Good morning. It’s Friday. Today we’ll look at a tiny sign of spring in the Hudson River. We’ll also get details on why the Trump administration’s budget-cutting may force a do-over of the state budget.
In the spring, Tina Walsh’s fancy lightly turns to something that’s neither romantic nor particularly poetic: phytoplankton in the Hudson River.
“Little green guys,” Walsh — an assistant vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust, which works to restore the Hudson River estuary — called them. That was after she said that the phytoplankton bloom that appeared in the river a couple of weeks ago was “one of the hidden signs of spring.”
It seems that plankton are underappreciated at the time when birds return from wherever they go in the winter and the Delacorte Clock in Central Park switches to its spring playlist, chiming out songs like “It Might as Well Be Spring.”
By tomorrow, with the forecast calling for temperatures in the mid-70s, it might finally be warm enough to leave the outerwear at home. It might finally be warm enough to hit the “beach” on the Gansevoort Peninsula, a 5.5-acre recreational site on the Hudson River.
New York has been waiting for a couple of days like that. The gardeners in Bryant Park have rolled out the sod, making the lawn green again for crowds eager to sunbathe. The forsythia and the hellebore in Central Park are out, and the Cornelian cherry dogwoods are starting to bloom. The Asian magnolias at the New York Botanical Garden are waking up.
Phytoplankton in the Hudson do not face the world with the bright colors of springtime tulips. They give the river a greenish color that can be a turnoff for people who think that it means the water is unclean, Walsh said. But the presence of the phytoplankton is “actually an indicator that we have a quite healthy estuary.”
Plankton are often too small to see without a microscope, but not always. Jellyfish are plankton, though a different type from phytoplankton, and there are jellyfish in the Hudson — moon jellies, which have only short tentacles, and lion’s mane jellyfish, which have long ones. “We see them in the warmer months,” Walsh said.
But even microscopic plankton have a part in a big job: Plankton release at least half of the world’s oxygen. (“The trees get all the credit,” Walsh said.)
They also occupy an important place in the food chain in the Hudson. Without plankton, Walsh said, “there’s not enough for the oysters to eat. If the oysters can’t eat, they die. And there’s not enough for crabs to eat. And if the crabs can’t get enough to eat, then the diving birds and the cormorants can’t eat. It really does have a chain effect.”
Phytoplankton called diatoms have glassy shells made of silica, which helps with the photosynthesis they perform. “It wouldn’t make sense to have a shell light couldn’t pass through,” said Toland Kister, a colleague of Walsh’s who has researched plankton in the Hudson for nine years.
“The glass shell is awesome,” he said, but the plankton also have pores for other things, like nutrients, to pass through.
He and Walsh were looking at diatoms magnified 400 times on the “superscope screen,” a video monitor at the Discovery Tank, an interactive showcase run by the Hudson River Park Trust at Pier 57. Some were round. Some looked like blocks or puzzle pieces.
“In a drop of water, you see hundreds of phytoplankton,” said Carrie Roble, a vice president of the Hudson River Park Trust. “The sheer number is stunning.”
Weather
Expect partly sunny skies and temperatures in the low 60s. In the evening, temperatures will drop to the low 50s, with a chance of showers.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr).
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Trump’s spending cuts create uncertainty for the state budget
New York’s state budget is due on Tuesday. It’s likely to be late — and whatever deal Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders agree to may not be the final blueprint for state spending in the 2026 fiscal year. The Trump administration’s push to cut federal spending may force changes later on.
State leaders no longer expect to get the $91 billion in federal aid that they had originally anticipated. Exactly how much the state will actually receive has yet to be determined. That has left Hochul and the Legislature to guess about how much federal money will remain available.
So for now, the annual budget negotiations in Albany do not account for reductions in federal aid.
Some experts warn that there could be another troubling variable. New York relies heavily on income taxes. Dips in the stock market as investors react to Trump’s tariff proposals could affect how much money the state takes in, said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit policy group. The S&P 500 has lost about 3 percent so far this year.
Hochul had based her initial $252 billion state budget proposal for the coming year on the assumption that Washington would provide almost $91 billion.
That was roughly $5 billion less than the state received from the federal government in the fiscal year that ends on Monday.
Of that, roughly $57 billion went to the state’s Medicaid program. About $10 billion went to schools, about $4 billion to law enforcement and public safety and $2.5 billion to transportation programs.
After President Trump outlined his plans to dismantle the federal Department of Education, Hochul wondered: Would that endanger her effort to expand free school lunches in New York? Would that affect the state’s Pell Grant allocations for college undergraduates who need financial help?
“We don’t have a crystal ball that tells us the scale of the cuts,” Hochul said.
More followed. The Department of Health and Human Services abruptly canceled more than $12 billion in federal grants to states. Two state agencies working on addiction services and mental health care told nonprofit providers that two federally funded state grant programs, which totaled about $330 million and were supposed to run through the end of September, had been halted.
METROPOLITAN diary
Sour Patch
Dear Diary:
It was around Halloween, and I was walking up Sixth Avenue, happily munching on some Sour Patch Kids Watermelon candies from a bag I had just bought.
As I paused for the light at West Eighth Street, a large hand entered my field of vision.
I turned my head.
The hand was attached to an older gentleman. He was lounging against a store smoking a cigarette. The corner, it appeared, belonged to him, and so did the sunshine. It made sense that the candies would too.
His palm remained in front of me, expectant. I poured some candies into his hand. His eyes crinkled.
“Good choice,” he said. “The watermelons are way better than the kids.”
I grinned back at him, and the light changed.
“Don’t miss it,” he said, and nodded me on my way.
— Beah Jacobson
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Hannah Fidelman, Sarah Goodman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post A Mostly Microscopic Sign of Spring appeared first on New York Times.
