Genna Martin / The Herald Shaylene Jefferson, 16, of Suquamish, waits in the boat for her uncle, in Mukilteo, after a day of crabbing in Puget Sound on June 11.
The Coast Salish people gave it a name that sounds much like Mukilteo.
It means “good camping ground,” said Michelle Myles of the Tulalip Tribes Lushootseed language department.
Mukilteo was the gathering place where in 1855 territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens signed the Point Elliott treaty with representatives of 22 tribes and bands of native people from the greater Puget Sound region, now called the Salish Sea.
History is big in Mukilteo, which was the first non-Indian settlement in Snohomish County. It was established about 1860 with a trading post. A fish cannery and sawmill followed later.
Mukilteo is still all about summer.
A walk-on ferry ride to Whidbey Island, beachcombing and picnic, a tour of the lighthouse, a beer at Diamond Knot, fish and chips at Ivar’s and produce from the Wednesday afternoon farmers market in Lighthouse Park off Front Street.
It’s all there in old Mukilteo. You can easily spend a full day enjoying it, so plan accordingly.
Any tour of Mukilteo has to start with its lighthouse, which opened in 1906 to guide ships in and out of Puget Sound and continues to be the city’s most enduring icon.
The Mukilteo Light Station, surrounded by native Nootka roses, is on the National Register of Historic Places. From noon to 5 p.m. on weekends you can climb the 38-foot tall lighthouse tower to see the now-automated carved-glass Fresnel lens and take a look around.
The 17-acre park along the beach has improved greatly since the city took it over from the state in 2003. Be sure to check out the park’s Coast Salish artwork created by Joe Gobin and James Madison of the Tulalip Tribes.
Kids have plenty to do, on the beach or on the playground. Educational signs help people understand what’s in the water and how to help keep it clean.
Even on a rainy day at the park, you can picnic under a shelter and enjoy the calming water-island-mountain view that seems incongruous with the fact that just a few miles away is a huge regional metropolitan area.
Mukilteo was incorporated in 1947 with a population of 775. Land annexations and development off the Mukilteo Speedway have increased that number to about 21,000 residents.
After the lighthouse, the beach park and a round-trip ride on the ferry, take in lunch at the Diamond Knot Brewery on the west side of the ferry or at Ivar’s Mukilteo Landing restaurant on the other side. You also can walk a block or so up the hill to Arnie’s seafood restaurant.
Another option is the Red Cup, located in a delightful little shopping block at Fourth Street and Lincoln Avenue across the street from the Rosehill Community Center.
The coffee shop offers breakfast and lunch, served up with a beautiful view. And from 6 to 8 p.m. on Wednesdays throughout the summer, Red Cup Cafe hosts an open microphone that attracts an eclectic mix of performers.
It’s no wonder that Mukilteo’s Rosehill Community Center is the site of dozens of weddings throughout the summer. The views are outstanding and the grounds include wild roses and other native and drought-resistant plants.
Inside, check out the display of work by local artists, the historical photos of the former Rosehill schools and Crown Lumber’s mill.
The beautiful little cemetery includes a great view and the weathered gravestones of town founders Morris Frost and J.D. Fowler, along with headstones of Japanese mill workers.
The memorial is a bronze sculpture of a Japanese origami bird that sits on a white pedestal, symbolizing peace and commemorating Mukilteo’s long history with its Japanese community.
Finish your visit with a walk on the trail at nearby Japanese Gulch, a 144-acre forested park where the families of Japanese immigrants lived.
A dying Pisaster ochraceus sea star in the waters off West seattle dangles by its tentacles off an underwater piling that would normally be covered with a rainbow of sea stars. | credit: Laura James
MUKILTEO, Wash. — Near the ferry docks on Puget Sound, a group of scientists and volunteer divers shimmy into suits and double-check their air tanks.
They move with the urgency of a group on a mission. And they are. They’re trying to solve a marine mystery.
“We need to collect sick ones as well as individuals that appear healthy,” Ben Miner tells the divers as they head into the water.
Miner is a biology professor at Western Washington University. He studies how environmental changes affect marine life. He’s conducting experiments in hopes of figuring out how and why starfish — or sea stars, as scientists prefer to call the echinoderms — are wasting away by the tens of thousands up and down North America’s Pacific shores.
Watch the video report:
Scientists first started noticing sick and dying sea stars last summer at a place called Starfish Point on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Then reports came from the Vancouver Aquarium in British Columbia, where diver biologists discovered sea stars in Vancouver Harbour and Howe Sound dying by the thousands.
It’s been coined “sea star wasting syndrome” because of how quickly the stars deteriorate. Reports have since surfaced from Alaska to as far south as San Diego, raising questions of whether this die-off is an indicator of a larger problem.
“It certainly suggests that those ecosystems are not healthy,” Miner said. “To have diseases that can affect that many species, that widespread is, I think is just scary.”
At first only a certain subtidal species, Pycnopodia helianthoides, also known as the sunflower star, seemed to be affected. Within a day or two of showing symptoms, the fat, multi-armed stars melted into piles of mush.
Then it hit another species, Pisaster ochraceus, or the common, intertidal ochre star. Then another. In all, about a dozen species of sea stars are dying along the West Coast. Sea star wasting has also been reported at sites off the coast of Rhode Island and North Carolina. But researchers say until they’ve identified the cause of the West Coast die-offs, they can’t confirm any connection between these outbreaks.
Scene From A Horror Film
Scuba diver Laura James was one of the first to notice and alert scientists when the morning sun star, Solaster dawsoni, and the striped sun star, Solaster stimpsoni, began washing up on the shores of Puget Sound near her home in West Seattle.
“I thought, ‘This is just getting a little too close for comfort, I need to go see what’s going on. And I need to document it,’” said James, an underwater videographer.
Laura James dives to film starfish die-offs in Seattle. Credit: Katie Campbell
“There were just bodies everywhere,” James said. “There were just splats. It looked like somebody had taken a laser gun and just zapped them and they just vaporized.”
She returned the site weekly, tracking the body count. At first, young stars seemed to be hanging on, a sign of hope that the next generation might be spared, but then even the smallest succumbed.
James has been diving in Puget Sound for more than two decades and says she’s never seen anything like it.
“People always ask me, ‘Do you see any big difference between now and when you started?’” she said. “I’ve seen some subtle differences, but this is the change of my lifetime.”
Reports from recreational divers like James have made it possible for scientists to track the ebb and flow of the syndrome. That’s what led Miner and his dive team to Mukilteo — a place where sea stars showing initial symptoms could be gathered.
“It turns out that you just need a lot of people out looking to be able to detect the spread,” Miner said.
Miner’s team surfaced, laden with 20 giant orange sunflower stars. They gathered stars that appeared healthy and others that had lesions and weren’t acting normal -— unnaturally twisting their arms into knots.
Miner trucked the stars to an aquarium-filled lab and placed one sickly star in with one healthy looking star. He also set up tanks containing only healthy-looking stars for comparison.
Then he watched to see what would happen.
Two sea stars share a tank, one healthy looking and one dying. Credit: Katie Campbell
Within a few hours, the sick stars started ripping themselves apart. The arms crawled in opposite directions tearing away from the body. While starfish have the ability to lose their arms as a form of defense, these starfish were too sick to regenerate their arms. Their innards spilled out and they died within 24 hours.
As for the healthy looking stars, Miner said they didn’t show symptoms anymore rapidly by being in the same tank with sickly stars.
A few weeks later divers returned to Mukilteo to find that most of the sea stars there have died. Miner concluded that all of the stars his team had collected were likely already infected just experiencing varying stages of illness. His team has since continued other infectiousness experiments collecting stars from other areas of Puget Sound where the disease hadn’t yet surfaced.
One such place was San Juan Island, part of an archipelago in the marine waters of Washington and British Columbia.
An Opportunity For Science
“We’re holding steady here and we’re not sure why,” said Drew Harvell, a marine epidemiologist from Cornell University who has studied marine diseases for 20 years. She teaches an infectious marine disease course at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs on San Juan Island and was at the labs when the disease broke.
Harvell immediately recognized the die-offs as an important opportunity for science. Marine organisms are often plagued by disease outbreaks, she explained, but seldom are scientists able to identify the exact cause.
“We have a problem of surveillance for disease in the ocean because they’re out of sight and out of mind,” Harvell said.
For the past few months, Harvell has been coordinating a network of scientists on both coasts who received rapid response funding from the National Science Foundation to investigate the die-offs. The team has established a website and map run by Pete Raimondi from the University of California Santa Cruz. It’s one of the fastest-ever mobilizations of research around a marine epidemic.
“This is an opportunity for understanding more about the transmission and rates of disease in the ocean, so it’s important that we gather the right kinds of data,” Harvell said.
In her lab, Harvell anesthetizes a healthy sea star before cutting off one of its arms and slipping it into a sterile bag. She’s sending samples to Cornell where her colleague Ian Hewson, a microbial biologist, will compare them with samples of sick sea stars from along the West Coast.
Using cutting-edge DNA sequencing and metagenomics, Hewson is analyzing the samples for viruses as well as bacteria and other protozoa in order to pinpoint the infectious agent among countless possibilities.
“It’s like the matrix,” Hewson said. “We have to be very careful that we’re not identifying something that’s associated with the disease but not the cause.”
Ben Miner collects arms of dying starfish for lab analysis. Credit: Laura James
Ruling Out Possible Culprits
In the search for what’s causing this sea star die-off, it’s important for scientists to rule things out. Some have suggested that these die-offs could be linked to low oxygen levels in the water and environmental toxins entering the water through local runoff. Yet this seems unlikely, they say, because these conditions would normally impact a wider array of animals, not just sea stars.
Others have pointed out that marine die-offs in the past have been linked to larger environmental factors like climate change and ocean acidification. Warming waters and changing pH levels can weaken the immune systems of marine organisms including sea stars, making them more susceptible to infection.
Some have asked whether radiation or tsunami debris associated with the Fukushima disaster could be behind this die-off. But scientists now see Fukushima as an unlikely culprit because the die-offs are patchy, popping up in certain places like Seattle and Santa Barbara and not in others, such as coastal Oregon, where wasting has only been reported at one location.
Others have wondered if a pathogen from the other side of the world may have hitched a ride in the ballast water of ocean-going ships. Scientists say this fits with the fact that many of the hot spots have appeared along major shipping routes. However, the starfish in quiet Monterey Bay, Calif. have been hit hard, whereas San Francisco’s starfish are holding strong.
But at this point, there’s no evidence to entirely confirm or entirely rule out these hypotheses.
A Sea Without Stars
Sea stars are voracious predators, like lions on the seafloor. They gobble up mussels, clams, sea cucumbers, crab and even other starfish. That’s why they’re called a keystone species, meaning they have a disproportionate impact on an ecosystem, shaping the biodiversity of the seascape.
“These are ecologically important species,” Harvell said. “To remove them changes the entire dynamics of the marine ecosystem. When you lose this many sea stars it will certainly change the seascape underneath our waters.”
Because the die-offs are patchy, scientists aren’t concerned that sea stars will be wiped out entirely. But there’s no end in sight and the disease continues to spread.
“We may still be at the very early stages of this. We don’t really know,” Harvell said. “But it’s as important as ever right now, that we’re monitoring to know where the disease hasn’t been yet and when it first hits.”
New experiments in Washington state started this week to test possible infectious agents. The network of scientists collaborating on this project hope to make an announcement in a few months.
