Back in the summers of 2018 and 2019, the shellfish industry in Washington state was rocked by .

“It was oysters, clams, cockles — all bivalve species in some bays were impacted,” said Teri King, aquaculture and marine water quality specialist at Washington Sea Grant based at the 91̽��. “They were dying, and nobody knew why.”

Now, King and partners from NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science, NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Northwest Indian College and AquaTechnics Inc. think that they have finally sleuthed out the culprit: high concentrations of yessotoxins, which are produced by blooms of certain phytoplankton. The researchers’ were published last month in the open-access journal Harmful Algae.

Because are not a threat to human health, their presence in Washington has not been closely monitored. The researchers dug through data that had been collected by the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center and NOAA National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science for different purposes, coupled it with current observations from the SoundToxins phytoplankton monitoring program, and discovered that these algae species, Protoceratium reticulatum and Akashiwo sanguinea, are correlated with shellfish mortality events stretching as far back as the 1930s.

In 2018 and 2019, with SoundToxins partners’ eyes on the water, and reports of dying shellfish from the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife and the shellfish industry, the research team was able to collect shellfish and water samples for analysis. This set the table to help answer the mystery of what was causing summer mortality in Washington state shellfish.

These findings have significant implications for shellfish growers in the region.

“We are working towards being able to help growers count the cells of yessotoxin-producing organisms in the water and correlate it to an action level,” King explained. “SoundToxins has been conducting similar work for the Washington Department of Health for three ‘human health’ marine biotoxins since 2006. Adding the ‘shellfish killing’ plankton species to the real-time mapping capability of the SoundToxins partnership would allow for shellfish producers and natural resource managers to make informed decisions, such as harvesting their product early or otherwise strategizing to save as much crop as possible.”

King said this research is also a demonstration of the value of partnerships between shellfish producers, plankton monitors, Native tribes, agencies and researchers.

“We were a team of oceanographers, biologists and chemists working together to answer these questions,” King said. “People are able to think differently when you have different people at the table.”

Sometimes, it’s even the key to solving the longstanding mysteries that have been taking place right in your backyard.

For more information, contact:

MaryAnn Wagner, Washington Sea Grant, 206-371-7656, maryannb@uw.edu
Michael Milstein, NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center, michael.milstein@noaa.gov
Sierra Sarkis, NOAA/NCCOS, NCCOS, sierra.sarkis@noaa.gov
Barbara Lewis, NW Indian College,  bjlewis@nwic.edu

To understand how Puget Sound has changed, we first must understand how it used to be. Unlike most major estuaries in the U.S. — and despite the abundance of world-class oceanographic institutions in the area — long-term monitoring of Puget Sound fish populations did not exist until 1990. Filling in this missing information is essential to establishing a baseline that would provide context for the current status of the marine ecosystem, and could guide policymakers in setting more realistic ecosystem-based management recovery targets.

Researchers from the 91̽�� School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, 91̽��Puget Sound Institute, NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife have discovered an unconventional way to help fill in these gaps in data: using old vessel logbooks.

The crews of the 91̽��’s then School of Fisheries’ research vessels R/V Oncorhynchus (1947 to 1955) and R/V Commando (1955 to 1980), both of which were skippered by , took notes on all of the fish tows conducted under their watch. With funding from Washington Sea Grant, the researchers combed through more than 1,000 of these logbook entries to analyze the information regarding the groundfish species caught in each tow, including when and where the fish were caught. Then, the researchers analyzed historical logbook data from 1948 to 1977 and contemporary monitoring data to reveal longer-term trends in the local groundfish populations. The research was published in last month.

Although there were changes throughout the periods analyzed, the researchers did not find that groundfish populations today in Puget Sound look fundamentally different from the historical populations.

“We see the same types of fluctuations in the historical data as in the contemporary data,” said , professor at the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and the study’s lead author. “This suggests that boom and bust populations are natural, and speaks to the importance of having a long time view to establishing a baseline.”

However, some trends did stand out, Essington explained. For example, Pacific cod used to be very common but is rare today, and the abundance of Pacific spiny dogfish has decreased.

The fact that the researchers were able to fill in any of the historical gaps was really a matter of luck: the right people had maintained the research vessels at the right time.

“They were remarkable, the records,” Essington said. “They not only noted the species and size, but also detailed descriptions of the locations. It was amazing what we could reconstruct.”

was a graduate student at the School of Fisheries from 1957 to 1960, during which he ventured out on the Commando along with Oswold and his advisor, Allan DeLacy, to collect data for his research on Puget Sound rockfish. He remembers once being chastised for filling out the logbook incorrectly.

“I had misspelled one of the scientific names — that was the only time I remember that DeLacy got mad at me,” Hitz said. “He said that the logbooks had to be correct.”

This level of precision made Essington’s work possible decades later. For Hitz, the logbooks also became a rich repository of memories.

“When I was going through the logs of the Commando, I found an entry that I had written on May 3, 1960,” he wrote in a 2015 . “It was for trip #6017 and it brought back a wave of memories, since that was my first encounter with the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. At the time I was being considered for a job with the Exploratory group which worked the outside waters from Mexico to the Bering Sea. The first thing that came to my mind was, would I become seasick once I was outside? If so, would three years of graduate school be wasted? There was no class about seasickness given at the [School of Fisheries], but there was talk.”

Although the researchers analyzed logbooks up until 1977, Essington explained that they became considerably less useful after 1973. As Hitz recalls, this was around the time the school began to place more emphasis on chartering the Commando for outside research, rather than using it for students’ education and research.

“I assume the logbooks became less important when the boat was being chartered,” Hitz said.

Essington described the project methods as “half detective work and half computer work.” The detective work involved the researchers carefully perusing the old logbooks while wearing N-95 masks to protect themselves from the mildew and dust (prior to COVID-19). The computer work involved analyzing how the catch rates of 15 groundfish species differed between the historical and contemporary datasets, to understand how the general groundfish populations differed between the two periods.

Given that the details within the logbooks petered out, and then stopped altogether once the Commando was retired, the researchers were forced to leave out an important period in their analysis.

“There was a 17-year gap between the captain’s books and current monitoring, and no amount of scrappiness could fill this in,” Essington said.

The years between the two datasets — the bulk of the 1970s and 80s — also happened to coincide with extensive environmental change in Puget Sound, including the implementation of regulations to address pollution and protect endangered species. A few changes particularly impacted groundfish: For example, the 1974 Boldt decision resulted in increased non-tribal recreational groundfish fishing. Subsequently, the introduction of bag limits, marine protected areas and species-take prohibitions in the late 1980s and early 1990s reduced the intensity of recreational groundfish fishing.

in June 2020, groundfish were added as a food web indicator species for the Puget Sound Partnership’s , which has guided policy since 2010. This research could help shed light on what to look for as healthy for this vital sign, the authors said.

“It might be better to think about baselines in the dynamic sense,” Essington said. “To focus on acceptable ranges of fluctuation, rather than a precise number.”

Other co-authors are and of the Northwest Fisheries Sciences Center; of Puget Sound Institute at 91̽��Tacoma; , an independent consultant who previously worked at the 91̽��School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences; and of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.

This study was funded by Washington Sea Grant, The Seadoc Society and the Lowell Wakefield Endowment.

For more information, contact Essington at essing@uw.edu.

Fisheries managers typically strive to strike a delicate balance between two, often competing, types of needs: the needs for fishermen’s profits and the needs for the planet. But in 1994, entrepreneur John Elkington posited that true sustainability requires consideration of a third “P” — the needs of the people. In making this argument, he coined the term “.”

In a , an interdisciplinary group of researchers used Pacific herring in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, as a case study for modeling the implicit tradeoffs within the triple bottom line that result from various fisheries management decisions. They found that considering spatial dynamics is a key component of this modeling process — for example, considering the geographic areas of the fish populations, the areas that are important to the various communities of people, and the areas that are impacted by management decisions.

Published Sept. 30 in the journal Fish and Fisheries, the study is one of the outcomes of the , a collaboration between the 91̽�� and The Nature Conservancy that aims to use models to provide insights on how to best address complex ocean issues.

Pacific herring provided a relevant and timely prototype for modeling the economic, ecological and socio-cultural tradeoffs within a fishery. Herring is in high commercial demand, is a vital part of the food web, and has been central to the social, cultural and economic life of Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest for millennia. Herring fisheries have also borne out steep management consequences: the collective North American herring fishery collapsed in 1993, and has required careful management to recover.

“There are so many people who rely on fishing as part of their way of life,” said , assistant professor of biological science at Florida State University who led the modeling component of the study. “Everyone wants their piece of the pie. But we need a better way of making decisions regarding fisheries.”

While most herring fisheries remain closed or severely limited, some British Columbia stocks have rebuilt to a level at which managers are considering reopening the fishery. However, several critical factors that would determine the success of reopening these fisheries are still missing, the researchers said, including a social-ecological framework to address issues of equity in decision making by integrating traditional knowledge and ecosystem services into management. This study demonstrates a new and concrete way to fill this void.

These social and cultural considerations are notoriously difficult to quantify in such a way that they can be measured against the economic and ecological ones.

“We started from qualitative ethnographic information, including local and traditional knowledge, to identify indicators linked to various benefits and values of herring,” explained co-author , a social scientist at Washington Sea Grant based at the 91̽��. “We then surveyed different user groups to generate quantitative scores for select indicators to determine outcomes for various fishing sectors, abundances of herring and places of harvest.”

The social benefits of the herring fishery included in the study were the ability for the commercial fishing fleet to practice harvest, the ability for Indigenous Haida to practice harvest, and community and social relationships within the Indigenous Haida community.

The researchers incorporated these social-ecological indicators along with economic and ecological metrics into a model to analyze their relative tradeoffs under different management scenarios. These management scenarios included four target harvest rates of the total herring population, ranging from 10% to 37.5%; three upper-limit harvest thresholds, ranging from 25% to 70%; and two spatial closures, in which a traditional roe, or egg, harvest area is closed to commercial fishing.

“As expected, many management options result in sharp tradeoffs in the triple bottom line,” said co-author , managing director of the Ocean Modeling Forum and lead ecosystem ecologist with the Puget Sound Institute at 91̽��Tacoma. “For example, higher commercial catches reduce ecological and social benefits — this could have been predicted. What’s interesting is where we found more balance among the multiple benefits.”

Spatial closures often resulted in win-win-wins: they allow for commercial harvest at open locations while also protecting cultural benefits and reducing the risk of collapse in protected areas. That said, the location of these closures must be carefully considered, accounting for both ecological productivity and the implications to different user groups. For example, while commercial fishermen are relatively mobile, Indigenous harvesters are often constrained to fishing in traditional areas. This shows the need for fishery management models that allow for evaluation at a spatial scale that is culturally relevant.

No one management strategy within the study’s model optimized the benefits to all of the people, planet and profit factors. However, having a framework to understand the relative tradeoffs to each of these factors is the first step toward responsibly balancing them, the researchers said. The model developed in this case study could be used not only to evaluate management strategies for Pacific herring fisheries as managers consider reopening them, but also for other fisheries that face similar dilemmas across the globe.

“This work has the potential to be game changing,” said co-author , 91̽��professor of practice and lead scientist at the Nature Conservancy. “For years researchers have talked about the triple bottom line but lacked the ability to really assess it. By directly linking quantitative fisheries models for social and cultural outcomes, we now have the ability to truly evaluate the full impacts of alternative management strategies.”

In the 1990s, the endangered status of the short-tailed albatross catalyzed efforts to reduce the number of birds accidentally killed as bycatch in Alaska, home to the country’s biggest fisheries. Marine fisheries scientist , at Washington Sea Grant at the 91̽��, and research associate Kim Dietrich, an independent contractor, were at the forefront of a collaborative research effort that led to Alaska’s longline fisheries adopting streamer lines in 2002, a technology that is towed behind vessels to create a visual barrier that keeps seabirds away from the baited hooks below.

In a new published Jan. 28 in the journal Conservation Biology, Melvin, Dietrich and partners from Oregon State University and the Alaska Fisheries Science Center show that in the time since they were adopted, streamer lines have had an extraordinary impact: seabird bycatch in Alaska’s longline fisheries has been reduced by 77 to 90 percent, saving thousands of birds per year including hundreds of albatrosses.

Melvin said much of this success is thanks to the fishing industry’s active involvement when the team was researching methods to avoid seabird bycatch two decades ago.

“It’s really to the industry’s credit that they were fully engaged in the research and started implementing streamer lines two to three years before they became mandatory,” Melvin said. “The fishermen owned the solution from start to finish.”

The solution also involved training fisheries observers to properly identify seabirds in order to record vessel bycatch. “The data they were able to collect over decades allowed us to monitor and estimate bycatch rates and track the success of this effort,” said co-author Shannon Fitzgerald, a fisheries scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

The researchers arrived at their results by analyzing 23 years’ worth of this meticulously collected fisheries observer data. While they found that bycatch rates remain much lower than the pre-streamer line days, more recently the number of birds hooked has been increasing.

“We have seen a continued increase in seabird bycatch, especially albatross, in Alaskan longline fisheries, with one of the recent years after our study the highest since 2002,” said co-author Rob Suryan, a wildlife specialist at Oregon State University and research ecologist with the Alaska Fisheries Science Center.

In parsing out this trend, the researchers realized that bycatch significantly varied by both fishery and type of bird. The three species of highest conservation concern – the albatrosses – were more likely to be snared by a sablefish or halibut vessel than one that fishes cod. Other bird species, however, were more likely to be hooked by boats that fish for turbot, a type of flatfish.

The researchers looked into the success of other methods of bycatch reduction as well. Fishing at night, when many seabirds are less active, is a tactic commonly used elsewhere in the world. They found that fishing at night dramatically decreased bycatch rates of albatrosses while increasing the fish catch rates of Alaska’s longline fleets – however, it also increased the accidental capture of northern fulmars by 40 percent.

While northern fulmars are not a species of conservation concern, the possibility of accidentally catching more of these seabirds certainly presents an unwelcome tradeoff. Melvin added that many fisheries operate in the summer, when Alaska’s high latitude makes for very short nights; requiring night fishing could hurt the industry by substantially cutting down on the available fishing time.

Importantly, the scientists found that in recent years fewer than 2 percent of the 300 vessels they analyzed accounted for 46 to 78 percent of the bycatch. The authors said it is not clear why these particular boats caught so many birds. Perhaps they encountered unusually aggressive birds that were unable to locate natural prey, or perhaps they represent a newer generation of fishermen who do not feel the same urgency around seabird conservation because they were not working when the issue was first raised.

Whatever the reason, it suggests it’s possible that resource managers don’t need to rethink their entire seabird bycatch strategy. Targeting the few vessels with anomalously high bycatch rates with outreach about the proper use of streamer lines could prove to be enough.

This study was funded by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

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For more information, contact Melvin at edmelvin@uw.edu or 206-543-9968.

The productive ocean off Washington state’s Olympic Coast supports an abundant web of life including kelp forests, fish, shellfish, seabirds and marine mammals. The harvest and use of these treaty-protected marine resources have been central to the local tribes’ livelihoods, food security and cultural practices for thousands of years. But ocean acidification is changing the chemistry of these waters, putting many coastal species – and the human communities that depend upon them – under threat.

With a new $700,000 grant awarded from the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program, scientists from the 91̽��’s Applied Physics Laboratory, Washington Sea Grant and the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean have teamed with federal and tribal partners to study the social and ecological vulnerabilities of Olympic Coast ocean acidification. The collaborative team hopes their work will enable Pacific Northwest decision makers to better anticipate, evaluate and manage the significant and unique risks that ocean change presents to tribal communities.

“The goal of this project is to marry two currently disparate data sets; ocean chemistry and biological data collected by natural scientists, and social science data that includes how people use the resources that may be impacted,” said , an oceanographer at the 91̽��Applied Physics Laboratory.

Much of the first dataset already exists, as researchers from groups including UW, NOAA, the local tribes and the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary have been measuring these biological and chemical trends for the past few decades. The group will synthesize these existing data sets, and use social science to help to hone in on the trends that will have the biggest impacts to the local people – including members of the Hoh, Makah and Quileute tribes, and the Quinault Indian Nation – whose ways of life are inextricably tied to the marine environment.

When it comes to understanding the effects of ocean acidification, “there’s a whole ocean of species scientists could focus on,” explained , social scientist at Washington Sea Grant. “But we want to focus on the ones that are identified as the most important by the communities. What are the species and the food webs that the community depends upon for economic and cultural well-being – for their identity and traditional practices?”

The collaborators will assess these and other questions related to the social dimensions of ocean acidification through community-participatory methods such as ethnographic interviews and workshops. Once they have synthesized the existing chemical and biological datasets and determined the roles of key marine species to the communities, the team will model future projections and estimate the impacts that ocean acidification will have on those species. Then, they will identify the aspects of community well-being that are most vulnerable to these ecological changes.

The researchers and tribal members will use the data to work together to find the next step: viable solutions that will help the community navigate these impacts. Ultimately, the group hopes to find community-driven strategies that can increase the ability of the tribes to prepare for and respond to how ocean acidification will affect them. They also hope the approach and techniques used in the project will be transferable to other communities who face similar challenges.

“The tie to the ocean is fundamental to who tribal people are – to their history, relationships, homelands – everything. The impacts to the ocean are felt deeply and in complex ways,” said Poe. “And so the solutions also need to be carefully matched and driven by the community needs and priorities.”

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For more information, contact Poe at mpoe@uw.edu or 206-685-8209 and Newton at newton@apl.washington.edu or 206-543-9152

For decades, resource managers agreed that removing the two dams on the Elwha River would be a big win for the watershed as a whole and, in particular, for its anadromous trout and salmon. The dams sat on the river for more than 100 years, trapping approximately 30 million tonnes of sediment behind their concrete walls. As the dams were removed between 2012 and 2014, much of this sediment was released downstream — and scientists had little comparisons to draw from to understand what this sediment load would do to the marine ecosystem at the mouth of the river.

In the time since the dams’ removal, scientists from 91̽��-based , the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington Department of Natural Resources, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the Environmental Protection Agency and the  91̽��have sifted through eight years of data collected before and after the dam removal projects to analyze the impacts the resulting sediment load has had on the nearshore ecosystems near the mouth of the Elwha River. Their in the journal PLOS ONE in December 2017.

“The main impetus for the dam removal was the salmon reintroduction,” said study co-author Stephen Rubin, a USGS fishery biologist. “But it was also about a whole ecosystem restoration, all the way from above the dams to the strait.”

In the short-term, however, some hypothesized that the sediment influx to the nearby coastal marine ecosystem could negatively impact certain species. This study sought to monitor these potential impacts and the ecosystem’s progression as it adjusted to post-dam life.

They found that how organisms were affected depended on the type of sediment that was deposited in their habitat (for example, whether it was sand or mud) and the local turbidity (how murky suspended sediment had made the water). Still, some organisms were more resilient to the changes than others.

According to their results, the dam removal projects did not result in significant overall changes in the invertebrate or fish communities. Kelp, however, markedly decreased. Understandably so, since kelp relies on light for photosynthesis, and when more sediment is suspended in the water, there is less light available to them.

“We viewed this as an opportunity to find out what really happens to the nearshore environment after a dam is removed,” said co-author , coastal hazards specialist at Washington Sea Grant.

The researchers used SCUBA surveys and towed video transects to quantify the relative abundances of algae, invertebrate species and benthic fish living along the shore near the river, and then compared these findings to the patterns of sediment influx using data collected by the USGS and the 91̽��School of Oceanography on substrate changes, and MODIS satellite imagery to track changes in the suspended sediment in the water column.

“We had a huge suite of data we were working with, which is one of the things that made this such a complicated endeavor,” Miller said.

While the study showed a decrease in kelp, Miller notes that these are still relatively early days on the Elwha’s road to recovery. More recent data suggests that, over the last two years, kelp populations at the mouth of the river have already begun to rebound.

“Even where we saw a negative consequence for one group of organisms, kelp, in our more recent surveys we’ve already begun to see a rapid recovery,” Miller said. Another proverbial grain of sand to add to the pile of knowledge that could help resource managers elsewhere assess the impacts of events that send large amounts of sediment into the coastal zone – and answer questions such as whether to remove dams on their own local rivers.

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For more information, contact Miller at 360-417-6460 or immiller@uw.edu.

The grants were awarded through two competitions designed to identify projects that will lead to the responsible development of the domestic shellfish, finfish and seaweed aquaculture industries. NOAA received 126 proposals requesting nearly $58 million in federal funds. For each of the 32 accepted proposals, every two federal dollars granted is matched by non-federal funds, bringing the total investment in the projects to $13.9 million.

“Washington shellfish farmers have led the nation in production of high-quality cultured products for decades,” said Penny Dalton, director of Washington Sea Grant. “Two of the projects will focus on environmental challenges the industry faces. The third will pilot commercial operations to grow sablefish.”

Washington Sea Grant’s largest award was $824,144 for research on developing sablefish (also known as black cod) aquaculture. While sablefish are highly sought after, their populations are not increasing and the wild fisheries are highly controlled. Aquaculture offers a possible solution to address the gap between sablefish supply and demand. The project brings together scientists from the 91̽�� and NOAA Manchester with Jamestown S’Klallam tribal experts in an experiment to grow 10,000 sablefish to harvest size.

Washington Sea Grant also received funding to address potential impediments to the shellfish aquaculture industry. While many local shellfish farms focus on introduced species, interest in culturing native shellfish species is rising. However, interbreeding captive and wild shellfish raises concerns about potential genetic risks to wild populations. The grant will provide $149,530 to develop genetic risk assessment tools and evaluate management strategies for mitigating these risks.

Lastly, the organization received $149,995 for a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, 91̽��and NOAA scientists to research the functional role of shellfish habitat as compared to natural habitat. This project will address two major barriers to the sustainable growth of shellfish aquaculture in Washington: public perception and permitting.

“This country, with its abundant coastline, should not have to import billions of pounds of seafood each year,” . “These grants will promote aquaculture projects that will help us reduce our trade deficit in this key industry.” As the aquaculture industry is already a mainstay of the state, Washington is poised to play a vital role in its expansion.