The creatures that dwell in and on the bottom sediments of the Cove, the benthos, sustain themselves with what the tidal currents and waves bring in. The waters carry and deposit not only drift logs, shells, and bits of trash, but also a diversity of seaweeds, detrital organic matter, tiny planktonic plants and animals and larvae, and nutrients in solution. These constitute the base of the Cove’s food chain.

Snails and sandworms live in the sands of the Cove, scavenging the deposited detritus. Clams, sand shrimps, crabs, and many other crustaceans burrow in the soft sediments. Blue Crabs, indigenous to our region, used to be a principal commercial and recreational food source. They swim in the shallows, preying on small fish, as do Green Crabs, which first appeared in the harbor a century ago. Rock Crabs and Japanese Shore Crabs, the latter a recent arrival, crawl on the sediments.

Small shells of Blue Mussels on the Cove’s beaches imply that living mussels are growing on nearby rocks below the low tide line and could be colonizing higher up. Mussels are filter-feeders, gathering nutrients from planktonic plants from the waters passing through their gills while they remain stationary, held to the rocks by strong threads of their own making.

Oysters, also filter-feeders, produce a secretion rather than threads for fastening themselves to rocks and to each other. Enormously effective in their filtering, they clean surrounding waters to great ecological benefit. Oyster reefs once paved hundreds of square miles of shoreline and harbor bottom, feeding local people and an industry, but today they are small occasional specks, depleted by over-harvesting, excessive pollutants, and lack of substrate upon which to attach. Now that the health of the waters is improving, oyster beds are, with human assistance, being re-established around the harbor.