In the latest video in SeaDoc Society’s series called “Salish
Sea Wild,” veterinarian and all-around marine life expert Joe
Gaydos goes on a quest to observe herring during their annual
spawning ritual — an event Joe calls the Salish Sea’s “most awesome
spectacle.”
In this drama, there is a role for nearly all the players in the
Salish Sea food web — from plankton that feed tiny fish to killer
whales that eat marine mammals. As the story plays out in the
Strait of Georgia, commercial fishers harvest herring at the peak
of the spawn. These herring are sold overseas, often becoming sushi
in Japan.
“This is the only major industrial herring fishery left in the
Salish Sea,” Joe says in the video. “Our other herring populations
are already too depleted.”
Canadian herring fishers are allowed to take up to 20 percent of
the estimated herring run, which has triggered a debate over
whether to reduce the quota, change the management system or cease
fishing for herring altogether, as outlined in a story by Jolene
Rudisuela of the
Vancouver Island Free Daily.
A recent story by Randy Shore of the
Vancouver Sun describes an ongoing effort by environmentalists
to end the herring fishery. Randy raises the prospect of at least
setting aside a protected herring reserve, as suggested by Andrew
Trites, a marine mammal researcher at the University of British
Columbia.
In another “Salish Sea Wild” video, released in October, Joe
Gaydos goes out on Puget Sound with Brad Hanson, a federal marine
mammal biologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center to
collect scat and fish scales left behind by our southern resident
orcas. These samples can provide clues about what the killer whales
are eating at various times of the year as well other aspects of
their well-being.
I’m increasingly amazed at the interwoven nature of the Puget
Sound food web. Whenever I become focused on a specific species —
Chinook salmon, for example — one of the first questions I ask is:
What is this species eating?
I soon learn that the answer depends on the size of the
individual doing the eating. Prey for a baby salmon is much
different from prey for an adult.
If you really want to learn about why a species is doing well or
poorly, you need to look beyond prey availability for your species
of interest and find out what the prey are eating as well. Healthy
prey must be abundant for any species to do well, so the prey of
the prey must also do well.
For years, I have been told the story of how PCBs and other
toxic chemicals cling to soil particles and tiny organic debris as
polluted water washes off the land.
Richard Henderson of the Skagit
River System Cooperative uses a beach seine to catch juvenile
chinook salmon near the Skagit River delta. Fish from this rural
area were found to be less contaminated than fish taken from urban
bays. // Photo: WDFW
Eventually, the PCB-laden particles are carried into Puget
Sound, where they settle to the bottom. From there, they begin
working their way into marine animals, disrupting their normal
functions — such as growth, immune response and reproduction.
The idea that contaminants settle to the bottom is the story
I’ve been told for as long as I can remember, a story long accepted
among the scientific community in Puget Sound and across the U.S.
So I was surprised when I heard that leading scientists who study
toxic chemicals in Puget Sound were questioning this long-held idea
about how dangerous chemicals get into the food web.
Puget Sound may be different from other waterways, they
said.
“When you look at the concentrations in herring and the
concentrations in the sediments, something does not line up,” Jim
West told me. “The predictions are way off. We think there is a
different mechanism.”
Jim is a longtime researcher for the Washington Department of
Fish and Wildlife. I have worked with him through the years on
various stories about the effects of contaminants on marine
organisms. But now he was talking about changing the basic thinking
about how chemicals are transferred through the food web.
Jim postulates that many of these PCB-laden particles that wash
down with stormwater never sink to the bottom of Puget Sound.
Instead, they are taken up by tiny organisms floating in the water.
The organisms, including bacteria and phytoplankton, are eaten by
larger plankton and become incorporated into fish and other
free-swimming creatures — the pelagic food web.
Jim presented his findings at the Salish Sea Ecosystem
Conference last month in Vancouver, B.C. Sandie O’Neill, another
WDFW researcher, presented other new information about the transfer
of contaminants through the food web — from plankton to herring to
salmon to killer whales.
My stories about the studies conducted by Jim and Sandie (with
help from a team of skilled scientists) were published today in the
Encyclopedia of
Puget Sound, where you can read them. These are the first of at
least 10 story packages to be to written by a team of reporters
working for the Puget Sound Institute.
The Salish Sea conference was attended by more than 1,100
people, including 450 researchers and policymakers who talked about
new information related to the Salish Sea — which includes Puget
Sound in Washington, the Strait of Georgia in British Columbia and
the Strait of Juan de Fuca on the U.S./Canada border.
When I first heard about Jim West’s idea regarding the fate of
toxic chemicals circulating in Puget Sound, I thought one result
might be to shift restoration dollars away from cleaning up
sediments to cleaning up stormwater. After all, if the majority of
PCBs aren’t getting into the sediments, why spend millions of
dollars cleaning up the stuff on the bottom? Why not devote that
money to cleaning up stormwater?
In fact, the worst of the contaminated sediments in Puget Sound
have been cleaned up, with some cleanups now under way. That helps
to ensure that toxic chemicals won’t get re-suspended in the water
and taken up into the pelagic food web all over again. A few
hotspots of contaminated sediments may still need some
attention.
As far as putting the focus on stormwater, that’s exactly what
the Puget Sound Partnership has done with support from the
Department of Ecology and other clean-water agencies. It is now
well established that the key to reducing pollution in Puget Sound
is to keep toxic chemicals out of stormwater or else create
settling ponds, rain gardens, pervious pavement and other methods
to capture the PCB-laden particles before they reach Puget
Sound.
I noticed that Ecology just today
announced a new round of regulations to control stormwater in
King, Pierce, Snohomish and Clark counties. Proposed changes
include updating stormwater programs for new construction projects
and for redevelopment. An appendix will describe Seattle’s plan to
reduce stormwater pollution in the Lower Duwamish River, where PCBs
are a major problem. For more on stormwater regulations, go to
Ecology’s
website.
As Sandie told me during our discussions, all the work on fixing
habitat in Puget Sound streams is not enough if we can’t control
the discharge of PCB’s — which were banned in the 1970s — along
with newer contaminants still working their way into our beloved
waterway. Any measure of healthy habitat must include an
understanding of the local chemistry.
We just completed another group of stories in the ongoing series
we’re calling “Taking the Pulse of Puget Sound.” This latest story
package is about
marine water quality and marine sediments. (The stories
themselves require a subscription.)
Noctiluca, a type of
plankton that could disrupt the food web, has grown more prevalent
in recent years.
Photo by Christopher Krembs, Eyes Over Puget
Sound
For all my years of environmental reporting, I have to say that
I’ve never really understood the meaning of water quality. Keeping
the water free of chemicals and fecal bacteria is one thing. Safe
levels of oxygen, temperature, acidity and suspended sediment are
other important factors.
But in the real world, you never find ideal conditions. You take
what you get: physical conditions dictated by weather, climate and
bathymetry; a strange brew of toxic chemicals; and a mix of
nutrients and organic material, all drifting through complex cycles
of life and death.
Water quality means nothing without the context of living
things. More than 1,000 species of tiny organisms live in or on the
mud at the bottom of Puget Sound. In many areas, sensitive species
have disappeared. We are left with those that can tolerate harsher
conditions. Why are they dying off? What can be done about it?
Some plankton species are becoming more dominant, and the
effects on the food web are unknown. When water quality is poor,
Jellyfish are displacing forage fish, disrupting the food supply
for larger fish.
We know that toxic chemicals are spilling into Puget Sound in
stormwater and getting into the food web, first touching the
tiniest organisms and eventually causing havoc for fish, marine
mammals and humans. Compounds that mimic hormones are affecting
growth, reproduction and survival for a myriad of species. Because
of biomagnification, some chemicals are having serious effects at
concentrations that could not be measured until recently.
Puget Sound can’t cleanse itself by flushing its chemicals and
waste out to sea, as most bays do. Puget Sound is long and narrow
and deep, and the exchange of water takes a long time. Most of the
bad stuff floating in the water just sloshes back and forth with
the daily tides.
We can’t forget that some of the good stuff floating around are
microscopic plants that feed the food web, along with a variety of
larvae that will grow into fish, shellfish and many other
creatures. But many of these planktonic life forms are vulnerable
to chemicals, which can reduce their ability to survive against
predators, tipping the balance in unknown ways.
Understanding water quality is not so much about measuring what
is in the water as understanding the effects on living things.
Which species are missing from a given area of Puget Sound, and
what killed them off?
Biological monitoring has been around for a long time, but we
may be entering a new phase of exploration in which we begin to
connect the dots between what takes place on the land, how
chemicals and nutrients get into the water, and what that means for
every creature struggling to survive.
We have some brilliant people working on this problem in the
Puget Sound region. I would like to thank everyone who has helped
me gain a better understanding of these issues, as I attempt to
explain these complexities in my stories.
—–
While I was looking into the sediment story, Maggie Dutch of
Ecology’s sediment monitoring team introduced me to a huge number
of benthic invertebrates. In a blog she calls
“Eyes Under Puget Sound,” she talks about the monitoring
program and offers a slideshow of some of the bottom creatures. See
also Ecology’s
Flickr page.
For some
amazing shots of polychaete worms, check out the work of marine
biologist and photographer Alex Semenov who took these colorful pix
in Russia and Australia.
Sunday marked the halfway point in my ongoing series “Taking the
Pulse of Puget Sound,” which examines the health of our waterway
and asks the question, “With all the money being spent on
restoration, are we making any progress?”
For me, the series so far has been an adventure and a learning
experience, thanks to abundant help from the many great scientists
and smart policy makers we have in this region.
The first half of the project has focused largely on species,
including humans; herring and organisms at the base of the food
web; salmon and marine fish; marine mammals; and
Sunday’s piece on birds (subscription).
Still to come are stories about marine water quality, freshwater
quality, upland habitat, water quantity and the future.
As a reporter, I regret that everyone can’t read all these
stories immediately without a subscription to the Kitsap Sun, but I
have to trust that these kinds of business decisions will allow me
to keep doing my work. Still, many of the stories, photos and
graphics in this series are available now with or without
subscription, starting with the lead page, “Taking
the Pulse of Puget Sound,” and moving through the series:
Some of the larger points from the latest seabird
story:
Puget Sound has about 70 common species of marine birds. Many
populations are in decline but some appear to be stable and a few
are increasing.
The winter population is about four times as large as the
summer population, reaching a peak of roughly half a million
birds.
Because birds can fly from one place to another, their choices
of location can tell us something about the health of one place
compared to another in Puget Sound.
If the population of a wintering bird species is in decline,
you need to know something about its migration route and nesting
area before you can conclude that conditions in Puget Sound are to
blame.
The marbled murrelet, a “threatened” species, is an odd bird,
first identified by early explorers in the late 1700s but whose
nesting habits weren’t discovered until 1974.
Researchers are trying to learn why two similar birds — tufted
puffins and rhinoceros auklets — are faring differently in Puget
Sound. Steep declines are seen for tufted puffins, which may be
headed for an endangered species listing, while rhinoceros auklets
are on the increase. Their varying behaviors are at the center of
discussion.
Ecosystem indicators for birds, as chosen by the Puget Sound
Partnership, are more involved than most other indicators. They
focus on the densities of four bird species and also consider food
supply and reproductive success.
I just completed the second part of a yearlong series I’m
writing about the Puget Sound ecosystem and the 21 “vital signs”
indicators chosen by the Puget Sound Partnership to measure the
health of the sound.
This second part, published in
Sunday’s Kitsap Sun, consists of stories about the food web,
including plankton and eelgrass; forage fish, including herring;
and bulkheads, which are generally considered a threat to the
nearshore ecosystem.
I was trying to cover the lower half of the food web, to build a
foundation for the other parts to come.
I talked to a lot of experts on these issues and ended up
writing one of the largest story packages I’ve ever written. Still,
I barely touched the surface of these topics. I guess I’ll have to
return later to dig a little deeper.
Scientists often say, the more they know, the more they realize
what little they know, or something like that. I’ve always tried to
help people understand the complexities of environmental science,
but there are no simple answers.
That’s why the Puget Sound Partnership is an important bridge
between policymakers and scientists. We have enough tools to know
what should be done to save Puget Sound, but how do we know what
projects should come before others? What can we afford to do? And
how do we measure success or failure? Those are the questions
challenging the partnership at the moment.
I would like to thank all the researchers willing to give their
time to this project as well as Kitsap Sun staffers who helped
crunch the numbers and produce the graphics for the story package,
as well as the editors who offered ideas along the way.
Sinclair Inlet last August
was awash in colorful plankton. This photo was taken over Port
Orchard, looking toward Gorst.
Photo by Christopher Krembs, Eyes Over Puget
Sound
It seems there is finally some good news coming out of the Gulf
of Mexico.
After 170 days, the leaking oil well — nearly a mile under water
— was finally plugged with mud. Officials say it means an end to
the long spill. As BP stated in a
news release:
“Pumping of heavy drilling mud into the well from vessels on the
surface began at 1500 CDT on August 3, 2010 and was stopped after
about eight hours of pumping. The well is now being monitored, per
the agreed procedure, to ensure it remains static. Further pumping
of mud may or may not be required depending on results observed
during monitoring…
“A relief well remains the ultimate solution to kill and
permanently cement the well. The first relief well, which started
May 2, has set its final 9 7/8-inch casing. Operations on the
relief wells are suspended during static kill operations. Depending
upon weather conditions, mid-August is the current estimate of the
most likely date by which the first relief well will intercept the
Macondo well annulus, and kill and cement operations commence.”
If the spewing has indeed stopped for good, discussions about
the fate of the contamination and restoration of the ecosystem have
some real meaning. A report issued
this morning by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration starts to put the issue into perspective. Continue reading →
