November 7, 2016 — SEATTLE — Conservative groups from the Pacific Northwest petitioned President Obama on Friday in an effort to protect the Puget Sound orcas.
The Orca Relief Citizen’s Alliance and Project Seawolf want the Obama administration to create a ten square mile “whale protection zone” near San Juan Island.
The groups claim the noise and pollution from boats and other human disturbances interfere with the orcas’ feeding.
September 23, 2016 — Millions of pounds of Dungeness crab are pulled from Pacific Northwest waters each year in a more than century-old ritual for commercial and recreational fishermen.
But as marine waters absorb more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, federal scientists are worried that the ocean’s changing chemistry may threaten the sweet-flavored crustaceans.
So scientists with the NOAA Fisheries’ Northwest Fisheries Science Center are exposing tiny crab larvae to acidic seawater in laboratory experiments to understand how ocean acidification might affect one of the West Coast’s most lucrative fisheries.
Research published this year found that Dungeness crab eggs and larvae collected from Puget Sound and exposed to higher levels of carbon dioxide — which increases ocean acidity — grew more slowly and larvae were more likely to die than those in less corrosive seawater.
Now, researchers are taking the experiments a step further to study how the crabs respond to multiple stressors during various growth stages. They also plan to analyze the sublethal effects: Even if the crabs don’t die, are they affected in physiological or other ways by ocean acidification?
“They’re so economically and ecologically important here on the West Coast,” said Paul McElhany, a research ecologist with the Northwest Fisheries Science Center north of Seattle, who is leading the current experiments.
Crab larvae are valuable food for small salmon and forage fish like herring that are eaten by salmon. Dungeness crabs are also the top revenue-fetching fishery in Washington and Oregon. In 2014, nearly $200 million worth of crabs were harvested along the West Coast.
September 8, 2016 — Invasive European green crabs have been swarming up and down both coasts, but because of the flow of ocean currents around the Pacific Northwest, inland waters of BC and Washington State were thought to be relatively safe. Well, on Sept. 2, volunteers announced they’d recently caught a single crab on San Juan Island, in Puget Sound. Although it’s just one for now—and it could have hitched a ride on someone’s fishing gear, or another way—it’s the first confirmed sighting in these inland waters.
Starting next week, a “rapid response team” will be out laying traps and trying to figure out if there are more crabs out there. The aliens pose a threat to the region’s native species.
“I’ll admit, I have a lot of respect for these crabs,” Sean McDonald, a research scientist at the University of Washington, told me. McDonald works with the Washington Sea Grant’s Crab Team, a network of citizen scientists that serves as an early alert for the crustacean’s encroachment. They caught the crab, and will be organizing next week’s response. “They’re tough and resilient,” he continued. “They make a living anywhere they can.”
August 22, 2016 — Human travelers have interstates 5 and 90. Salish Sea salmon have the Juan de Fuca Strait.
It’s the route that they all swim on their way to and from the wide Pacific — the salmon from the Elwha and all the rivers of Puget Sound, plus many salmon returning to Canada’s Fraser River, which are the main local food source for Puget Sound orcas and have always formed the bulk of Puget Sound’s commercial catch.
Now, Icicle Seafoods — recently acquired by Canada’s Cooke Seafood — wants to raise Atlantic salmon in 9.7 acres of salmon net pens in the strait, just east of Port Angeles, Washington.
Although it has its critics, salmon aquaculture isn’t new in Puget Sound — and certainly not elsewhere. British Columbia aquaculture produces salmon worth nearly half a billion (Canadian) dollars a year. And B.C. is a minnow compared to the salmon-raising industries of Norway (where salmon aquaculture is booming) and Chile (where it’s not.)
Icicle already has eight salmon aquaculture operations in the Sound, including one at Port Angeles tucked in behind Ediz Hook. The company’s plan for putting pens out in the Strait has been driven by U.S. Navy plans to expand its base on Ediz Hook, which won’t physically displace the existing pens but will ruin the neighborhood for salmon. Pile driving for the Navy project, scheduled to begin late this year, would actually kill salmon in nearby pens. Icicle has decided to move its operation.
Under Icicle’s planned new development, 14 circular pens, each 126 feet in diameter, would be kept in place by a network of two-to- four-ton steel anchors. The new pens would produce 20 percent more salmon than the old. They would be the first anchored this far offshore in Washington waters.
June 14, 2016 — On a recent Tuesday morning, Brian Rackley ate oysters for breakfast. He slipped a little knife into the neck and popped the shell, cut the foot. He took in a long, deep breath, quietly considering the bivalve’s aromatics, and slurped the thing out of the shell. After a moment’s thought, he scribbled a couple of words in a Moleskine notebook: “Driftwood, Shrimp Bisque.”
Rackley runs the oyster program at Kimball House, a restaurant that occupies a former train station in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a fine place, where diners sit in tufted leather booths and order caviar service and cocktails that arrive in chilled, antique glassware. The oyster menu that Rackley maintains is suitably elaborate, an ever-changing list of 20-odd varieties of oysters sourced from across the continent: Puget Sound, Washington, to Edgecomb, Maine.
Rackley eats oysters for breakfast, before even a cup of coffee, so that his palate will be unadulterated when he writes his tasting notes, those subtle distinctions of flavor and aroma that help his customers navigate the qualities of oysters. His notebook is filled with little phrases and lists of words: “citrus, lettuce & cucumber”; “celery salted wild mushroom”; “cedar and spinach”; “rich clay & minerals, perfect with Muscadet.”
Oysters are a finicky business. Those subtle distinctions in flavor can be erased into blandness by a heavy rain. They can take years to produce but days to spoil. The vagaries of water and air temperatures, the complicated seasonal intersections of rainfall and tides, all the uncontrollable whims of nature conspire to affect oyster production. Rackley is constantly changing his menu to accommodate new oysters, removing unavailable ones.
The most notable change on Rackley’s menu, though, is the growing presence of farmed oysters from the Gulf of Mexico. High-end oyster bars have long depended on well-known oyster farms like Hama Hama, Island Creek, and others where oyster farming techniques go back decades, if not longer.
May 27, 2016 — EVERETT, Wash. — After a nearly monthlong stalemate, the Department of Fish & Wildlife and Native American tribes have come to an agreement on a recreational fishing season for Puget Sound.
The agreement reached Thursday afternoon follows extended negotiations between state and tribal fisheries managers after they failed to reach an agreement earlier this spring.
The state and tribes must now obtain a joint federal permit in order to open the fishing season in Puget Sound waters.
“We plan to re-open those waters as soon as we have federal approval,” said John Long, salmon fisheries policy lead for Fish & Wildlife. “We anticipate getting the new permit within a few weeks.”
Approval of the permit is expected by mid-June. In the meantime, a closure of recreational fishing that was enacted May 1 remains in effect.
The season includes a hatchery chinook season on the Snohomish River from June 1-July 30. A sockeye season on Baker Lake also is planned starting in mid-July, with a maximum take of 4,600 fish for the season.
May 9, 2016 — For the first time in 30 years, state and tribal fishery managers failed to develop a joint plan for the 2016-17 Puget Sound salmon fishing season, effectively closing all of Puget Sound and some lakes and rivers.
“The door remains open (for more discussions with the tribes),” said Ron Warren, the state Fish and Wildlife salmon policy manager. “The tribes and (state) in different ways offered packages that met the conservation objectives, but we couldn’t reach agreement on them.”
This left many — an estimated 200,000 anglers held Puget Sound salmon licenses during the 2014-15 fishing season — questioning what led to this unprecedented situation.
During a meeting April 27 in Fife — around 60 representatives from state, tribal, NOAA Fisheries and officials from the offices of the governor and attorney general — plans were laid out for additional cuts needed to reach an agreement.
State fishery managers offered an alternative proposal for sport fisheries, with a 50 percent harvest cut on an expected poor Puyallup River return of 353 wild chinook and 3,708 hatchery fish.
April 29, 2016 — SEATTLE — All salmon fishing in Puget Sound will close on May 1 unless federal officials issue last-minute permits.
State and tribal fisheries managers failed to reach an agreement Wednesday for this year’s Puget Sound fishing season, which runs from May 1 to April 30, 2017.
“We had one last round of negotiations in hopes of ensuring salmon seasons in Puget Sound this year,” Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife Director Jim Unsworth said in a statement. “Regrettably, we could not agree on fisheries that were acceptable to both parties.”
April 21, 2016 — OLYMPIA, Wa. – State fishery managers have decided to separately secure the federal permit required to hold salmon fisheries this season in Puget Sound.
The decision was made Tuesday after negotiations over salmon seasons with tribal leaders again came to an impasse. The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and the tribes last week could not reach an agreement during the annual season-setting process.
“We had hoped additional conversations with the tribes would result in fisheries that were agreeable to both parties,” said Jim Unsworth, director of the department. “Unfortunately, that did not happen, but our door remains open to further discussions.”
April 20, 2016 — SEATTLE — Fisheries managers on Friday approved limited ocean salmon fishing off the Washington coast, but are still discussing plans for Puget Sound, including closing all fishing in the region due to disastrous runs.
The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which includes state and tribal officials, met last week in Vancouver, Wash. to set commercial and recreational fishing guidelines.
The president of the Puget Sound Anglers called predictions for this year’s salmon run “the worst we probably have ever seen.”
The council set an ocean-salmon sport catch at 35,000 Chinook and 18,900 hatchery coho salmon.
Debate continues this week on what, if any catch, will be allowed in Puget Sound.