Text/Photo Peninsula All-Media Reporter Wang Yuan (except by signature)
In January 2018, in the marine biological specimen room of the Qingdao Environmental Monitoring Center Station, Cui Yong, a 60-year-old engineer, bid farewell to more than 400 Qingdao intertidal biological specimens he had collected and produced over the past 36 years. After gently closing the door of the herbarium, Cui Yong retired from an environmental protection post after 42 years of work. More than 400 intertidal biological specimens, from 1981 to 2017, wading across the beach, rising and falling tides, under the persistence of Cui Yong, Qingdao has not only become the first city in the country to carry out intertidal biological monitoring in the environmental protection system, but also one of the few cities that still retains this environmental monitoring project, and has achieved an authoritative position in the domestic professional field.
The difficult "scripture" road of the initial period
As one of the first environmental protection people in Qingdao, when Cui Yong stepped into this post, there was no "Environmental Protection Bureau" department. Born in 1958, Cui Yong joined the workforce in 1976, "the office was at 37 Taiping Road, with less than 20 people crammed into an office with no laboratory and no equipment. Cui Yong recalled that in 1979, the unit expanded a small north house, recruited a group of laboratory technicians, and began to do water sample analysis, which was the predecessor of the Qingdao Environmental Monitoring Center Station. In 1979, the "Qingdao Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau" was established. In 1980, the Qingdao Environmental Protection Monitoring Station was formally established, and Cui Yongcai had a formal position as an environmental monitor.
Beginning in 1981, Cui Yong began monitoring intertidal organisms off the coast of Qingdao. What is intertidal?" Simply put, the coast between the point of submergation when the tide rises to the lowest level and the point that emerges when the tide recedes to the lowest level is the intertidal zone, which is where we Qingdao people 'catch the sea' to dig clams. Cui Yong introduced.
"Qingdao is a coastal city, and whether intertidal organisms can reproduce well or not directly reflects the changes in the urban environment and the offshore environment, and has a very important guiding significance for environmental governance." After Cui Yong retired, the younger generation Liu Xudong continued to insist on the post of intertidal biological monitoring.
The beginning of the environmental protection cause, whether it is the technical equipment on the hardware, or the talent and scholarship in the software, are extremely scarce, and the biggest problem facing Cui Yong's monitoring work is the lack of reference materials in related professional fields, and the work once reached an impasse. So Cui Yong made up his mind to find a book!
In the marine monitoring experiment of the Qingdao Environmental Monitoring Center Station, Liu Xudong carefully moved out a stack of old books, "These are the information books used by Cui Gong when he first carried out monitoring work in the first few years, which are very precious, and he left them to us when he retired." "One of the most age-old is 'Common Invertebrates in Qingdao Coast', printed in 1959, with a musty smell on the yellowed pages, the title page of the book is broken, and the wire on the spine is obviously redesigned." At that time, there was no such book to sell, it was too unpopular, and there were not many books in the country, all in the hands of individuals. Cui Yong said that in 1981, by chance, he saw the book from his teacher and was deeply attracted by the handmade paintings in the book, "When encountering the identified creatures, as soon as you compare the handmade paintings in the book, you can immediately figure out what species it is, which is what monitoring work needs." In order to be able to buy this book, Cui Yong inquired all the way to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found out who had the book in his hand, and went to buy it.
Not all books can be bought with money. In the early spring of 1987, Cui Yong traveled most of China to seek a set of "Chinese Animal Atlas", and finally found a book holder, who was determined not to sell. It cannot be difficult to force others, but the monitoring work in front of us urgently needs this book, how can this be good? Cui Yong had a clever move, he begged people to borrow it for a few days, and during these days, he found a printing house to copy the whole set of books, bound them into a book, and brought them back to Qingdao.
More than 400 specimens tell the "story"
From 1981 to 2017, Cui Yong produced more than 1,000 intertidal biological specimens, and more than 400 specimens are stored in the marine monitoring laboratory of Qingdao Monitoring Center Station. In the specimen bottle, these small creatures that were frozen in a certain moment told the story of the environment under the sea.
Judging from the time label of the specimen, the first intertidal biological specimen officially produced by Cui Yong was a "slug" collected from the fertilizer plant Shiba in 1981, and the specimens of the same year also included "Japanese Sekigong Crab", "Long-snout Sand Silkworm", "Finely carved Rib Sea Urchin" and so on. Among them, the "Japanese Guan Gong Crab" is the most eye-catching, and the grooves on its back armor just form the face of Guan Yunchang, a major general of the Shu State in the Three Kingdoms period - a pair of Dan phoenix eyes, two crouching silkworm eyebrows, "the face is like a heavy date, the lips are like grease", and it is mighty.
In May 1987, during the sampling process, Cui Yong was surprised to find a fossil-level species , the "sour pulp shellfish". Sour pulp shellfish is a very ancient marine life, evolving from the Cambrian Period about 600 million years ago to the present, and more than 30,000 fossils have been found alone. The sour shell found by Cui Yong can be said to be a "living fossil", with a length and width of 2.5 centimeters, and the color is very beautiful, showing a soft flesh pink color. "Qingdao is the distribution area of sour pulp shellfish, which can be collected, indicating that Qingdao's offshore environment remained relatively stable until the 1980s." Liu Xudong introduced.
The "living fossils" that are active in the intertidal zone of Qingdao at the same time as the sour pulp shellfish are also "sea bean sprouts". The scientific name of "sea bean sprouts" is tongue-shaped shellfish, which is the longest genus in the world to have been found, in 1987, Cui Yong found "sea bean sprouts" in the intertidal zone at the mouth of the Dagu River, and in 1988, "sea bean sprouts" were found in Shuangbu. Judging from the specimen, the two shells of "sea bean sprouts", whether in color or shape, resemble two pieces of watercress, and the long fleshy stems protruding from between the two shells resemble bean sprouts.
In April 2013, Cui Yong collected a sample of a white-ridge barnaclad on the reef of the Fushan River, found that it was attached to the bottom of the organism the size of a small grain of rice, carefully peeled off, collected, and brought back to the laboratory to repeatedly examine and identify, determined that this is the "maroon lasha clam", the world's smallest clam, the adult is less than 2 mm, the smallest one is less than 1 mm.
Liu Xudong told reporters that intertidal biological monitoring does not rely on an independent species to reflect the marine environment, "the investigation is biodiversity, only the species are rich and the ecological structure is stable, in order to prove whether the ecosystem is healthy and sound, whether the ecological environment is effectively protected." ”
Wading across the beach did not dare to tell the family
Sampling intertidal organisms is a very hard job, Cui Yong revealed that he has never told his family about his specific work in the past 36 years, and Liu Xudong also "hid" the work content from his family, "only saying to sample, not wanting to let the family worry." "Qingdao is a half-day tide, two rises and two falls a day," the sampling time is exactly the meal, the most difficult is the summer, the sun is like fire, under the high temperature baking bowed and bent, dizzy is inevitable. Cui Yong said that in the winter of November sampling, can not wear gloves, hands are stiff, "this hard work not many people can persist." ”
The texture of the intertidal zone is different, there is sand, there is reef, there are beaches, and for more than 30 years, sinking into the beach is Cui Yong's common thing, "the deepest sinking to the root of the thigh". Later, Cui Yong summed up the experience and created a set of methods for sampling the beach, "walking on his knees, holding the sampling tool in his hand, crawling and walking where he encounters a trap, increasing the force area." "When encountering reefs, scratches, falls, and punctures are even more inevitable. Cui Yong also experienced the incident of being trapped in the mudflat and finally calling for help from the farmers.
"Without Cui Gong's persistence, Qingdao's environmental protection cause would not have had this project." Liu Xudong sighed. Cui Yong said bluntly, "I grew up by the sea, I grew up deeply in love with this part of qingdao's sea, when I was a child playing on the seashore, at that time I heard fishermen say that a tide can hit 300 pounds of partial mouth fish, and then there are fewer fish, I want to use my own strength to protect the sea and protect the marine environment." ”
Under Cui Yong's 36-year insistence, Qingdao became the first city in the country to set up intertidal biological monitoring in the environmental protection system, and established the Marine and Ecological Monitoring Section. 42 years of environmental monitoring, Cui Yong has struggled all his life, loved a lifetime, before retirement, he also has a wish, to the Qingdao Environmental Monitoring Center Station, in the intertidal biological monitoring post to introduce talents. And Liu Xudong is a high-quality student introduced under his proposal.
At the end of the interview, Cui Yong said emotionally, "The future environmental protection cause relies on talent and knowledge, my life is a coolie, with professional talents like Xudong, the environmental protection cause can climb several steps step by step." "At present, the monitoring of marine life is gradually expanding, and the personnel team and technical ability are also improving, and there are 2 doctors and 4 masters among the 8 personnel in the room.
[Editor: Zhang Zhenzhen]