The supercomputers at the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center have crunched long-term trends to produce an outlook for June, July and August. For most of the Northwest, the forecast gives a strong probability of above-normal temperatures.
National Weather Service is forecasting a strong probability of above-normal temperatures in June, July and August for most of the Northwest.
Credit National Weather Service
Seattle-based meteorologist Johnny Burg said the trend is strongest along the West Coast and becomes less pronounced as you go inland to Idaho.
“Usually our summers here are pretty warm and dry compared to the weather patterns throughout the year,” Burg said. “But what the CPC is saying is that we are looking at maybe having warmer than normal temperatures for this summer.”
The summer outlook for rainfall is neutral for the Pacific Northwest, but calls for above average rainfall chances in the central Rockies. There’s no drought relief in sight for parched rangelands in southern Oregon and southwest Idaho.
The Climate Prediction Center notes a transition to El Niño conditions is underway in the tropical Pacific, but that global weather phenomenon is not driving the forecast for a warmer than normal summer in the Northwest. Burg said that there is usually a lag before El Niño’s effects can be seen in the region’s local weather.
A national report released Tuesday says climate change will make it increasingly difficult for the Northwest to generate hydropower and protect salmon at the same time.
The Northwest gets 75 percent of its electricity from dams. As climate change reduces summer stream flows, the Northwest Climate Assessment report says the result will likely be less hydropower production from those dams – with reductions of up to 20 percent by 2080.
The reductions would be necessary to preserve stream flows for threatened and endangered fish, according to Amy Snover, director of the Climate Impacts Group and co-lead author of the Northwest report. Snover says with climate change leaving less water in rivers during the summer, what’s left will have to be divided between storage for hydropower and flows for fish.
“It will be increasingly difficult to meet the two goals of producing summer and fall hydropower and maintaining sufficient flows in the river for protected and endangered fish,” she said. “You can reduce some of the negative impacts on hydropower production but you can’t do that and maintain the fish flows.”
Snover says her report’s projections are based on the way the Northwest operates hydroelectric dams right now. But that could change. Regional power managers say climate change is leading them to reconsider how they will operate dams in the future.
John Fazio, an analyst with the Northwest Power and Conservation Council, says climate change is going to shift demand for electricity in the region, too.
Winters will be warmer, so people will need less power than before at a time of year when there’s lots of water in the rivers. And as summers get hotter, there will be more need for power to cool people off at a time of year when there’s less water available to generate hydropower.
Fazio has been thinking about the best way to manage the hydro system under these climate change scenarios. He’s suggested using other sources of power in the winter to make sure the system’s reservoirs are full of water by summertime.
“My suggestion would be during the summer we could pull more water from reservoirs to make up for decrease in summer flows and then going into the winter, use generation from other sources to meet our (power) loads and let the reservoirs refill,” he said.
“It would call for a change in the whole approach to how we operate the hydro system,” Fazio said. “So far it hasn’t gotten any traction anywhere. It’s a complicated issue, but we’re trying to tackle it.”
Bonneville Power Administration, which manages 31 dams in the Columbia River Basin and distributes most of the electricity in the Northwest, has been pondering the issue of climate change as well. It’s developed a road map for adapting to climate change and launched pilot projects to model the effects of climate change on stream flows in the Columbia River Basin.
TULALIP, Wash, May 1, 2014 – The Taste of Tulalip is the ultimate “feast of the senses” that combines wine, food and fun in a relaxed setting that has helped define it as the defacto event of its kind in the Northwest.
The Tulalip Casino and Resort is a property on the Native American land of the Tulalip tribe, hence the casino part. Having the luxury of one of the areas top-ranking casinos helps provide revenue for the kind of budget required for the resort to put on a first-class event.
What makes the Tulalip Resort such a great venue for a wine and food event is really a combination of things going for it. A first-class staff such as Chef Perry Mascitti, Sommelier Tommy Thompson and its Food & Beverage Director, Lisa Severn. These three not only know how to throw a party, they do everything first-class.
Secondly, are accommodations which also present a very welcoming vibe and the rooms at Tulalip definitely fit the bill. Perhaps the nicest feature of the rooms is the three-tier shower system which hits all areas of the body, making you not want get out of it.
Assuming you pay for the full weekend pass, you’ll start things off with a multi-course reception dinner in the main convention hall. Everything from the quality of each course you consume to the attentiveness of each wait staff person, it’s a dinner you won’t soon forget. This past event, Carla Hall of ABC’s “The Chew” was on the center stage welcoming the guests and helping to get the “party started”.
Several hours later after you experience this food and wine assault on the senses, you’ll find a gorgeous, well-appointed room waiting for you to sink into.
The Grand Tasting is the event which most attend and it’s not just any “second-rate” tasting, you’ll find craft beers, imported wines from other countries such as Italy and France along with domestic favorites from California, Oregon and Washington State.
There are various mini-events which also take place during the Grand Tasting and those can be both a fun and educational to attend. There’s a cooking demo by a celebrity chef where you’ll get to try the food when done with the demo –winner of Top Chef, Kristen Kish, held the honors in 2013.
There is also a “Rock and Roll Cooking Challenge” across from the main grand tasting hall which has always proved to be a light-hearted, fun-filled event as well.
Additionally, there’s a Private Magnum tasting lounge where Tommy Thompson and crew open up extremely rare, extremely expensive wines from around the globe. Bourdeaux, Burgundy, Australia, Italy, Napa, Willamette Valley and Columbia Valley’s best are often represented in this exclusive tasting.
If you love wine, you owe it to yourself to get into this tasting in order to taste wines from the likes of Chateau Margaux, Screaming Eagle, Schafer, Quilceda Creek to name a few.
It’s the culmination of so many things which all seem to happen with flawless execution on the part of the staff and guests which helps guests feel very much a part of what’s going on.
Any more, being able to define an “ultimate food and wine” destination in most areas has become more difficult thanks to an availability of so many good ones to pick from. There’s no doubt that it should always be on your “must do” list of having an ultimate wine and food weekend in a relaxing, fun-filled place that you won’t soon forget.
TULALIP, Wash, May 1, 2014 – The Taste of Tulalip is the ultimate “feast of the senses” that combines wine, food and fun in a relaxed setting that has helped define it as the defacto event of its kind in the Northwest.
The Tulalip Casino and Resort is a property on the Native American land of the Tulalip tribe, hence the casino part. Having the luxury of one of the areas top-ranking casinos helps provide revenue for the kind of budget required for the resort to put on a first-class event.
What makes the Tulalip Resort such a great venue for a wine and food event is really a combination of things going for it. A first-class staff such as Chef Perry Mascitti, Sommelier Tommy Thompson and its Food & Beverage Director, Lisa Severn. These three not only know how to throw a party, they do everything first-class.
Secondly, are accommodations which also present a very welcoming vibe and the rooms at Tulalip definitely fit the bill. Perhaps the nicest feature of the rooms is the three-tier shower system which hits all areas of the body, making you not want get out of it.
Assuming you pay for the full weekend pass, you’ll start things off with a multi-course reception dinner in the main convention hall. Everything from the quality of each course you consume to the attentiveness of each wait staff person, it’s a dinner you won’t soon forget. This past event, Carla Hall of ABC’s “The Chew” was on the center stage welcoming the guests and helping to get the “party started”.
Several hours later after you experience this food and wine assault on the senses, you’ll find a gorgeous, well-appointed room waiting for you to sink into.
The Grand Tasting is the event which most attend and it’s not just any “second-rate” tasting, you’ll find craft beers, imported wines from other countries such as Italy and France along with domestic favorites from California, Oregon and Washington State.
There are various mini-events which also take place during the Grand Tasting and those can be both a fun and educational to attend. There’s a cooking demo by a celebrity chef where you’ll get to try the food when done with the demo –winner of Top Chef, Kristen Kish, held the honors in 2013.
There is also a “Rock and Roll Cooking Challenge” across from the main grand tasting hall which has always proved to be a light-hearted, fun-filled event as well.
Additionally, there’s a Private Magnum tasting lounge where Tommy Thompson and crew open up extremely rare, extremely expensive wines from around the globe. Bourdeaux, Burgundy, Australia, Italy, Napa, Willamette Valley and Columbia Valley’s best are often represented in this exclusive tasting.
If you love wine, you owe it to yourself to get into this tasting in order to taste wines from the likes of Chateau Margaux, Screaming Eagle, Schafer, Quilceda Creek to name a few.
It’s the culmination of so many things which all seem to happen with flawless execution on the part of the staff and guests which helps guests feel very much a part of what’s going on.
Any more, being able to define an “ultimate food and wine” destination in most areas has become more difficult thanks to an availability of so many good ones to pick from. There’s no doubt that it should always be on your “must do” list of having an ultimate wine and food weekend in a relaxing, fun-filled place that you won’t soon forget.
New research from the U.S. Geological Survey shows some fish in the West’s pristine, alpine lakes like Lake Solitude in Grand Teton National Park (pictured here) have high mercury levels. | credit: U.S. Geological Survey/John Pritz
SEATTLE — Some bad news for backcountry in the West: Some of the fish in the region’s wild alpine lakes contain unsafe levels of mercury, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.
In the broadest study of its kind to date, the USGS tested various kinds of trout and other fish at 86 sites in national parks in 10 western states from 2008 to 2012. The average concentration of mercury in sport fish from two sites in Alaskan parks exceeded federal health standards, as did individual fish caught in California, Colorado, Washington and Wyoming.
But perhaps more importantly, mercury was detected in all of the fish sampled, even from the more pristine areas of the parks.
The study, conducted jointly by the National Park Service and the USGS, found that mercury levels varied greatly from park to park and even among sites within each park. Overall, 96 percent of the sport fish sampled were within safe levels of mercury for human consumption.
“It’s good news that across this entire study area most of the fish were low,” said Collin Eagles-Smith, a research ecologist with USGS and the lead author of the study. “The concern is that there were some areas, and some fish, that did have concentrations that might pose a threat to either wildlife or humans.”
Spatial distribution of the 21 national parks sampled in this
study. Size of circle represents percentage of total dataset.
Credit: USGS.
Two percent of the fish sampled in Mount Rainier National Park exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency’s guidelines for safe human consumption. Fish sampled in Olympic National Park had a higher average mercury concentration than some other parks in the region, but none of the samples were above safe human consumption levels.
“Mercury concentrations in those fish in the Pacific Northwest were quite variable,” Eagles-Smith said. “Crater Lake had quite low concentrations in comparison to other parks, whereas Olympic National Park had some of the highest concentrations in comparison to other parks.”
The researchers were surprised to find some of the highest levels of mercury in a small fish called the speckled dace, which were sampled in Capitol Reef and Zion national parks in Utah.
“The concentrations in those fish were comparable to the highest concentrations we saw in the largest, longlived fish in Alaska,” Eagles-Smith said. He added that more research is needed to better understand how mercury is deposited from the atmosphere into the environment and then concentrated at varying levels in different species.
Speckled dace
There was some bad news in the study for birds: In more than half the sites tested, fish had mercury levels that exceeded the most sensitive health benchmark for fish-eating birds, Eagles-Smith said.
“People can regulate their intake of fish and wild fish-eating birds can’t. So, they’re going to take in more fish and more mercury as a result, and it can impact their behavior, ability to reproduce and ability to find food.”
Mercury can come from natural sources, like volcanoes. However, since the industrial revolution atmospheric mercury levels have increased three-fold because of the burning of fossil fuels. Recent studies have shown that particulate pollution from China, which could result from the burning of coal among other sources, can and does make its way across the Pacific Ocean to North America.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that exposure to high levels of mercury in humans may cause damage to the brain, kidneys and the developing fetus. Pregnant women and young children are particularly sensitive to the effects of mercury.
Salmon and other migratory fish attempting to return to their spawning grounds in the Pacific Northwest face no fewer than 400 man-made barriers in the Columbia River Basin, the earliest dating back to 1885—and there may be as many as 100 more constructed illegally on private property, tribal fish biologists estimate.
The impediments to fish migration posed by such monolithic barriers as the 551-foot-high Grand Coulee Dam are well documented, but anadromous fish face a myriad of other obstacles as well. In the 129 years since that first dam was built in Spokane, Washington, fish passage has been restricted, if not totally eliminated, in many areas, tribal experts said at a recent workshop addressing the issues. And it’s not just the Columbia River.
“The tributaries and main stem Snake River habitat are probably in worse shape than on the Columbia,” said Dave Johnson, program manager for the Nez Perce Department of Fisheries. “The main stem is a mess. All the Snake River salmon and steelhead populations are listed under the endangered species act or have been extirpated. Idaho Power Company is trying to relicense those facilities right now, and there are things they need to fix as part of that, things that are caused only by those dams being there such as the mercury issue, such as temperature problems.”
Biologists with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) have documented most of these obstructions on a massive map of the basin. They gathered at a workshop in mid-March to review their individual projects ahead of the CRITFC’s Future of Our Salmon conference to be held in Oregon on April 23 and 24. The goal is to restore historic fishing runs. Eliminating such obstructions is essential not only from a food-security standpoint, the experts said, but also culturally and spiritually—though all are different facets of the same thing.
“The deal we made with the Creator is that if we take care of our first foods, the first foods will take care of us,” said Paul Lumley, executive director of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), which held the workshop. “Salmon are the first of the first foods.”
By 1980, river flows had been reduced by 50 percent, causing migration time to increase from weeks to months and decreasing survival, said Sheri Sears of the Colville Tribes. The granddaddy of all these barriers is Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942, which completely blocked upstream migration all the way into the headwaters in western British Columbia. But there’s more—much, much more. The Brownlee, Hells Canyon and Oxbow dams on the Snake River totally block fish migration across western and southern Idaho nearly to the Wyoming border as well, for instance.
Moreover, these are all high dams. Besides Grand Coulee there is the Brownlee, soaring 420 feet. Others are only slightly lower. Their construction, and lack of any means to transport fish beyond them, has changed the culture of Northwestern tribes, whose members once depended on these fish for food.
Ever since the first dams were built, biologists from tribes and governmental agencies have sought ways to get fish over, around, and through these barriers: large and small dams, culverts and even waterfalls. Currents and water temperatures have changed over the years, as well.
The issue stretches all the way up into Canada, with nonexistent fish passage at the Keenleyside, Brilliant, and Waneta dams. Sockeye were once abundant there.
“None of these facilities provide fish passage,” Canadian biologist Will Warnack told workshop attendees.
Different locations reported various problems and possible solutions. One practice that has proven effective is the use of pit tags to compare survival rates between dams. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries biologist Ritchie Graves pointed out that it was relatively cheap, no handling was required, fish were from a known source, and it was an easy estimate to understand. In addition, he said, everyone using this technique sends their findings in, making for highly accurate reporting statistics.
New technology sometimes replaces old, as cited by James Bartlett, fisheries biologist with Portland General Electric. For instance, Round Butte Dam once had a 2.8-mile fish ladder. That was discontinued a few years later, and they now use a truck and haul method for both juveniles and adults. A pipe releases the fish 20 feet below the surface to prevent thermal shock.
Cracking down on the roughly 100 mostly illegal dams in central Washington would be a good starting point for restoring the fish runs, Sears said. The smaller dams and barriers notwithstanding, the single overriding problem continues to be moving fish past the major hydroelectric dams. Solutions are possible, but funding is key, which is one hope for the outcome of the renegotiation of the Columbia River Treaty, which is nearly complete.
Perhaps the most unique option for boosting fish over large dams is being developed by Whooshh Innovations, a company that is testing a flexible sleeve that rapidly moves fish using a pressure differential. The first tests will move fish 200 feet with a 50-foot rise, but the company is already thinking of much larger numbers, a minimum of 1,000 feet with a 236-foot rise.
“Our model indicates it would take a fish 25 seconds to make that rise,” said Deligan. “Do we want to go over something like Chief Joseph Dam? Absolutely.”
Just one visit to Grand Coulee Dam put the money needs in perspective. Over the next 10 years, $400 million will be spent for turbine retrofits at Grand Coulee. Each year, $70 million goes toward operations and maintenance. Fish-passage solutions pale in comparison.
“These huge outlays of money make one realize that installing fish passage facilities is not a financial impossibility,” noted Lumley, who emerged from the workshop optimistic about the April conference.
“This workshop exceeded my expectations in terms of identifying real solutions to restoring fish passage,” Lumley said. “It was mostly technical, but also [yielded] some really helpful suggestions for us on the funding side of it, and also in asking our leadership to reconsider some of the bad historical decisions that have been made and to right those wrongs.”
The U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis transits the Pacific Ocean alongside the oiler USNS Yukon. | credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery/Specialist 3rd Class Kenneth Abbate
SEATTLE — The Navy is pursuing permits to continue conducting sonar and explosives exercises in a large area of the Pacific Ocean — and that’s putting marine mammal advocates on high alert.
Public hearings kick off next week as the Navy gathers public comments on its draft environmental impact statement for the Northwest training and testing range. The range stretches from northern California to the Canadian border.
Marine mammals, like porpoises, gray and fin whales and endangered orcas, travel through the Navy’s training range. That’s why marine mammal advocates are voicing concerns about the Navy’s activities.
In the draft EIS the Navy outlined plans to conduct up to 100 mid-range active sonar tests each year. That type of sonar has been shown to affect marine mammal behavior.
The Navy also wants to conduct up to 30 bombing exercises per year in the range.
The Northwest training and testing range. Credit: Navy
John Mosher, Northwest Environmental program manager for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, says the training range is critical to naval preparedness.
“At some point realistic training, whether it’s with explosives or sonar, has to take place and they truly are skills that are perishable, things that have to be routinely conducted to be able to do them in case the real need occurs,” Mosher said.
The Navy gathered more than 300 public comments during an earlier scoping phase of its environmental review. Most of those comments centered around impacts on marine mammals.
The Navy has plans in place to look and listen for marine mammals before and during testing exercises. But environmentalists say the mitigation measures are inadequate.
“They’re dropping bombs and you can’t see orcas from the air,” said Howard Garrett of Orca Network. “There’s every real danger that orcas are going to stray into a live bombing range and we don’t want to see that.”
Brad Hanson
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been studying the endangered orca population of Puget Sound by tagging orcas and using underwater acoustic monitoring devices to better understand how the whales move through the region. The population of Southern Resident Orcas is hovering around 80 individuals, and has been decreasing in recent years.
Brad Hanson, an expert on orcas with NOAA, says the area within the naval training and testing range is an important forage area for the whales.
“We want to figure out if there are particular areas that the whales are using so the Navy could avoid using those areas for training exercises that might cause any type of harassment of the animals,” he said.
Hanson’s tagging research has shown orcas moving from Washington to northern California within the span of a week.
The body of 3-year-old female Orca L112.
Credit: Cascadia Research
Last year a 3-year-old female orca washed up dead near the mouth of the Columbia River. Her body showed signs of trauma that could have been the result of an explosion but it had been drifting on the Columbia River’s eddies for days, making the results of the necropsy report inconclusive. The official findings were to be released by NOAA Fisheries on Monday.
“It’s probably the most comprehensive necropsy report I’ve ever seen done on a killer whale,” Hanson said.
The Navy also recently announced plans to build a new $15 million dollar facility near Port Angeles, Wash. on the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
What’s Next
Public meetings will be held from 5-8 p.m. for the following dates and locations:
Feb. 26, 5-8 pm: Oak Harbor High School, Oak Harbor, Wash.
Feb. 27, Cascade High School, Everett, Wash.
Feb. 28, North Kitsap High School, Poulsbo, Wash.
March 3, Astoria High School, Astoria, Ore.
March 4, Isaac Newton Magnet School, Newport, Ore.
The deadline for written comments on the Northwest Training and Testing range EIS is March 25.
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.
Northwest sports teams are leading an effort to use the widespread appeal of basketball, football, baseball and hockey to spread an environmental message.
A group formed by six teams in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C., called the Green Sports Alliance set out three years ago to improve the environmental performance of professional sports. The alliance has grown to hundreds of teams across the country that are now competing to see who can be the greenest.
Baseball fields, basketball arenas and football stadiums across the country are installing solar panels and wind turbines. They’re selling local and organic food to their fans, and replacing trash cans with recycling and compost bins.
Supporters of this movement say sports offer a fun, non-political way to promote environmentalism. It saves money, cuts carbon emissions, and the environmental benefits count toward the teams’ record of community service.
Tracking Green Stats
The green sports game isn’t as exciting to watch as a slam dunk, a home run or a touchdown. But it has racked up some impressive stats:
The Portland Trail Blazers have cut the carbon emissions at the Moda Center by 50 percent since 2008 and saved $3.3 million in utility costs in five years.
The Seattle Mariners raised their recycling rate from 38 percent in 2010 to 90 percent in 2013 and saved $2.2 million in utility costs in seven years.
The teams are tracking their environmental performance with help from the Natural Resource Defense Council and the Environmental Protection Agency. So they know where they stand in the environmental rankings. According to Martin Tull, executive director of the Green Sports Alliance, that has spurred some friendly competition.
“When one facility puts up 3,000 solar panels, the next time an owner is going to build a stadium, he wants to have 3,001,” Tull said. “We try to use that as much as we can to give them little catalyst to have the biggest solar array or to have the least energy used.”
Scott Jenkins, vice president of ballpark operations for the Seattle Mariners, said his team has been trying to match the San Francisco Giants’ recycling rate for years. This year, the Mariners fell a little short once again as the Giants reached a 95 percent recycling rate.
“Every time I think we’re going to catch up to them they raise the bar a little bit more,” Jenkins said.
Tracking environmental performance has also yielded some interesting data. When the Blazers commissioned a study to measure their carbon footprint in 2008, it revealed that 70 percent of the carbon emissions associated with the Moda Center come from fan and employee transportation to and from the arena. Team transportation and business travel, by comparison, only accounted for 4 percent of the team’s carbon emissions.
“That surprised us all,” said Justin Zeulner, sustainability director for the Blazers. “We realized we have to start engaging with our fans and our community to get to our impacts because they’re the ones selecting behavior. They’re the ones that decide: How am I going to get to the game?”
Making it fun
Sports teams aren’t looking to bog people down with environmental doom and gloom. Instead, they say, they try to make the idea of sustainable living fun. One hockey arena, for example, invites fans to shoot aluminum cans into the proper recycling receptacle.
The Mariners introduced two recycling superheroes: Captain Plastic and Kid Compost. They roam the concourse of Safeco Field offering photo ops and recycling and composting assistance. The compost from the games goes to Cedar Grove Composting, which in turn creates bags of Safeco Soil made from compost at its facility. Fans can take that compost home to use in the garden; the team also offers “kitchen catchers” to hold household food scraps.
The Blazers have a living wall that invites fans to high-five a hand print if they support the team’s environmental mission. It also has a chalkboard for people to share how they’re going green in their own lives.
Watch the video:
Saving money
Tull says money is another motivation for teams going green – and one the alliance uses to attract new members.
“When we sit down with a new team that we haven’t worked with we ask a very simple question: Would you like to learn how other teams have saved millions through conservation,” he said. “And what do you think they say? They say hell yeah.”
Northwest sports teams are among the first to prove that conservation measures such as replacing light bulbs and reducing water use at event centers have a quick return on investment.
“When you look at your bottom line and say I’m saving $400,000 a year in utilities, I’m saving $200,000 a year on my waste costs, and I’m building brand value and doing what’s right, it really is a no-brainer to get into that area,” said Scott Jenkins, vice president of operations for the Mariners.
Selling environmentalism
For those who are rooting for a cleaner environment, Tull says, sports teams are a great way to sell the idea to a mass market.
“If I talk to a middle school student and say, ‘Did you realize the Portland Trail Blazers cut their energy use in their house by 30 percent?’ It’s a lot more exciting than if we say, ‘Did you realize that this local bank did a retrofit and cut their energy use?’”, said Tull. “Even with the exact same statistics it’s always going to be more exciting if it comes through the lens of sports.”
Allen Hershkowitz, director of the Natural Resource Defense Council’s Sports Greening Program, says his environmental group hatched the idea of using sports to sell environmentalism back in 2004.
Sporting events themselves don’t have huge environmental impacts, he says, “however, where the impact of sports is enormous is in its cultural and market influence. The cultural and market influence of sports is almost unparalleled.”
He cites a statistic: 13 percent of Americans follow science while 63 percent follow sports.
“So, if you want to reach Americans, you’ve got to go where they’re at,” he said. “Using the non-political, non-partisan, politically neutral space of basketball, baseball, football, hockey, tennis, soccer to educate people about the need for recycling, energy efficiency, water conservation and safer chemical use. It’s a spectacular platform and at the same time tens of millions of pounds of carbon have been reduced.”
Peter Murchie is an environmental health manger for the EPA in Seattle. He says his agency is hoping that fans will take environmental lessons home with them from the big game. He’s hoping the movement will trickle down to younger sports teams, too.
“Sports translates down into your local communities,” he said. “If you see that the Seattle Seahawks or Portland Trail blazers being green, there’s a chance that your local little league and youth sports will also look at how they can do things in a more sustainable way. That gets an even broader marketplace.”
What about climate change?
So far, sports teams are leading by example and sticking with subtle environmental suggestions. However, this year several league commissioners sent letters to Congress acknowledging the issue of climate change.
The Trail Blazers are the first and only professional sports team to sign a climate declaration. Zeulner says he’s hoping the unifying nature of sports can move people beyond political barriers toward taking action on climate change.
“You can go to a sporting event and be sitting with people who are complete strangers to you, but you’re all focused on that energy of what’s happening on the field – what’s happening on the playing surface,” he said. “You start seeing people high-fiving each other, hugging each other over this thrill of whatever the sport is. The emotion of that sport. These are Republicans and Democrats. They’re different races. Different sexes. It doesn’t matter. Sports gives you that opportunity to strip all those barriers down and realize we actually want the same things.”
The Green Sports Alliance is already expanding into college sports and is now looking at the prospect of including teams across the globe in Europe and South America.
In the late 1800s, when dams were first built around the Northwest, salmon and steelhead stocks began to decline. Fish hatcheries were put forth as a solution. Wild fish were taken from Northwest rivers and spawned in captivity, ensuring future generations of fish could be released back into the wild every season.
Jim Lichatowich is a biologist who’s worked on salmon issues as a researcher, manager and scientific advisor for more than 40 years. He sat down with EarthFix’s Ashley Ahearn to talk about his new book: “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
Ashley Ahearn: For someone who doesn’t know what a hatchery is or doesn’t understand how it operates, what happens at a hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: Fundamentally at a hatchery, salmon are taken out of the river, put into ponds until they’re ready to spawn and then the eggs are taken. They’re fertilized. Various different procedures are used at different hatcheries but that’s basically it. The eggs hatch, the juveniles are reared in the hatchery for varying levels of time and then they’re released back to the river and expected to migrate downstream fairly rapidly and go out to the ocean and from that point on pick up the normal life history of a regular wild salmon.
I guess the idea of how hatcheries started and [what] sustained them was, habitat was degrading and the fish weren’t doing as well in the degraded habitat. So the hatchery became a solution, a way of circumventing the problems we were creating ourselves by building dams, pumping out irrigation water, poor forestry practices that put silt and sawdust into the streams. The hatchery was supposed to take the salmon away from that problem, circumvent the problem.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim you talk about the ‘machine metaphor’ for nature. What is that? Can you read a section from your book here?
Jim Lichatowich: Sure I’ll read where I talk about the machine metaphor and the fish factory. And I might add here that I use ‘fish factory’ instead of hatchery through a large part of the book because that’s what hatcheries were originally called when they were first being used. They were called ‘pisce factories,’ or fish factories.
“The fish factory and the machine metaphor are a perfect match. The mechanistic worldview reduced salmon-sustaining ecosystems to an industrial process and rivers to simple conduits whose only function was to carry artificially-propagated salmon to the sea. The mechanistic worldview still has a powerful grip on salmon management and restoration programs in spite of a growing scientific understanding that the picture of ecosystems created by the machine metaphor was seriously flawed.”
And really, it’s been the factory metaphor that has guided a lot of the operation of hatcheries.
Ashley Ahearn: One of the things I really liked about your book is these side channel chapters that you sprinkle in between some pretty heavy critique of the way we manage our fisheries in this region. One of your side channels that I particularly liked was when you write about a trip to Indiana to the St. Joe River. Tell me about that side channel.
Jim Lichatowich: Well I grew up outside of South Bend, Indiana and the St. Joe River flows through South Bend. When I grew up there the St. Joe was pretty much a sewer that didn’t have much in the way of fish life. And over the years, particularly since I left — I left there in the 60s — there’d been a lot of clean up. And with the introduction of salmon into Lake Michigan — the St. Joe flows into Lake Michigan — they built a salmon hatchery and had a Chinook salmon run up the St. Joe River. They had to build a hatchery and clean the river up, too.
I was there and I was walking along the river and I came to where a tributary came into the St. Joe, and there was a salmon carcass — a Chinook salmon carcass laying up on the bank of the stream — and it just struck me how out of place it was. Seeing carcasses along rivers is pretty common here, but in Indiana that was a sight. And later on in watching the river, I saw salmon trying to spawn and I knew that their spawning was not going to be successful because the gravel was so silted in that the eggs weren’t going to get oxygen. I talked to a biologist a couple of days later and they confirmed that there’s very little or no actual reproduction, even though there are fish out there spawning.
I thought, you know, this really robs the salmon of their whole heroic story of battling up stream to get to the place where they spawned and where they could complete the cycle of parent to offspring. Even though it’s looked on by sportsmen in Northern Indiana as a positive thing, and there were a lot of people fishing for these fish that were in the river, I somehow had this nagging feeling that ‘should we be doing this to other species? Should we take them from where they belong and put them in a place where they have no chance of surviving without our intervention in a hatchery and call it salmon management?’
Ashley Ahearn: Is that what is happening here in the Northwest? I mean, we have salmon. The salmon have lived here for thousands of years — it’s not like Indiana, but arguably it’s a similar closed … are we robbing the salmon of their story here in the Northwest?
Jim Lichatowich: Well when we rely on hatcheries instead of healthy rivers, then we are robbing them of part of their story. Fortunately most of the rivers in the Northwest can support some wild production, some more than others.
But by relying more and more on hatcheries we’re creating a charade of sorts where the river that can’t support a salmon becomes a stage prop where fishermen and fish play out their respective roles, reenacting something, an important part of our past, that now is sort of a hollow empty memory of it.
Ashley Ahearn: Jim from your perspective are all hatcheries bad? Is there a good hatchery?
Jim Lichatowich: I think there might be, but the answer to that question hasn’t been answered. There has been attempts to reform hatcheries in the past and they haven’t been successfully implemented. There is a lot of good science now that should help managers change the way hatcheries are being operated to begin to see if they can begin to be integrated into a natural production system in a watershed. But it remains to be seen whether that will actually happen.
Ashley Ahearn: So if you were in charge, what needs to happen? What would be your order of operations to get salmon recovery back on track in this region?
Jim Lichatowich: Well I have two kind of strong ideas and those strong ideas were what I followed in writing this book. One was from John Livingston who said that all environmental problems, and I take that to mean salmon problems, are like icebergs, because, like an iceberg, environmental problems have a visible tip and for the salmon that tip is dams, over harvest, poor hatchery practice, poor logging practice –- the litany of things that we’re all aware of. But he says in addition there’s this huge hidden mass that an iceberg has. In that mass he calls it, he says in that mass there are the myths, beliefs and assumptions about how nature works that drive the decisions that either create the issues or prevent them from being corrected. And I think that’s a pretty powerful idea. We need to examine that body of myths, assumptions and beliefs. What I call in my book, our salmon story, and improve upon it. Make sure it reflects the latest science and not some really outdated myths or beliefs.
Ashley Ahearn: Or machine metaphors.
Jim Lichatowich: Or machine metaphors, right. And the other is Gary Nabhan’s idea. In one of his books he says that animals don’t go extinct because someone shoots the last one, or a bulldozer scrapes the last habitat. They go extinct because the web of relationships that sustain them unravels. He then put it in anthropomorphic terms and said, they go extinct because of a lack of ecological companionship. I think that idea is intuitive but at the same time very powerful. It should lead us to instead of defining the salmon’s problem in terms of numbers, which is really limiting your definition to the symptoms, it would be defined in terms of the unraveling of those relationships. And recovery, instead of boosting numbers by releasing more hatchery fish, would be a mending of those relationships. Trying to re-institute those relationships, and that’s a different approach than what we’ve been doing.
Ashley Ahearn: It seems your solutions center around a fundamental philosophical shift that needs to happen in the way we view management.
Jim Lichatowich: That’s right, and that is a good summary of my purpose in this book, is to make an argument for that shift.
Jim Lichatowich is the author of “Salmon, People and Place: A Biologist’s Search For Salmon Recovery.”
Native fishermen on the Pacific coast are seeing fewer cold water animals and reporting more sightings of warmer water species. Humboldt squid are being reported in waters off OR, WA, and BC. Ten years ago, sightings north of San Diego were rare. | credit: Katie Campbell
The top climate scientists in the Northwest have published a new report that surveys the many regional impacts of climate change.
It captures impacts large and small, from the hairy woodpecker which may enjoy more habitat, to smaller snowpack storing less water for the hydropower dams on the Columbia River. The report is the Northwest chapter of the third U.S. National Climate Assessment, a state-of-the-science update that Congress will receive next year. It was put together by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University and the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington — with input from researchers, native American tribes and economists.
The main conclusions won’t surprise anyone who follows climate science, or who reads EarthFix regularly. The greatest risks in the Northwest fall into three categories: risks caused by declining snowpack and water storage, risks due to rising sea levels and coastal ecosystems, and risks related to forest fires and forest health.
But the report highlights some less familiar research as well. Here are five projected impacts of climate change you may not be aware of:
1. Rising Seas and a Falling Continent
Predictions of sea level rise in the Northwest are complicated by plate tectonics. For example, very little sea level rise has been observed on the Olympic Peninsula to date because the peninsula is uplifting at about the same rate that the sea level is rising. Scientists project that sea level rises will range from 4 inches to 4 feet along the Northwest coast. But that doesn’t take into account a major Cascadia subduction zone quake. OSU’s Philip Mote, one of the report’s editors, says when the big one hits, it could cause the entire coastline to drop by 3 feet, compounding the impact of rising seas.
2. Your Health Is At Stake
Mote says the Northwest doesn’t have the kind of extreme weather events like hurricanes and tornadoes that tend to end with a high death toll. But rising temperatures are expected to make us more vulnerable to a whole range of troublesome and potentially fatal illnesses, from respiratory disorders to heat stroke to paralytic shellfish poisoning. If you want to learn more, check out EarthFix’s timely multimedia series, Symptoms of Climate Change: Will a Warming World Make Us Sick?
3. Hot Potatoes
Projected changes in temperatures, carbon dioxide levels, and the availability of irrigation water make the impact of climate change on agricultural crops surprisingly complicated to predict. The yield of winter wheat, for example, is expected to increase by up to 25 percent.
Potato yields are expected to increase until the middle of the century and then begin to decline, in some places as much as 40 percent. Mote says one reason agricultural yields may increase in the short term is the higher levels of CO2 in the air. “Carbon dioxide is plant food. It’s one of the nutrients that plants take in to grow structures and fruits and vegetables. For most plants, having more food allows them to grow faster,” he says. However, for many crops that positive effect may be offset by the impact of longer summer droughts with less water available for irrigation.
4. Thin shells
Climate change is tough news if you’re a marine creature with a shell or exoskeleton.
The Northwest already has some of the most acidified oceans in the world, and climate change is projected to reduce the pH of the oceans even further. Scientists predict that as a result of all the lower pH, mussels will form shells 25 percent more slowly and oysters will form shells 10 percent more slowly by the end of the century. EarthFix has reported extensively on this.
Other ocean critters may fare better; sea grasses and northern elephant seals may find more habitat available in a warming ocean. Paul Williams, who studies climate science and shellfish management for the Suquamish Tribe, says that while the big trend is clear, far more research is needed to understand how marine life will respond to acidification.
“If you want to ask, are the crabs going to disappear in Puget Sound, it’s hard to be that specific. What’s very clear is that we’ve changed the fundamental chemistry of the ocean,” he says.
5. Tribes
Climate change could affect many of the treaty rights reserved by tribes in the northwest, from water rights to shellfish gathering to the use of forests. And decreased summer water flows and increased stream temperatures could add to the stress that dams have placed on the region’s salmon runs, which are culturally and economically critical to many tribes. Several of the tribes in the Northwest have developed their own climate change research and mitigation and adaptation plans.
The Takeaway
I asked Philip Mote what he thinks the takeaway from the science is. He paraphrased John Holdren, a science advisor to President Obama. Holdren has suggested that three things will happen as we contend with climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering.
“The less we try to mitigate and the less we try to adapt, the more that plants, animals, and other humans will fare negatively,” Mote says.
