsy moth larvae appeared as if out of nowhere and 50 percent of the local woodlands were stripped bare. Many of those trees, especially the white oaks, were lost forever. The infestation was so bad that people in their houses were kept awake at night by the caterpillars’ droppings, or “frass,” from on high. Many decks, roofs, and car tops were completely covered with the stuff after a night of intense feasting. The arborists were kept busy throughout the spring spraying this and that insecticide to try to stem the attack, but in most cases their efforts were futile.

In 1999, arborists got to the caterpillars early and their success rate and widespread efforts paid off for the many homeowners who didn’t want to experience the 1989 losses all over again. The previous epidemic had taught us a lot. The NPV virus also left hundreds of nearly full-grown larvae dead on trunks of trees half hanging in a V-shaped posture.

In all of those gypsy moth eruptions, the parklands and woodland preserves such as the Grace Estate, Hither Woods, and the pine-oak woods of Wainscott and the South Fork’s terminal moraine suffered considerably. In 2001 I counted the rings of many dead white oak trees that the highway departments had to cut down for safety reasons. Several were more than 100 years old, a few as old as 150 years. Apparently, the older the tree the more susceptible it can be.

In the 1960s and early 1970s aerial spraying was used locally and on many parts of Long Island to stanch the spread of gypsy moths. It worked to a certain degree, but the poisons used — DDT, malathion, and the like — also killed off a lot of the birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians, the osprey among them.

Those other foreign invaders alluded to above slipped into the country by hook or by crook; they weren’t imported on purpose. The gypsy moth, on the other hand, was brought to a spot in Massachusetts from Eurasia in 1869 as a potential silk manufacturer by E. Leopold Trouvelot, himself an immigrant, as all silk at that time was spun in Asia. A few got loose and you know the rest of the story. It took almost 100 years for them to reach Long Island in outbreak numbers.

Even though my early April search of local woodlands failed to come up with more than a few ecru-colored egg patches on tree trunks, I began to get leery after coming back from an early June native plant workshop in Pennsylvania and seeing lots of defoliation along the Southern State Parkway, especially around Amityville and Huntington. Then, two and a half weeks ago, I was working in the yard and discovered several nearly mature gypsy moth caterpillars under some boards near one of my three very tall oaks. Had I never looked under those boards, I never would have known my trees were about to be hit hard — when I looked up, that particular scarlet oak tree was fully leaved.

A week later I found the black oblong pupae of gypsy moth larvae sequestered in another area. About that time, a lady who lived on the east shores of Three Mile Harbor emailed me that she had a gypsy moth problem and was going to treat. On Saturday while I was driving along Route 114 between Sag Harbor and East Hampton, I began to notice some trees that looked as if they were losing their leaves. (Five weeks earlier I had conducted a photographic study of the undergrowth and canopies of several South Fork woodlands and had found no sign of defoliation.)

On Friday morning a bunch of small brown moths — male gypsy moths — were flying in zigzag patterns around my yard. Uh-oh, I thought! On Sunday my teenage grandson, Matthew, and I went back to the Route 114 spot and parked alongside the defrocked oaks. Male gypsy moths were flying everywhere in the same zigzag pattern. While my grandson photographed through the open car window, I ventured out and inspected the boles and branches of the affected trees. Many black inch-long pupae remained. I looked farther in and finally found a trunk with two freshly laid ecru egg masses about head high with two freshly emerged female gypsy moths, much lighter in color than the males nearby. I found a spent female next to one of the egg masses. She had already lost her wings and was about to give up the ghost.

Oh, yes, the gypsy moth adults are quite ephemeral, in the way that mayflies are. The females don’t fly, but crawl from their opened pupal cases a few feet to the bole of the same tree and begin emitting a pheromone that the males sense. The scent says, “I am ready to mate.” Mating occurs and eggs are laid. Both the males and females live for only a few days. Sad, in a way.

The pinhead-size eggs hatch pre-winter as tiny larvae and overwinter in the fleece fibers deposited by the female. If some of the thousand or so eggs make it through the winter, they leave the nest come early April as the leaves are budding and make their way to the nearest buds. Later as they grow and shed the outer skin as many as seven or eight times, they work on the canopy leaves first. When they are an inch or so in size, they crawl down the trunk each night, hide under the cover of darkness and, come morning, crawl back up and go to work. During the zenith of an epidemic the caterpillars stay up in the trees and eat and eat and eat all day and all night.

Not all the caterpillars keep to the home trees when they are minute larvae just a few millimeters long. Many spin very fine silk threads, akin to spiderweb threads, and sail off with the gentlest puff of wind. They can move more than a mile downwind in such fashion. That is why, if there is a gypsy moth eruption west of the South Fork (which Newsday and News 12 say is so), we will eventually experience one here, as the dominant breezes from mid-April through June are southwesterly.

By the way, the hair tips can give you a rash, which was seen in children and teens from East Hampton’s elementary and high schools during the last epidemic. So, ladies and gentlemen, prepare for the worst, because unless some miracle of nature occurs between now and next April, we’re in for it big time!

A full moon occurs when our favorite satellite is almost entirely on the opposite side of the earth from the sun. It happens every 29-1/2 days.

This time of year the very thought of it illuminates the imaginations of fishermen of all stripes, whether they lower clam bait, live eels, or cast lures of many disguises in hopes of hooking Morone saxitilis, striped bass. The moon that became fulsome on June 2 lighted up the night fishing big time.

That night, Arden Gardell, a surfcaster, heaved an unidentified lure that hooked a 24.48-pounder, and Kevin Logie used the light of the moon to catch a behemoth bass that was weighed in at Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk at 49.24 pounds.

The bass fishing has come on strong in recent days coming on the tail of an impressive early fluke run. On Monday, Michael Potts, captain of the Blue Fin IV charter boat, reported the arrival of striped bass up to 50 pounds.

Harvey Bennett at the Tackle Shop in Amagansett said he was seeing the same thing. Bennett said that Indian Wells Beach on Gansett’s ocean side had produced a 37-pound striper on the moon, plus bluefish in the 10-to-12-pound range. The blues were feeding on bunker. “It’s like a fall run in spring,” he said, adding that bass in the 40-pound range were schooling in one of their favorite haunts around the South Ferry slip on Shelter Island. “Cool nights just off the full moon. That’s the key,” Bennett said.

Capt. Harry Clemenz loved cool nights just off the full moon. He loved everything about the sea and fishing. We lost him on May 13 at the age of 83. Captain Clemenz was a private fishing guide who helped pioneer big-game sport fishing in Montauk.

I was at the dock on July 20, 1986, when Capt. Bill Sweedler’s 46-foot Bertram tied up at the Montauk Marine Basin. On board was a fish like I had never seen, like I have never seen again. Harry “the Hump,” as he was affectionately known, had guided the fishing boat to a world-record blue marlin.

As reported in The Star’s obituary, Captain Clemenz told Sport Fishing magazine that when the fish was hooked, Captain Sweedler’s 19-year-old son, William Jr., jumped into the fighting chair. Clemenz described the contest as “a down-and-dirty fight.” Two hours into it, the marlin broke the rod in half. Captain Clemenz was able to tie the line into the line of another rod and reel, and the battle continued for three hours more.

The giant blue measured 15 feet long, and with a girth of nearly 8 feet at its thickest point. It weighed 1,174.5 pounds, a record 234 pounds heavier than the previous record marlins, two weighing exactly 940 pounds, also caught off Long Island in the early ’80s.

I will never forget the marlin’s eyes, blue and literally as big as saucers. I think mine were too. An incredibly beautiful animal to behold.

Harry Clemenz was a fixture around the Montauk docks, with skills honed over decades, starting back when the Deep Sea Club on Star Island was the epicenter of big game fishing in the Northeast. And, let us not forget his great sense of humor. Harry will be sorely missed.

As for Gardiner’s Bay, Cedar Point is said to be holding big bass and blues. Right outside Accabonac Harbor is a good bet for fluke and big bluefish chasing bunker. Word has it that Cherry Harbor continues to produce porgies en masse, with fluke found around Gardiner’s Island’s southeastern shoals.

I’m warning them now. The sloop Leilani is only two coats of varnish away from being launched. Soon after, her captain (me) will be steering her under sail to the porgy grounds while silently trolling a silver something to which a big bass or bluefish might take a shine.

It’s the peak of the breeding season for almost every bird, mammal, reptile, amphibian, and fish, not to mention shellfish and crustaceans. It’s also the middle of the landscaping and gardening season, when lots are being cleared, new houses constructed, lawns planted with exotic shrubs, trees, and forms. There is the usual concern for protecting the new foliage from destructive insects and deer. Fences are constructed and the usual assortment of insecticides and repellents are applied. Will they work? That is the question of the moment.

We know the vegan insects and the deer are used to the stuff that has been growing around for years, so they might opt for exotics. So you might think that the local colorful butterflies and maybe a hummingbird or two would also be attracted to such trees and shrubs.

Say you add some exquisite species from abroad, e.g. the kousa dogwood, rather than our local flowering dogwood. Will your predictions bear fruit? Will you get butterflies and multihued warblers during the day and pretty moths and electric fireflies at night? You might be surprised to learn that you probably won’t. An entomologist with a flair for botany recently completed a multiyear study showing that natives are far superior to exotics with respect to attracting insects and serving as nest sites for native birds that feed on those insects.

Douglas W. Tallamy has counted by species the different caterpillars that habituate 205 different species of northeastern native tree and shrubs. The locals far outshine the introduced trees and shrubs. Native oaks are host to 557 different caterpillar species. Only a few of them, like the foreign-born gypsy moths, are destructive. Next come the black cherries and beach plums, which host 456 different caterpillars, then the North American willows with 455 different ones.

The introduced butterfly bush, buddleia, touted throughout the world as a butterfly attractant, has only one host caterpillar. Surprised? The Chinese parasol tree may support a host of different caterpillars in China, but here, not a one! No fewer than 34 exotic landscape plants fail to support a single caterpillar species, while another 25 support one each, and 15 supply food and comfort for only two.

What’s going on? Well, it seems that regional floras and the native insects they host evolve together. If we imported more of the foreign insect species (we already have far too many) that evolved with say trees-of-heaven, heavenly bamboo, or Japanese snowbells in their native lands, it would be a different story. Most of the insects that are harmful to our local trees and shrubs came from foreign habitats where they evolved to become benign to their floral neighbors and hosts, but here, as with the Japanese beetle and European gypsy moth, they munch away without stopping. It’s the McDonald’s rule, but working in reverse. Start a McDonald’s in Russia or Japan and everybody comes to eat in it.

Those homeowners who enjoy birds might be surprised to find that they will attract many more breeding species with their native flora than with the exotic stuff. On the other hand, deer often prefer the exotics to the natives.

If you doubt my remarks concerning the difference in number between native and exotic flora insect populations, pick up a copy of “Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife With Native Plants” by Douglas W. Tallamy, and published by Timber Press. You will be as surprised as I was when I heard Mr. Tallamy speak at a “Native Plants in Landscaping” conference at Millersville University in Lancaster, Pa., and read his book this past week. When I got home I counted the natives in my yard: four different oaks, black cherries and beach plums, flowering dogwoods, and a bunch more. I also have several exotics. I plan to do my own survey throughout the rest of spring and summer.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

It rained and winded Monday, not a good day for taking pictures of plants and flowers. But it was okay. We needed the rain and I hope it won’t be the end of it during the coming summer. It was okay because I had finished doing my annual end-of-spring gypsy moth and groundcover monitoring for 2015.

I covered at least 70 miles of back-road woods on the South Fork by car looking for signs of defoliation. I also walked several miles of trails winding through wooded plots such as Barcelona and the South Fork moraine, or Bridgehampton hills and noticed no significant defoliation so far.

Next year could be different. As we were coming back from Pennsylvania two Saturdays ago, we saw some significant defoliation along the Southern State Parkway and the Sunrise Highway in Nassau County and western Suffolk. Spring’s prevailing southwesterlies generally move the gypsy moth caterpillars on their spider-web threads in an easterly direction soon after they hatch. Next year the defoliation should occur closer to home.

We haven’t had a serious gypsy moth event since 2001, so it is high time for another. Fifteen years is a long time between cycles. On that same trip back from Pennsylvania we saw several pitch pines recently dead all the way onto the South Fork — done in by the southern pine beetle, the next scourge to hit our forests.

The understory in my trips along South Fork roads and trails was dominated by blueberries and huckleberries. The coverage ranged from 50 to 90 percent, and I gave them a lushness value of 9 on my 10-point scale. Despite what the forester from the United States Department of Agriculture had to say at an East Hampton Village forum last year about the impact of deer on our understory, I saw little sign of pillaging by deer throughout Southampton and East Hampton Towns.

One might say, well the deer don’t like blueberries and huckleberries. What about the flowering plants or woodland forbs? On Sunday I took a walk with Vicki Bustamante and Callie Velmachos, two local naturalists who know their plants as well as I do. We walked along the old Long Island Rail Road spur trail that connected Bridgehampton with Sag Harbor and which is the stomping grounds for the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt. Either there are no deer in the large area of woodlands along the east side of the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike or the deer are leaving those plants alone out of respect for the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt.

We saw the yellow flowers of rattlesnake-weeds, the pink-purple flowers of the undulate-leaved milkweed, the white-green flowers of the parasitic cowwheats, as well as the yellows of wood sorrels, whorled loosestrife, and Canada and bushy frostweeds, the whites of spotted wintergreen, and the reds of the dogbanes, to name a few. As far as we could tell, all were untouched. Dense woodlands on Long Island generally have very few flowers. Those that flower early, before the trees leaf out, such as the may pinks, the violets, Canada mayflowers, and red-berried wintergreens, had already dropped their blooms. Nevertheless, their foliage was quite intact and not nibbled on, as far as we could tell.

No, we didn’t see any orchids, but orchids on Long Island have always been few and far between, when deer were rare and when deer became more common.

After such a harsh winter as the one we’ve just been through, it is uplifting to find the forest floor in such good shape and the green-leaved trees above them waving proudly. It appears as if we have been spared a second calamitous season and summer as well. I purposely didn’t mention the traffic and the hordes overrunning us from the west. I don’t want to put a hex on summer.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

I had lunch at the Inlet Seafood restaurant in Montauk on Monday afternoon. There were five of us, one of whom pulled out his smartphone as we waited with delicious anticipation for sushi, mussels, and broiled mahi sandwiches. 

Then one of the lunch mates, an experienced captain of a sportfishing boat, pulled out his smartphone, searched up a video that was going viral, and passed it around. The small screen displayed a very big white shark taking bushel basket-sized bites from a dead and floating humpback whale off Long Beach a few days ago. It was an impressive display of appetite that took away a little of my own. “Wow,” gravely spoken, was the unanimous reaction to the visual.

Conversation naturally flowed to the story of the fisherman competing in last weekend’s shark tournament held from the Star Island Yacht Club and Marina whose hand was bitten by a shark, a serious injury that required surgery. Apparently the angler was standing close to a mako that had been hauled up on the boat’s gin pole, face down, of course. The shark had been hanging for some time — according to scuttlebutt that scuttled around Montauk at lightning speed — but came back to life upon glimpsing the fisherman’s hand, and chomp!

The story, related by the same member of our party who had passed around the white shark video, was met with several minutes of guffawing, all present in agreement that what goes around comes around, all’s fair in love and fishing tournaments, with similar oblations to karmic justice. The back-to-back reactions proved once again that our relationship to sharks is as complicated as it is fascinating.

Sharks have been attacking of late. Three young swimmers were bitten in the past month on the East Coast, two in North Carolina, one in Florida. These were most likely cases of mistaken identity, the attackers mistaking the kids for other types of prey, turtles perhaps.

But, the bites, the viral video of white-shark power, the fact that Cape Cod beaches had to be closed during the past few summers due to cruising Jaws, jogs an ancient truth deep down in our subconscious, brings it right up to the surface. We are prey, given circumstances that are more common (we like to surf, boogie board, swim) than, say, taking a stroll in bear country.

That’s our instinctual response, but we are rational beings (sort of) and so we tend to laugh off the survival instinct, as long as it’s not our own, because we know that sharks bite because that’s how they live, and we admire them for it.

Here’s the question: If the angler who got his hand bitten had been competing in a no-kill shark tournament, like the upcoming Carl Darenberg Memorial Shark’s Eye tournament scheduled to be held from the Montauk Marine Basin on July 17, would my lunch mates’ reaction have been the same? I don’t think so. I think we might have felt sorry for the man for his greenery.

In any case, the winner of the Star Island tournament was the Whitewater boat that brought back a 470-pound mako. Two other hefty makos won those who angled them second and third-place honors. A 349-pounder was taken by the Overspray, and the Lady Irene hoisted a 334-pound mako for third. Blue sharks and threshers were also brought to the scales.

Also caught, by surprise, during the shark tournament were a number of bluefin tuna passing through on their northerly migration. The tuna are said to be in the 50 to 150-pound range, a school or schools stretching from Shinnecock east to southern New England. They have been feeding on sand eels, a mass of which swarmed close to shore in recent days, but have moved off, Paul Apostolides of Paulie’s Tackle shop in Montauk said on Tuesday morning.

Standings in the Montauk SurfMasters Spring Shootout tournament that ends on July 4 were as follows as of early Tuesday: Gary Krist remains in first place with a 42.08-pound striper, Paul Pira’s 36.1-pound bass holds the second position, with Wes O’Donnell in third place with a 28.86-pound striped bass.

Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett reports, “They’re all over the place up here,” meaning 8-to-10-pound striped bass along the south-facing beaches, as well as small bluefish. Gardiner’s Bay, especially Cherry Harbor on the west side of Gardiner’s Island, is alive with porgies, Bennett said.

He claims he’s been working with Stuart Vorpahl of East Hampton on cloning a giant “horsefoot” (that’s Bonac for horseshoe crab) in Accabonac Harbor.

“It’s going well with the help of the grays,” he said, explaining, for those, including me, who are not in that particular loop, that “grays” are extra-terrestrials.

Uh-huh. I’m getting that prey-like feeling.

Monday night was delicious. It was quiet and as late as 9 objects big and small could still be discerned with the naked eye without the addition of artificial lighting. It was a perfect night to go out and scour the woods and fields for whippoorwills, without leaving the driving seat of my vehicle. So that’s what I did.

I scoured the back roads of Noyac, Bridgehampton, and Water Mill, stopping by fields and woodlands. From 8:10 to 10:07 I drove along, stopping and listening for up to five minutes at 25 different stops along Old Sag Harbor Road, Millstone Road, Noyac Path, Guyer Road, Deerfield Road, and Deer Run.

For the first 40 or 50 minutes I could see fairly well. I stopped alongside a pastoral setting on Old Sag Harbor Road and could see a female deer sitting in a field of tall grasses looking my way from 300 yards away. At the same stop I heard the crows gathering at roosts, among them a few that were either fish crows or just fledged common crows uttering their nasal caws.

A stop beyond and what did I hear? Male gray tree frogs uttering their soft tremolos. Aha, I remembered, we had almost an inch of rain on Saturday, enough to create vernal ponds in depressions, the kind of breeding habitats that spring peepers, wood frogs, and gray tree frogs prefer. Vernal ponds are transient and do not have fish or other organisms that could prey on the eggs and tadpoles of those amphibians.

A few doors down the road, the woods were lush and the light failing. It was 9 and a wood thrush was still singing its territorial song, the beautiful strains of an avian organ at dusk, but still no guttural fast repeated whippoorwill-whippoorwill-whippoorwill outbursts. Neither did I see any flying and hunting over the open fields adjacent to woodlands where they make their nests during my listening stops.

What was that? A tiny dot of light caught my eye. Yes, a firefly, the first of the season for me. Indeed, as I crept along at 30 miles per hour I saw more and more of them. They were not yet peaking but they were lighting up at least 15 of my 25 stops.

Noyac Path was particularly intriguing — several tree frogs trilling, fireflies sparking, the first quarter moon overhead unobstructed by clouds. A bit to the east, Venus shined brightly as well. I am reminded that I have explored the heavens for years and need to get back to astronomy before I forget all that I know about it, however fleeting. I’ll never understand the Big Bang theory.

If the absence of any whippoorwills was disappointing, I was prepared for that finding. But what was really distressing was how lighted up the woods were, not by fireflies, but by houses and their driveways. As I drove along Deerfield Road past what I call Farrell Town I almost had to shield my eyes; the number of lights and their intensity was enough to blind one who had become perfectly dark-adapted during the first 20 stops. No chance of a whippoorwill here with all that light, I thought.

Even the flickerings of the fireflies were overshadowed by the galleries of incandescent lights. Deerfield Road doesn’t have street lighting, it has McMansion lighting.

“I’ll try one last stop,” I said to myself, and pulled off onto Deer Run, a Deerfield offshoot that is adjacent to the line of steel high-tension powerline towers on their way to Sag Harbor and points east. Absolute silence!

I pulled out of Deer Run and 100 yards to the north was a freshly killed fawn lying in the middle of Deerfield Road. Oh, yes, there were plenty of speeding cars and a helicopter or two overhead to remind me that the Hamptons, while not having yet attained the close-knit 24-hour-a-day suburban life of Nassau and western Suffolk, are nevertheless well into the 21st century.

Yes, not a single whippoorwill to behold, but over all, it was a wonderful adventure, the positive aspects still outweighed the negative ones, and I resolved to continue my environmental ways, nonetheless.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

This season’s no-kill shark fishing tournament is named the Carl Darenberg Memorial Shark’s Eye Tournament after the late owner of the Montauk Marine Basin who broke with precedent by maintaining the Marine Basin’s exciting tradition of shark tournaments while sparing the lives of sharks.

Darenberg also championed the use of non-stainless-steel circle hooks, a type of hook that lodges in a fish’s jaw rather than in its gut and which corrodes over time to eventually free caught-and-released sharks from the hooks and any attached line. The use of circle hooks to catch sharks is now the law in New York State, and there is an ongoing effort to make it the law of the land.

No-kill tournaments lack the spectacle — some might say, the medieval spectacle — of dead sharks being hauled high on marina gibbets to be ogled, ooed, and awed at before being drawn and quartered in name of science.

In this respect, no-kill tournaments have leaped centuries from an age when people gathered to witness bear-baiting and gory death to one in which satellites circling the earth permit the tracking of fish that have special tags placed on them before they are set free.

This does not satisfy everyone, because the primitive lure of bloody spectacle is made more alluring by the equally primitive urge to gamble on bloody spectacle — cockfights writ large. Cash prizes for the biggest sharks in kill tournaments range into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Shark tournaments exploded in popularity after the movie “Jaws,” based on Peter Benchley’s book of the same name, hit the screens in 1975. Benchley had created a bugbear that resurrected the fear of being eaten alive that for most of us had been replaced by fear of bug bites, sunburn, and pollen.

Peter Benchley’s book was set, not in a village called Amity on an island as in the movie. It was set in Amagansett just down the road from Montauk, a place the author departed from on a number of occasions aboard the Cricket II, the late Capt. Frank Mundus’s infamous shark-fishing charter boat.

Starting in the late ’50s, Captain Mundus, Montauk’s “Monster Man,” dragged big sharks back to the harbor, some of them too big to hoist aloft, and thus bigger still in the public’s imagination. Although not one to publicly bite the hand that fed him, Mundus grew to despise the monster, in the form of shark tournaments, that he himself — through Benchley’s experiences aboard Cricket — had helped create. They were amateur hour in his eyes, and wasteful. 

Last summer, Wendy Benchley, Peter Benchley’s widow, fished in the Montauk Marine Basin’s Shark’s Eye tournament. She caught a mako she named Cate Ells. The shark was fitted with a satellite tag and its wanderings were tracked on computers via the Ocearch Web site for months until the shark became a “confirmed kill” a week ago.

Today, none of the 10 satellite-tagged sharks — 6 makos, 2 tigers, and 2 blues — caught during last summer’s Shark’s Eye tournament are still pinging their locations. They have either been caught, died naturally, or their tags have ceased working for some technical reason. Perhaps they have been beamed up to the satellites and now circle the earth showering us with green vibes. 

This year’s Shark’s Eye tournament will be held from the Montauk Marine Basin on July 18 and 19. Five satellite tags have been made available. One will be placed on a shark to be named Carl Darenberg after the tournament’s founder. Three others will be named by the anglers that catch them, and the fifth grade class at the Sag Harbor School has dibs on a tag to be fitted on a shark the students have already nam­ed Seamore.

The Oceans Institute of the Montauk Lighthouse Museum, a.k.a. the Montauk Surf Museum, has asked that a sixth tag be made available so that its shark can be tracked on a video screen located in the museum, and in real time. Organizers of the tournament inform me that more boats, and more observers (those who identify and virtually weigh caught sharks via still and video cameras) are needed. It’s important to support this tournament and spread the concept to other areas. Needless killing should be a thing of the past.

In other fishing news, striped bass surf fishermen using clam baits have been doing well along south-facing beaches. Porgies continue to abound in Gardiner’s Bay, and though scattered by the recent blow, bluefish are beginning to school en masse.

Migrating bluefin tuna are said to be in range of Montauk, as close as eight miles offshore.

On Sunday, Mary Lee’s dorsal fin broke the surface a few miles off the eastern shore of Virginia at 10:29 a.m., prompting a ping to sail aloft, bounce off a satellite, and report to the OCEARCH organization, whose website transmits the information in very close to real time.

Earlier this spring, on April 12 at 8:37 a.m., she had pinged within 10 miles of New Jersey and just off Jones Beach.

Like a growing number of sharks, this 3,500-pound great white’s dorsal had been fitted with a small antenna capable of transmitting fascination as well as deep concern. Mary Lee represents a paradox in our efforts to re-green the earth, at getting “back to the garden,” as Joni Mitchell put it.

The East End’s community preservation fund is claiming open space to fend off development, rivers and marshlands are returning to their natural fecund states. The word “organic” is giving synthetic fertilizer and pesticide pushers fits. Wolves have been reintroduced to national parks out west. Two years ago, the Montauk Marine Basin hosted the first no-kill shark tournament as an alternative to our annual shark slaughter. All good . . . er . . . ah . . . well . . . almost all good.

I’ve thought hard about this, and you could stretch an inclusive point, but I believe surfing, diving, and perhaps the Iditarod (bears can outrun dog sleds) are the only sports where practitioners are in danger of being eaten alive on any given day.

The nearly worldwide ban on the killing of great whites appears to be working in their favor. To a lesser extent the practice of finning (cutting the fins off live sharks to satisfy the Asian hunger for shark-fin soup) has begun to limit the wholesale killing of other shark species. The downsides have been an increase in the number of species that pose a danger to humans who share the shark’s environment, and, due to cyber tracking, an exaggerated fear of shark death. Did I say exaggerated?

The surfers of western Australia have literally been chased from the surf. The Surfers Journal recently reported the deaths of three surfers from Perth, two bitten in half and eaten, with no trace left behind, and one who was bitten in half with a few remnants rescued by a boater before they too disappeared. A 20-foot white was thought to have been responsible. Surfers want the man-eaters hunted and killed. The government and environmental community do not.

“Surfers are checking their phones, not for tide charts or swell reports, but for the latest shark update,” Ray Berg­man observed in Surfer magazine. Imagine watching some of the best waves in the world peeling perfectly and yet knowing that paddling out into them is the equivalent of entering a cage inhabited by a couple of hungry, yet unseen tigers. I say cage because the ocean is not our native element. It would be like the idiotic running of the bulls in Pamplona, but with no chance of out-paddling the beasts.

The whole 21st-century satellite-tagging phenomenon juxtaposed with the primordial fear of being eaten alive presents a “Jurassic Park” sort of scenario. It would be wonderful to see T-rex in the flesh. The Jurassic was a garden, but a hungry one. If we were able to return to it, should we? Or, should we be careful of what we wish for?

The “Jaws” story was reenacted for real on Cape Cod last year, and I believe the summer before that, complete with beaches closed because of cruising white sharks. They were probably in search of seals, but unfortunately wetsuited surfers can be mistaken for seals. Are we being mistaken for them? Or are we being added to the menu?

Capt. Frank Mundus, Montauk’s own “Monster Man,” and Peter Benchley’s model for the vengeful charter captain Quint in “Jaws,” once told me that the danger to humans around here was limited because white sharks preferred fish, and, at the time, the young and old whales they picked from pods migrating relatively far from shore limited the danger to humans in this area.

But species, including sharks, change their behaviors in response to changes in their food supply. Nancy Kohler, a biologist with the shark laboratory in Narragansett, R.I., said the dramatic increase in the number of seals in our area in recent years — due to protections under the Marine Mammal Act and changes in their environment and feeding patterns — virtually guaranteed the eventual notice of great whites, as is the case in South Africa, Australia, Hawaii, and Northern California.

If every apex predator with large teeth were fitted with a dorsal tag at birth, we could simply check the satellite receiver-equipped surfboards to know when to get the hell out of the water. But they are not. 

Certainly it’s a good thing to bring a species back from the brink of extinction. And it’s probably healthy to re-instill that nearly extinct fear of being part of the food chain. But that’s an intellectual “healthy,” which evaporates when you see a dorsal fin, with or without its satellite antennae, fast approaching. Food for thought becomes just food.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to live in a world with no great whites, or any other nonhuman species that happens, in all innocence, to be a threat to my life. Our own species is far less innocent and far scarier. 

Dan Callahan, a visitor to the OCEARCH site from Virginia, posted a message to Mary Lee: “Too close for comfort. Go back to the deep, Mary, is all I have to say. Try the North Canyon. I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”

And I will add that there is a lot for Mary to eat out there. John Nolan Jr., captain of the Seacapture tilefish longliner, returned to Montauk a few days ago with a trip of very large tiles, most in the 35 to 45-pound range.

And, closer to shore, the charter boat Elizabeth II returned to the Montauk Marine Basin during a morning half-day trip with customers high-fiving after having angled some very large striped bass. Big fluke around too. Fishermen were saying the extra cold winter confused arriving prey species. Sounds like we’re getting back to our bountiful normal.

Long Island had two big fish kills in its inshore waters last week — one in Manhasset Bay, another in the western part of the Peconic Estuary. These two kills involved a single species that is famous for its periodic mass die-offs up and down the Atlantic Coast — the menhaden, Brevoortia tyrannus. These massive kills of thousands upon thousands of fish do not occur at regular intervals. They are most likely to occur when the population of young menhaden 1 to 3 years old reach such massive numbers when plying shallow waters for food that they quickly exhaust the dissolved oxygen supply and commit a kind of mass suicide.

Menhaden, also called mossbunker, and porgy belong to the herring family, the Clupeidae, along with shads, alewives, and gizzard shads. Members of this family are filter feeders; they use their feathery gills not only to extract oxygen, but also phytoplankton and zooplankton, from the water. They are the vacuum cleaners of the sea and can on occasion exhaust their food and oxygen supply, after which there is nothing for them to do but bite the dust en masse.

This fish helped build the reputation of East Hampton’s elite fisherman population. In the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th, there were quite a few bunker-rendering factories including ones on Hick’s Island and at Promised Land on Gardiner’s Bay, now the home of Multi Aquaculture Systems. The last of these went out of business in the 1960s when the government imposed strong take restrictions on harvesting bunker, as the middle Atlantic bunker population had practically collapsed.

In 1979 the then owners, the Clarkes, sold the site and a large portion of the remaining undeveloped land in Napeague, which stretched from the bay south to the Atlantic Ocean, to the State of New York. It became Napeague State Park.

Serendipitously, the odors produced at the menhaden-rendering site when it was working were the best defense ever devised against developing a large piece of raw real estate such as the Napeague isthmus. As soon as it went out of business, the parcels along Cranberry Hole Road and those south of Montauk Highway were quick to be built on. A kind of Coney Island atmosphere came into being and Napeague became one of the prime centers of attention of the real estate industry in East Hampton Town.

Menhaden are very oily fish. Their bodies were separated into oil and fish parts, the bulk of which were used as fertilizer. The name menhaden is said to derive in part from the Atlantic Coast Native American name for fertilizer, “munnauhateaug.” The local Indians taught the early settlers how to use the fish to fertilize corn and other crop plants. The coastal fishermen followed the bunker schools up and down the coast — as did the whales, dolphins, bluefish, striped bass, and sharks — and captured them in large purse seines worked by several boats at a time. It was kind of like haulseining with nets a quarter of a mile long. The fishermen worked together to make hauls and divided up the spoils democratically.

Unfortunately, those days are gone forever. Science and politics put an abrupt end to them. But the mossbunkers live on. In a way, they are like the sand eels, the much tinier fish that will reproduce in the millions and millions and start the plant-to-animal food chain, which ends in the stomachs of the top predators — tunas, marlins, sharks, and the like. As Stuart Vorpahl is quick to point out, such cycles of “glut” and “want” have been going on for centuries, starting long before any semblance of modern civilization.

It’s the way that the ocean works, or at least used to work.

In the last century and this one, fishery scientists and others have made extreme efforts to try to even out the fluctuations in the hopes of producing large quantities of harvestable seafood year round, century round, in the way that farms and ranches maximize output on an annual basis.

At the same time, science and regulation have collided with human overpopulation, grand scale pollution, wars, and the other negative accoutrements of modern civilization, producing a kind of flattening out of the highs and lows of natural production while coincidentally contaminating the seafood with mercury, bacteria, viruses, and other harmful agents.

Yes, there are lots of ways to make things better on land and in the seas, and we are diligently working to do that. We need to get rid of the Pacific and Atlantic gyres of plastic bits, the microbeads, the PCBs, the pentas and C.C.A.s, and all of the other baddies that are poisoning our world. On the other hand, trying to govern the way things work in the world’s oceans according to some preconceived model for the benefit of man has little chance of succeeding. Perhaps, when we stop killing each other on all of the lands bordering those oceans, we can take on such a difficult task.

In the meanwhile, the menhaden, which may not be as smart as we are but are far wiser in an evolutionary sense, will come and go as they always have.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].

The East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue Squad in a flier wants it known that this week, beginning on Sunday, is National Beach Safety Week, and, in keeping with the theme, has provided the following desiderata:

“Learn to swim — promote the Y.M.C.A. and the junior lifeguard programs.”

“Swim near a lifeguard.”

“Swim with a buddy.”

“Check with the lifeguards as to daily conditions.”

“Obey posted signs and flags, and know your location for 911 calls.”

“Keep the beach and water clean.”

“Learn rip current safety.”

“Enter water feet first.”

“Wear a life jacket when appropriate or mandated.”

“Use sunscreen and drink water.”