Animals

Today NOAA Fisheries listed Bocaccio as endangered and Canary and Yelloweye Rockfish as threatened. These are 3 of about 26 long-lived rockfish species that inhabit the Salish Sea region. Hopefully listing will eventually results in recovery plans that restore the populations of these three fish. To find out more about 64 threatened and endangered species in the Salish Sea, check out SeaDoc's biennial review:
http://www.seadocsociety.org/files/pdfs/GB-PS_Species_of_Concern_2008%20Manuscript.pdf

Also see:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2011714303_rockfish28m.html

Restoring a vast, complex ecosystem like the Salish Sea costs money — that long green stuff with the short future. With politicians and public opinion involved, tough fights often break out over spending on improvements that, to some, appear subjective: Is it worth $100,000 to remove a certain bulkhead or replant a certain eel grass bed? Maybe… And that’s where good science can inform great policy.

One of the best examples of science coming to the rescue of a dollar-and-cents conservation issue occurred when the SeaDoc Society recently got caught up in the question of abandoned fishing nets. In partnership with the Northwest Straits Initiative, SeaDoc developed a predictive model that clearly shows the cost of these ghost nets that continue to trap and kill marine life for decades.

Northwest Straits Initiative-funded researchers made multiple dives on derelict nets, counting trapped critters, studying decomposition rates, and determining how much of the dead marine life fell out of the nets as they were recovered (Over 17% of the catch never made it to the surface, showing how critical it is to have underwater scientists on the job). SeaDoc then dove into the data, actually inventing a statistical model to predict each cast-off net’s killing capacity.

The results? Abandoned nets catch and kill more than 1,000 invertebrates (mainly crabs), 150 fish, and nearly 80 birds every year, year after year after year – and most of these silent killers have been doing their dirty work since the 1970s. Run that data through the seafood value calculator and it quickly adds up, with each net wasting $19,656 in Dungeness crab alone, every 10 years. The one-time cost to retrieve a derelict net? $1,358. It doesn’t take an accountant to do that cost-benefit analysis.

Only through funding from private donors like you was SeaDoc able to do this ground-breaking (and net-cutting) science, which has led to clear policy and, more importantly, vital and measurable improvement in the Salish Sea ecosystem. Thank you.

To view the manuscript just published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, click here (pdf).

For more about SeaDoc's derelict fishing gear project, see our lost fishing gear page.

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In the March 17, 2010 Federal Register, NOAA lists the Eulachon (Thaleichthys pacificus) as Threatened under the US Endangered Species Act. This fish, also called the candle fish because it is packed with so many calories you can light a dried one like a candle, is an important food source for many marine fish, birds and mammals. Historically it has been an important food source for many Native American tribes.

Interestingly, we don't have good data on Eulachon numbers in the Salish Sea. Unlike with herring, Washington State does not conduct quantitative stock assessments for eulachon, but it is believed that eulachon stocks have declined in the Columbia (WOEMP, 2001) and Elwha Rivers (Shaffer et al., 2007). In British Columbia, the Frasier River eulachon spawning stock biomass has collapsed and is at a precariously low level (DFO, 2007).

The listing of this species will hopefully ensure that more work is done to understand the natural history of this species in the Salish Sea so that we can ultimately restore the population.

Find out more about the listing of the eulachon at:

http://www.nwr.noaa.gov/Other-Marine-Species/Eulachon.cfm

SeaDoc is the only organization that tracks threatened or endangered species in the Salish Sea on an ecosystem-wide scale. Since 2002, we have been tracking "species of concern" as listed by Washington, British Columbia, the US Federal Government and the Canadian Federal Government.

Eulachon are listed as threatened (BLUE list) by BC, are candidates for listing in WA state, are Candidates under the Canadian COSEWIC with a status report expected this year, and were Candidates for listing under the US Federal ESA until now.

Download our PDF listing the species of concern and describing the listing processes (we publish this report every 2 years):

Gaydos and Brown, 2009
http://www.seadocsociety.org/files/pdfs/GB-PS_Species_of_Concern_2008%20...

Harbor seal populations have exploded nearly tenfold in the Salish Sea since the 1970s, while at the same time many rockfish species have plummeted. Some fishermen blame that on the increase in hungry seals. But coincidence is not science. So who ya gonna call?
 
SeaDoc-funded scientists rolled up their sleeves and collected almost 1,000 samples of seal scat in the San Juan Islands. Detailed analysis of these samples revealed that herring make up nearly 60% of these harbor seals' diets, with their next favorite meals being salmon, pollock and cod-like fish. The seal's total menu, though, was surprisingly diverse, with seals chowing down on at least 35 species of fish! Still, through the entire first year of the study, less than 3% of samples contained rockfish bones. Case closed? Not so fast...
 
In the second year, 12% of the samples contained rockfish remains, particularly in the winter when there are fewer salmon locally. With all the seals in the Salish Sea, those numbers could impact rockfish recovery. That doesn't mean, however, that we should start controlling seal populations: this study showed seals also have a taste for dogfish, another major fish predator. So fewer seals could mean more dogfish. The real answer is to remember that all parts of our ecosystem are tightly intertwined. Rockfish recovery depends upon ecosystem recovery, including salmon recovery, herring recovery and so on around the Sea.

More information on this topic:

• The original report on this study (so you can see what we've learned since the first round)
• The Puget Sound Partnership's resource page on rockfish.
• SeaDoc's comments on the proposed (12/2009) rockfish conservation plan by the WA Dept of Fish & Wildlife.
• All the info on our site about rockfish (automatic search)
• All the info on the site about predator/prey relationships (automatic search)

(You can do these last two searches yourself by choosing "browse by species" or "browse by issue" from the Salish Sea menu at left.)