SeaDoc Christens New Boat, the Nancy Bee

Last year Steve Alboucq and Josie and Wally Barrow donated a beautiful 15-foot Boston Whaler to SeaDoc. Yesterday we had the pleasure of christening her the “Nancy Bee” in honor of Steve’s late wife and Wally and Josie’s daughter Nancy, who died a few years ago. Nancy loved the ocean, was a SeaDoc volunteer, a beach naturalist, a KWIAT volunteer, loved SeaDoc’s summer interns and loved bees and other pollinators. Now her boat namesake will safely carry SeaDoc interns for summers and summers to come.

SeaDoc Board member Rochelle Severson and Barb Clever cooked up a storm and hosted the event. We ate Fresh Thai veggie rolls, Thai basil wrapped shrimp with sweet chili sauce, pork, scallop and shrimp su man, kibosh with sumac and yogurt cheer labna, vegan butternut soup with bacon and parmesan, focaccia flat bread with all the fixings and goat cheese and crab kisses. Now that’s how you christen a boat.

We are eternally grateful to Steve Albouq and Josie and Wally Barrow for donating the Nancy Bee and to Rochelle and Barb for hosting a wonderful evening. It takes a lot of supporters and donors to make SeaDoc’s good work happen and we appreciate it all. Thank you!

Another Year of Marine Mammal Stranding Response, Thanks to Federal Grant

The SeaDoc Society, in partnership with the San Juan County Marine Mammal Stranding Network, a program of The Whale Museum, was recently awarded another one-year federal grant through the John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue and Assistance Program.

This is the 14th time we have received this important grant. Funds will enable the Stranding Network to continue field response during the 2018 season, which includes preventing the harassment of live stranded animals, transporting injured or harassed animals to rehabilitation centers, and collecting critical data from dead stranded animals.

SeaDoc will help diagnose disease and other causes of marine mammal strandings, including identification of diseases and parasites that can affect marine mammals, domestic animals and even people. Examples of diseases diagnosed in the past include brucellosis, fungal infections caused by Cryptococcus gattii, and the presence of harmful algal toxins in stranded marine mammals.

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Banner photo courtesy of The Whale Museum.

What’s happening under the Salish Sea?

By Joe Gaydos

For the past two weeks SeaDoc, collaborating scientists, and trained volunteer divers have been spending a lot of time underwater. For a total of 15 dives, Joe Gaydos, NOAA Scientist Adam Obaza, and Whale Museum scientific diver Jen Olson conducted annual surveys looking for young of the year rockfish (also called YOYs). While last year was a big recruitment year with thousands and thousands of yellowtail rockfish born, this year we only found one YOY (seen in the first 10 seconds of the video above).

Working with Janna Nichols at REEF Environmental Education Foundation and Bandito Charters, we also hosted more than a dozen trained citizen scientist divers to conduct more than 100 surveys for all fish species, and a subset of 40 or so invertebrates, including species of concern like northern abalone and sunflower sea stars. We did see a few abalone and a few sunflower stars, but not as many as we would have liked. Check out some of the other amazing animals we saw while diving in the video that accompanies this piece. Interested in becoming a trained citizen scientist diver? Check out www.reef.org.

SeaDoc Finds Millions of Scuba Dollars Bubbling Through Local Economy

For most folks, the surface of the Salish Sea exists as a beautiful albeit slightly forbidding border. Our inland sea is wonderful to ferry or paddle across and a fine comfy home for seals, killer whales and other critters. But jump into that cold water? No thanks.

There’s an entire subclass of people, though, who look at our chilly green water and see opportunity. Escorted around reefs by curious kelp greenling, local divers regularly engage in staring contests with lingcod, link arms with giant octopus, peep at nudibranchs and attend rockfish schools.

This hardy band of deep breathers knows that underwater images in books like The Salish Sea: Jewel of the Pacific Northwest aren’t just exotic, aspirational fantasies; divers see these colorful creatures every time they strap on a mask. With such awesome diving in our front yard, it’s no wonder that Washington State has the 3rd highest number of certified scuba divers per capita in the U.S.

A newly released SeaDoc study led by Dr. Katharine Wellman, resource economist with Northern Economics, asked local divers about the most important factors in choosing underwater sites to visit. Not surprisingly, number one was “abundant wildlife.”

Spending their down time literally immersed in the environment, divers naturally tend to be passionate advocates for healthy marine ecosystems. Many even volunteer as citizen scientists, doing underwater surveys, deploying fish-tracking instruments, and acting as early warning systems for unusual mortality events like the 2013 Sea Star Wasting Disease outbreak.

Research has also shown that divers do more than their share to contribute to a healthy local economy, spending more per activity day than any other outdoor enthusiasts. Our new study found that just the approximately 1,000 state residents who belong to Washington’s scuba clubs contribute five million diving dollars to the state’s economy each year.

“Considering that there are an estimated 100,000 certified divers in the state,” says Dr. Wellman, “and thousands more in British Columbia, plus all those who travel to the area to dive, we’re talking about a deep financial impact on the region." Diving, together with other recreational activities like fishing, kayaking, coastal hiking, wildlife and whale watching, contributes billions to our local economy in direct and non-market benefits.

Each one of those dollars and all the related jobs are dependent on a functional, flourishing Salish Sea ecosystem, something we at SeaDoc are constantly working on whether we’re at our desks, in the lab or when we’re lucky enough to be getting down with our dive buddies.

Read the full report here: Economic Impacts of Washington State Resident Scuba Divers.

SeaDoc would like to thank Rick Stratton of Diver News Network; Mike Racine of Washington SCUBA Alliance;  Josh Reyneveld and Maya Kocian of Earth Economics; Dan Tonnes, Adam Obaza, Steve Copps and Leif Anderson of NOAA; Janna Nichols of REEF; Craig Burley and Dayv Lowry of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife; Patrick Christie at the Univ. of Washington; Fran Wilshussen and Preston Hardison at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, and the many dive shops, clubs, and recreational divers who helped scope this project and collect data used for the economic valuation.

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Banner photo: A diver gets an audience with a Puget Sound King Crab (Lopholithodes mandtii). Photo courtesy of Brandon Cole.

Meet SeaDoc Society's 2017 Summer Interns

Each summer, SeaDoc brings one or more rising third-year veterinary students to Orcas Island to assist with research projects in conjunction with the Whale Museum in Friday Harbor. The eight-week internship is a great opportunity for vet students to get involved in wildlife health issues. One of their primary roles is to help respond to marine mammal strandings, but they also participate in medical rounds at the Wolf Hollow Wildlife Rehabilitation Center and they work closely with volunteers and spend a good deal of time educating and speaking with the public. This year's interns are Alyssa Capuano and Devon England from the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine and Amber Backwell from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.

Summer housing for the interns has been generously provided by the Hoglund family, whom we thank deeply for their support of SeaDoc. Get to know each of the interns below!

Alyssa Capuano

It is a dream come true being a part of The SeaDoc Society as a veterinary intern this summer! Originally from Long Island, I have moved coast to coast following my passion for science, education, wildlife, and the ocean. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara where I experienced the life-changing world of scuba diving, I worked as a marine science educator at the Catalina Island Marine Institute. My curiosity for marine biology brought me to the University of Miami where I completed a graduate degree in marine mammal science. My career goals to protect marine wildlife and their ecosystems through research, education, and medicine encouraged me to attend veterinary school at UC Davis. My research with Dr. Walter Boyce at UCD focuses on influenza virus exposure in marine mammals, an important link between marine mammal disease, the ocean environment, and human health. In my free time I love hiking, scuba diving, paddle boarding, and spending time with family, friends, and fellow ocean enthusiasts. I am very grateful to connect my love of the ocean and marine mammals this summer as I contribute to the important mission of The SeaDoc Society!

Devon England

My love for the ocean and the animals that inhabit it started pretty much from day one—born and raised in Southern California just 30 minutes from the Pacific Ocean, some of my favorite childhood memories are of spending hours at the beach looking for sand crabs or admiring the huge range of mollusks and anemones at local tidepools. This love of both science and animals transformed into a desire to become a veterinarian when I was eight years old, a path I have been following ever since. All throughout my many years of education, first during my undergraduate at Cornell and continuing through my first two years of vet school at UC Davis, I have sought out experiences to work with and learn about marine life: from volunteering at marine mammal rehabilitation centers in San Pedro and Sausalito to spending a semester abroad in Queensland, Australia home of the incredible Great Barrier Reef and the multitude of oceanic life that call it home. The SeaDoc society internship program has thus been on my radar for quite some time now, and I am beyond thrilled to be spending my final summer vacation before entering my clinical year on the beautiful Orcas Island! Working for an organization like the SeaDoc Society—which combines two concepts I am extremely passionate about: veterinary medicine and environmental stewardship—is a dream come true and I am loving taking part in just some of projects the fantastic team of Joe Gaydos, Jean Lyle and Markus Naugle have devoted their careers to. I hope to take what I learn here this summer into my future career—which I hope will in some way involve caring for marine wildlife and their ecosystems—and continue to spread the ideals of SeaDoc wherever on this planet life might take me!

Amber Backwell

My passion for wildlife and being outdoors is what led me to beautiful Orcas Island and the SeaDoc Society!  I moved to Vancouver, British Columbia (from Ontario) in 2009 to pursue a Masters in Public Health and immediately fell in love with the west coast.  I worked in spinal cord injury research for two years upon completion of my Masters, after which I flew one-way to London, England and travelled the world for just shy of a year.  I needed time to recalibrate personally and professionally and reflect on what it was that I wanted to do with my life. It was in the far west of Nepal, near Bardia National Park, on a tuk tuk ride that I realized I needed to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a veterinarian. Upon returning home to Canada I completed the prerequisite courses and applied to and was accepted at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where I am now in my fourth year of the DVM program.  My time at the WCVM has been difficult albeit rewarding in so many ways. Last summer I had the opportunity to travel with a school club to three African countries where we volunteered with some amazing wildlife veterinarians and were able to work with many different wildlife species, my favorites being large cats and rhinos!  When I’m not in school or traveling the world, I enjoy hiking, camping, horseback riding, reading and spending time with my two cats.  The Pacific Northwest is my home now and I hope that through my career I can help protect our beautiful environment and the animals with which we share it.  The SeaDoc Society does incredible work in this area and I am so thrilled to be here learning more about the Salish Sea and helping out with Society’s various projects!

Learn more about the internship program.

Harbor Seal Stranding Response in the Salish Sea (VIDEO)

Every year, the SeaDoc Society hosts interns for the summer in collaboration with The Whale Museum and the San Juan County Marine Mammal Stranding Network. In this video, two of our interns respond to a call about a harbor seal pup on Orcas Island. One of our 2016 interns, Megan Mangini, a student at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, explains how the response network works and what she gained from her experience as a summer intern. SeaDoc is part of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center, which is part of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Big thanks to the Hoglund family for supporting the SeaDoc Society and generously donating lodging to the interns each summer. We deeply appreciate it! Stay tuned for some darting practice footage from our 2017 interns next month!

Note: The pup in the video above was re-sighted in the wild once after being tagged, but specifics beyond that are unknown. 

First Guardians to Future Scientists: New Board Members Expand SeaDoc's Reach

Connections to the Salish Sea run deep for the SeaDoc Society’s two newest board members.

Ardi Kveven

“My grandparents had a cabin out on Lummi Island,” says Ardi Kveven, who was born and raised in Everson, WA. “Growing up, I spent time every summer exploring the beaches and experiencing all that the Salish Sea has to offer.”

Those early adventures sparked Ardi’s life-long interest in marine science and her passion for sharing what she learned with others. Earning a biology degree from University of Washington and a Masters in Science Education from Western Washington U, she embarked on a career teaching oceanography to high school and college students.

In 2003, Ardi founded the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA), the only program of its kind in the US. Along with core classes, ORCA students receive an intensive, hands-on, college-level marine science education that enables them to graduate with both their high school diploma and an associate degree from Everett Community College.

Working with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Ardi has developed ORCA into a world-class educational program complete with a waterfront lab and its own research vessel.

“Exposing our young people to the Salish Sea provides a connection to the place they live,” says Ardi, who’s excited about the chance to foster close connections between her students and the SeaDoc Society.

“Powerful programs are about the passion of the individuals who choose to be a part of them,” she says. “I appreciate the passionate people who choose to be part of SeaDoc, and I applaud their enthusiastic efforts to save the Salish Sea. I look forward to strengthening the opportunity for our students to join those efforts and to feel empowered to make a difference.”

In recent years, some of the most powerful and effective groups making a difference in the Salish Sea’s health have been the Coast Salish tribes and First Nations. And another new SeaDoc board member we’re thrilled to have join the team, Larry W. Campbell, Sr., is a distinguished elder of one of those tribes, the Swinomish.

arry Campbell

Larry, whose tribal name is Wanaseah, is currently the Community Health Specialist For Climate Change in the Swinomish Environmental Health Program.

"Ninety percent of our tribal land borders the water," says Larry. "So we're very sensitive to changes in sea level and chemistry that will effect everything from our economy and health to our salmon runs and ancestral sites."

Before beginning his three decades of service as a Swinomish government and cultural leader, Larry made his living out on the water as a salmon fisherman. He first worked with SeaDoc several years ago on a project to evaluate the impact of increased energy development in the Salish Sea region.

“We know how to measure impacts and classify threats to wildlife,” says Joe Gaydos, SeaDoc’s Science Director, “but Larry helped us identify the species that were of particular economic, cultural, and spiritual value to the Coast Salish tribes and First Nations.”

Since the tribes are co-managers of Salish Sea natural resources, concerns for species important to their way of life carry extra weight when it comes to management decisions, and can often determine whether impactful projects like coal ports move forward.

The Coast Salish philosophy that every species and element of the ecosystem are important and interconnected meshes perfectly with the SeaDoc Society’s scientific beliefs, just as Ardi Kveven’s dedication to educating young people meshes with our belief that SeaDoc's work is pointless if we don’t engage those who will continue the mission into the future.

“We’re so fortunate to add these two new board members,” says SeaDoc Director Markus Naugle. “Ardi connects the society to the next generation of marine scientists and conservationists, while Larry further bonds us to the very first guardians of the Salish Sea. We look forward to calling on their ideas, guidance and wisdom in the years to come.”

Please join us in welcoming Ardi and Larry aboard!

On An Acre Shy of Eternity: Micro Landscapes at the Edge (Book Review)

By Robert Dash (2017). ISBN: 978-0-578-18871-3

Review by Joe Gaydos Science Director, SeaDoc Society

When Bob Dash asked if we'd review his book, On An Acre Shy of Eternity: Micro Landscapes at the Edge, I admit questioning how a book about one acre of land could be relevant to the Salish Sea and the world's oceans.

I wasn't even through the Preface when I realized that Dash's fascination with edges, or what he calls the places "where alien worlds collide," was akin to my preoccupation with how little separation there really is between the land and sea.

To convey the concept, I often tell stories of salmon, bears, American dippers, and marbled murrelets - animals that defy the land and sea segregation. Dash, the artist with a camera and poet with a pen, does it ever more subtly and more convincingly. By the time you've admired and re-admired his photographs and read and re-read his poems, you see how interconnected this one acre is and you're left wondering how you could have ever doubted that the land and sea are inseparable.

At first glance, you will be inspired and wonder where in the Salish Sea you can find Dash's magical little acre of land and how you can arrange a visit to take it in first hand. After enjoying beautiful photographs of birds and scanning electron microscope images of their feathers or thinking about "this land as an essay" while reading free verse poetry juxtaposed to striking photography, you will realize that a visit to Dash's acre is not really what you need.

Instead what you need to do is open your eyes and see that we are all living on our own "acre shy of eternity," we just didn't know it. Dash opens our eyes so subtly and so convincingly that you, like me, may walk away from reading his book thinking you already knew what you really just learned. On An Acre Shy of Eternity will intensify not only your view of the world, but your love for it as well.

Who are SeaDoc Society’s stakeholders?

By Markus Naugle

Can you hear me up there?  It’s gotten so noisy down here I can hardly hear myself breathe.  I’m also having a hard time seeing over distance and the water feels a bit different.  My quillback rockfish family and I have seen a lot of change over the past 100 years, and much of it makes me wonder if we’ll live to see another century more.  But I know there’s hope.

The SeaDoc staff, its volunteers and veterinary interns, the Board of Directors and Scientific Advisors, and the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine have been helping to understand and heal our Salish Sea ecosystem through science over the past 15 years. We celebrate your dedicated effort to educate, connect, restore, and protect this place we call home; with your ownership and tireless work, we swim hopefully toward new waters.  But some of my friends are still threatened or disappearing at an alarming rate.

From down here, it’s difficult to see exactly what is causing the problem.  Tanker and container ship traffic, unsustainable fishing techniques, waste water and sewage runoff…at the core of our problems is a growing population of humans who need to eat and work.  So please use your creativity and human connection in making every effort to educate and include them as part of the solution, rather than alienating them as part of the problem.

We’re immensely grateful down here for the SeaDoc Society funders and concerned citizens who provide resources to understand our precarious web of life, and the elusive, shifting balance that is necessary for its viable future.  With your support, the scientific and academic communities can seek and find objective information with new insights into the extent of human impact, leading to development of strategies that support sustainability.  Government entities at the municipal, state, federal, and tribal levels use these scientific findings to define new regulations, policies, and procedures that manage and protect, helping to ensure that their constituents and Salish citizens enjoy a quality of life that breeds health and happiness as a foundation for peaceful coexistence.

While my friends and I swim, fly, and move freely, many of the two-leggeds are flummoxed by those imaginary black lines that define countries, states, and tribal nations, impeding progress towards area-wide solutions that preserve our home.  To the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who are working in harmony to find trans-boundary solutions, we give thanks for your focus on connection and sharing to implement solutions that will restore and protect our Sea.

My hauled-out pinniped friends and spy-hopping cetacean residents share that they see myriad outdoor enthusiasts cycling to Lime Kiln, paddling sea kayaks, and peering wide-eyed over rails of all shapes of bi-national boats, funding Salish Sea tourism and commerce such as restaurants, hotels, and guesthouses as well as the advertisers, printers, and web developers who publicize their services, and airlines, car rental agencies, and collective transporters who deliver them to our teeming waters.  Businesses and the residents whom they employ in the San Juan and Gulf Islands, and entire Salish Sea depend, in some capacity, on our fragile existence.

The employees, stockholders, and billions of worldwide customers of thriving Seattle corporations, such as Amazon, Microsoft, Boeing, Starbucks, and REI, also benefit from our Salish existence.  They attract high quality, diverse workers for not only career opportunities and financial benefits but also this magnificent natural backyard playground that supports their health, well-being, and quality of life.

In fact, all of the human population of approximately 8 million people in the Salish Sea can be considered stakeholders in our shared future.  Like the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, diverse, abundantly rich, natural resources and unparalleled beauty are fueling creativity and the development of industries such as high tech, biotech, and money management with entrepreneurship becoming a regional norm.  It would be difficult to find a person or group within the Salish Sea region that does not hold a direct interest or shared investment in our sustainability.

But perhaps the biggest stakeholders of all, should we choose to acknowledge fully our interconnected sacred balance, are the 38 species of mammals, 172 species of birds, 253 species of fish, 2 species of reptiles and more than 3,000 macro-invertebrates who call the Salish Sea home.  Without us, without clean water, air, earth and falling sun rays that support our critical viability, there is no jewel of the Pacific Northwest.  So, on behalf of my rockfish kin and all the creatures that inhabit the Salish Sea, we thank you from our depths and urge you to keep going.  We need each and every one of you to invest in our shared future and keep this jewel sparkling.

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Banner photo: quillback rockfish can live to be 90 years old. Photo courtesy of J. Nichols.

Power to the Puffins

Tufted Puffins are iconic seabirds. Adapted to "flying underwater" to catch schooling forage fish and invertebrate prey with their large orange bills, puffins were once considered common in the Salish Sea. Historically, more than 40 puffin nesting colonies were documented in Washington, however recent work found nesting birds at only 17 sites and the population is thought to number less than a thousand birds.

With the support of private donors like you, SeaDoc helped write the scientific Status Review for Tufted Puffins, which the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) used to list the bird as Endangered. This State-private partnership, based on trust and scientific respect, was so unique that we even published a paper on it.

Thanks to a very generous donation by SeaDoc Founder, Kathy Dickenson, we're back at it. This time, SeaDoc is teaming up with WDFW to write a recovery plan for these amazing birds. Recovery plans are action plans, often seen as the place where the rubber meets the road for conservation. This plan, which will be written by Drs. Thor Hanson (a SeaDoc special hire for this project), Scott Pearson (WDFW), and Peter Hodum (Univ. of Puget Sound), will detail what we need to do to bring this bird back.

We can't wait to make the puffin common again and look forward to keeping you updated on the recovery plan, but more importantly, on puffin recovery.

One Person Can Make a Difference… and it Can be You, Too!

By Markus Naugle

Courtesy of Hedgebrook

We’re extremely grateful to Seattle-born philanthropist and environmentalist Nancy Skinner Nordhoff who has put us one step closer to completing our Salish Sea Forever Campaign! Thanks to her generous $50K matching grant, every dollar you donate will now be counted as two. One more person has made a difference and you can, too. So please tell all your friends and give today to help us achieve our $1.5M goal, doubling our capacity to protect the Salish Sea…forever.

Nancy Nordhoff has dedicated her life to philanthropy, learning first through the family’s Skinner Foundation then honing her skills and expanding her reach through efforts such as the United Way, Seattle Junior League, Seattle CityClub, Pacific Northwest Grantmaker’s Forum (later renamed Philanthropy Northwest) and the Goosefoot Community Fund for sustainable community development on Whidbey Island. Her tireless work has earned many accolades and honors while empowering women, supporting rural communities, and promoting environmental protection of Washington state’s flora and fauna.  In 1985, she founded Hedgebrook, a women’s writers retreat on Whidbey Island. She is a mother of three, a former pilot, and an avid baseball fan. And obviously, a fan of a healthy Salish Sea. Thank you, Nancy, for your lifetime of support, of SeaDoc and so many others!

If you haven't already donated to the Salish Sea Forever Campaign to help SeaDoc increase our impact, please make a difference today by doubling your donation to restore and protect our extraordinarily diverse and uniquely beautiful Salish Sea ecosystem for generations to come.

'A Sea of Glass' Shrinks the Gap Between Art and Science (Book Review)

Book review by Joe Gaydos, SeaDoc Society

A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas' Fragile Legacy in an Ocean at Risk
By Drew Harvell
University of California Press, Oakland, California
2016

With highly cited publications in Science, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and every other prestigious scientific journal you can imagine, Cornell University Professor Drew Harvell is a scientist. And honestly, scientists are not known for being art aficionados. But when Drew was appointed to curate a stunning collection of glass invertebrates purchased by Cornell in the late 1800s as a teaching tool, she had the wisdom to recognize beauty and the power it has to change us for the better. These 569 glass animal pieces were made by the famed European glass artists Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka and purchased with the help of Cornell's first President to teach land-locked students about the ocean's incredible biodiversity. Dusty, long forgotten, and often broken, these artistic pieces were still so beautiful and so true to life they compelled Harvell to undertake a worldwide quest to find their living counterparts. Like the fate of the actual glass collection since its creation 160 years ago, the world's oceans too had been neglected, not well cared for, and in more places than we care to admit, broken.

A Sea of Glass is Harvell's personal story. One where the joy of experiencing the perfection of Blaschkas' glass counterfeits actually shrinks the fabricated gap between art and science. It also takes a hard look at how the oceans have changed since the Blaschkas' created their first piece ... a time when the oceans' were unexploited, healthy, and teaming with exciting creatures, most of which had yet to be discovered or described. The fragility of our oceans and what we have done to them is well detailed in Harvell's imaginary discussion with Leopold Blaschka where she shares her passion for the artistry of the ocean's vast invertebrates and also explains to him how we have squandered the ocean's riches in our quest for improved life and material goods. After a heartfelt monologue that includes the toll that ocean acidification is already taking on so many shell-forming invertebrates, Harvell herself recognizes that the depressing story she portrays sounds more like science fiction than fact.

Just as Harvell was able to recognize the value of and restore the Blaschkas' neglected art, she too reminds us that there is so much we can do to revive our fragile oceans. In the end, Harvell's well-written story makes the reader want to create a future that generations look back on as we do the work of the Blashkas - with pride for having created something lasting and inspirational that makes the world a better place. After all, shouldn't that be the goal of both art and science?

Coming next: Gaydos reviews Robert Dash's new book, On an Acre Shy of Eternity: Micro Landscapes at the Edge

It's a Small, Small World

How did this Washington State crab buoy wind up in a tree on Wake Island?

Ever have one of those “What a small world!” moments? Well, SeaDoc recently experienced a remarkable one when our founding director and current board member Dr. Kirsten Gilardi received an email from out of the blue—from way out of the blue.

The message was from her brother-in-law, John Gilardi, who’d been out doing his quarterly survey of seabirds on Wake Island, a miniscule coral atoll that’s 2,300 miles west of Hawaii, 1,500 east of Guam, and 1,000 miles south of nowhere.

“I’d gone to the windward side of the island to count gray-backed terns,” says John, an ecologist who the islanders call Birdman. “They like to nest there amid the coral rubble thrown up by storms.”

Of course coral isn’t the only thing cast ashore by the wind and waves. “That side of the atoll collects all kinds of flotsam, jetsam and other man-made debris,” says John. “I always keep an eye out hoping to find old Japanese glass fishing floats, but mostly it’s trash like bottles, buckets, cigarette lighters and shoes. The folks on Wake do cleanups every few months, but it just keeps coming.”

On this particular beach survey, John spotted a flash of color that turned out to be a modern fishing float. When he got closer, John noticed that the buoy still had its Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife commercial crab license tag attached. That’s when he had an "aha" moment. “I thought, ‘I bet Kirsten would be interested in this!’”

There’s even more to the coincidence beyond the gee whiz improbability of a SeaDoc-family relative finding a Washington crab float that somehow navigated the great Pacific gyres on a three-and-a-half-year odyssey to a speck of land less than two square miles in area some 4,300 miles from the Salish Sea. As it happens, John’s sister-in-law Kirsten has been wrapped up in lost fishing gear for years.

Her involvement started at a SeaDoc board meeting more than a decade ago. “I remember board member Tom Cowan bugging me about this great fishing gear recovery program they had going on in Puget Sound,” says Kirsten.

Tom was the first director of the Northwest Straits Commission, and back around the year 2000 he’d asked several groups of scientists to come up with a priority list of actions the NWSC could take to begin restoring the Salish Sea.

“They all came back saying derelict fishing gear, especially nets, was a huge problem,” says Tom, who then received a grant from NOAA to come up with a safe and effective way to remove nets lost on Puget Sound’s rocky reefs.

Derelict nets keep ghostfishing for decades, and SeaDoc got involved by developing a statistical modeling program that predicts the killing capacity of lost gear and the cost/benefit ratio of removal. The resulting scientific paper written by Kirsten, Tom and others proved beyond any doubt the great economic benefit of clearing derelict nets.

“We showed that every year, along with killing huge numbers of seabirds and marine mammals, these nets were destroying millions of dollars worth of commercial seafood like Dungeness crab,” says Tom. “When we figured out a way to remove them at relatively low cost by hiring fishing-industry divers to haul them up, the program really took off.”

Kirsten caught gear recovery fever from Tom, and brought it back with her to UC Davis, SeaDoc's administrative home. After several years of operating a program using divers just like Washington, though, SeaDoc gave the concept a Golden State twist. While Puget Sound’s program involved paying sea cucumber divers to clear fishermen’s gill nets, Kirsten’s idea was to incentivize fisher folks to recover gear lost within their own industry.

“For the last few years, our program has focused on the Dungeness crab fishery in California,” says Kirsten. “When commercial crabbers can’t work because it's off season or there's a closure due to algal blooms, we figured out a way they can still get out on the water and get paid to recover lost crab traps.”

The program SeaDoc started was such a success that it has been turned into a California State law called the Whale Protection & Crab Gear Recovery Act (crab gear is also a major entanglement threat to migrating whales). It's hoped that the act will become financially self-sustaining through the fees crabbers pay to buy back their lost gear.

And there’s yet another circle-of-saving-sealife aspect to this story. After recovering more than 5,900 fishing nets from the Washington State portion of the Salish Sea and thereby transforming nearly 900 acres of killing zones into healthy, productive habitat, Northwest Straits has now turned its attention, like SeaDoc in California, to lost crab pots.

The float that went on walkabout all the way across the Pacific until it was found by the brother-in-law of SeaDoc’s lost-gear guru was originally attached to one of an estimated 14,000 commercial and recreational crab pots that are lost each year in Washington State waters.

The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife runs a program in the state’s coastal waters that allows commercial crabbers to get a special WDFW permit and head out after the season to scour the Pacific coast for lost gear. The arrangement cleans the habitat and clears potential entanglement risks, and the benefit for the keen-eyed crabbers who recover gear is finders keepers. But the program doesn’t include the waters of the Salish Sea, where some 12,000 of those crab traps go missing every year.

Northwest Straits has already recovered 4,700 lost traps in Puget Sound, but obviously there’s a lot more for all of us to do. Recreational crabbers and shrimpers can do their part by making sure their traps don’t go missing in the first place by using enough weight to hold them in place, rigging more than enough sinking-type line to account for the depth, having proper biodegradable escape panels, and by not setting traps when the tides and currents are too extreme.

The gear recovery programs SeaDoc has been involved with in Washington and California are both huge successes and have become models for similar efforts around the world. Out on Wake Island, John "Birdman" Gilardi hung that well-traveled crab float on a Casuarina tree as a symbol of our interconnectedness.

All the world’s oceans and seas share problems like marine debris and ghostfishing gear that kills wildlife and damages habitat. But by sharing solutions and supporting restoration efforts, we are making a difference.

Donate wine to the SeaDoc auction

We've made it easy for you to purchase one or more bottles of wine (at a 20% discount) for donation to the SeaDoc Wine 'n' Sea auction. Here's how it works:

1. Look below to see the list of hand-selected wines
2. Pick the wines you want to donate.
3. Call Compass Wines in Anacortes to give them your order and payment. 360-293-6500
4. Be sure to mention this is for the SeaDoc Auction, (you'll get 20% off), and let them know how you'd like to be acknowledged on the bid sheet.
5. We'll take care of the rest! The wines will be delivered directly to SeaDoc in time for the auction.

Prices shown below are actual value for the auction. The price to SeaDoc members for the auction are 20% off the prices shown.

Bergevin Lane Intuition 2008                          $58.99

Betz clos du Betz 2011                                   $61.99

Bunchgrass the Bard 2011                              $28.99

Buty Connor Lee 2013                                     $45.99

Cadence Taptiel Vineyard 2012                   $45.99

Canoe Ridge Estate Merlot 2010                   $39.99

Cayuse Horsepower Sur Echalas 2013           $235.00

Cedergreen Cabernet 2009                          $29.99

Co Dinn Cabernet 2013                                  $54.99

Covington Cellars Syrah 2007                       $45.99

Damsel Boushey Syrah 2013                          $42.99

Den Hoed Andreaus Cabernet 2012              $80.99

Dunham Lewis Vineyard Syrah 2005             $79.99

Fidelitas Quintessence Cabernet 2013           $60.99

Figgins Red 2013                                           $104.99

Finn River Artisan Cider                                   $23.99

Force Majeure Collaboration VI 2010           $51.99

Gilbert Cellars Pinot Noir 2013                     $54.99

Gorman Evil Twin 2013                                  $65.99

Gramercy Idiot du Village 2011                   $54.99

Grand Reve Collaboration III 2008               $51.99

Leonetti Reserve 2011                                       $199.99

Lobo Hills Right Bank 2014                            $35.99

Lullaby Laylee 2010                                      $52.99

Mark Ryan Water Witch  2014                     $55.99

No Girls Tempranillo 2012                            $175.99

Pondera Jackalope 2010                              $50.99

Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2000   $200.00

Rotie Cellars dre 2012                                   $64.99

Ryan Patrick Reserve Cabernet 2013            $36.99

Sheridan Block I Cabernet 2013                    $135.99

Sight Glass Cellars GSM 2014                      $34.99

Sleight of Hand Archimage 2012                  $56.99

Sparkman Wonderland 2011                              $49.99

Two Vintners Sal Cabernet 2013                    $55.99

Walla Walla Vintners Sagemoor Cab 2014 $54.99

Woodinville Wine Cellars OMO 2010          $38.99

Woodward Canyon Charbonneau 2013       $91.99

Zoning Issues: Using Science to Inform Decisions on Orca Protection

A difficult truth we're facing is that the Salish Sea’s Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs) are at serious risk of extinction.

Due to their population structure and dynamics, limited fecundity, high toxin load and food-supply challenges, the orcas of J, K and L pods are vulnerable to having a single disease event, oil spill or just a terrible year that takes out too many breeding-age females signal the end of our iconic killer whales.

Even without a random disaster, the long-term prospects for Southern Residents are not good and are likely to get worse, with proposals for multiple Salish Sea port and pipeline projects threatening to greatly increase the dangers of ship strikes, fuel spills and underwater noise pollution (read the paper SeaDoc published on this topic).

When the SRKWs were placed on the Endangered Species List in 2005, there were 88 whales in the three pods. Today, after a dozen years of recovery planning and efforts, the official count from the Center for Whale Research shows that the population has actually dropped to just 78 individuals. With the recent sharp decline, people are pushing regulators to do more.

Underwater noise increases with a boat’s speed.

One example is a petition by three NGOs asking NOAA Fisheries to declare a whale protection zone (WPZ) along the west side of San Juan Island. The area has historically been known as the best place to spot SRKWs, both from boats and from the shore, as well as to fish for Chinook salmon, the orcas’ favorite food.

The petition asks that no vessels (with a few necessary exceptions) be allowed to enter the WPZ, which will extend three-quarters of a mile from shore, with an additional quarter-mile no-wake buffer zone. Excluding boats, say the petitioners, will reduce noise and disturbance, allowing the orcas to hunt and communicate more efficiently and to transit or rest in a favored foraging area without being stressed.

A previous proposal for a smaller WPZ in the same location was sunk by strong opposition, primarily from recreational fishers, whale watch operators, and the local tourist industry. This time around, similar battle lines have been drawn. While there’s no debate that the SRKWs are in trouble, the arguments start when it comes down to which specific recovery actions to take and who those measures will impact.

All parties agree that the best thing for the Southern Residents would be to fully restore the Chinook runs on which they depend and to rid the Salish Sea of toxins. Those efforts have already been underway for decades, though, with billions spent showing mixed results at best. Many Chinook runs, in fact, still share space on the Endangered Species List with SRKWs.

The proposed WPZ, petitioners argue, is an achievable action that could be quickly put in place. The question is: will it help the Southern Residents? If the answer is no, then there’s no reason to potentially disrupt the local economy. If yes, then citizens need to wisely judge the benefits versus the possible economic impacts. This is where SeaDoc and good science enter the picture.

Transient killer whale surfaces in front of a sailboat.

“Science cannot tell you what your priorities are, and it doesn’t make decisions,” says Kit Rawson, SeaDoc Board Chair and former conservation science program manager for the Tulalip Tribes.

Kit says that issues like this are good reminders that the SeaDoc Society is a scientific organization, not an advocacy group, and that its job is to conduct and translate research that is free of bias and insulated from political, emotional or economic concerns.

“SeaDoc’s value is derived from that credibility,” says Kit. “It’s imperative that we communicate to the public and to policymakers facts that are objective, rigorously tested and evidence-based so that they can use them to inform their decisions whether or not to support actions important to marine conservation.”

As we’re now in a period where efforts are being made to deny, devalue and defund science, with calls to seriously hobble research supported by NOAA and EPA—both critical partners in Salish Sea salmon and killer whale restoration—it’s more important than ever to remember that science isn’t about opinions, ideology or alternative facts. It’s about going wherever the evidence takes you.

To that end, SeaDoc’s science director, Dr. Joe Gaydos, examined the data used to support the current WPZ petition—just as we do for many regulatory proposals that affect the Salish Sea, whether they come from fishermen, whale watchers, government agencies or concerned citizens groups.

In Joe’s review of the scientific literature, he found some of the supporting science unsettled due to data uncertainties, while other lines of evidence were strong enough to draw conclusions.

In short, there is ample scientific evidence to suggest that vessel noise, disturbance from vessel traffic, and a limited supply of salmon are having an interactive effect on our resident orcas’ health, and clearly need to be addressed. The science is there to support strong actions to recover the Southern Residents. Exactly what form that action takes is now up to informed citizens, elected officials, and management agencies.

Joe strongly recommends, however, that if NOAA Fisheries does move forward with a WPZ or other regulatory mechanism to protect our killer whales, they need to invest in a process to address any concerns of the co-managing tribes as well as stakeholders including whale watch operators, commercial and recreational fishing interests, and recreational boaters to ensure that whatever guidelines are developed will be respected by all parties.

With many federal and state governmental science programs that partner with SeaDoc facing drastic budget cuts, we’re reminded again just how crucial private donors like you are to continuing our mission to use science to heal the Salish Sea. We couldn't do it without your support. Thank you!

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Banner photo: vessels of any size can disturb orcas, with propeller noises masking echolocation and communication calls, and the simple presence of nearby boats causing behavioral changes. A boat crosses the path of a male SRKW. Photo courtesy of Bob Friel.

Early Giving is Open for Give Big Day

Starting Thursday, April 27 at noon, you can schedule donations for Give Big Day 2017! The donation button is now live on www.givebigseattle.org/SeaDocSociety, but scheduled donations will not be charged to your card until Give Big Day, which is May 10.

Why schedule your donation early? Because it helps ensure that you don’t forget to give on the big day! Our lives are busy, and giving early allows you to donate when it's on your mind. Scheduled gifts will be processed very early on May 10, so your donations will also help SeaDoc get some great momentum to start to the day, which can encourage others to give as well.

For early giving, donors will be prompted to create a simple profile that includes their name, email and a password when they donate. Learn more about early giving in Give Big's FAQs.

To address the growing challenges facing the Salish Sea ecosystem, we are in the final stretch of a $1.5M fundraising campaign, Salish Sea Forever, designed to double our science and double our impact. We are fortunate to have a $125,000 matching grant, meaning every dollar that you donate on Give Big (including the ones scheduled in advance!) will be counted as two. "Now more than ever", please give BIG this year!

SeaDoc Society's mission is to improve the health of the Salish Sea ecosystem that is home to more than 8 million people and extraordinarily diverse fish and wildlife populations. We are a core program of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at the University of California Davis, a center of excellence in the School of Veterinary Medicine recognized as the top veterinary school in the world for the past three years.

Based on Orcas Island in the Salish Sea, SeaDoc works on both sides of the US/Canadian border. All donations are used in the Salish Sea. We have prioritized and funded more than 100 scientific projects documented in more than 70 peer-reviewed publications on topics ranging from evaluating water quality and contaminants to forage fish and killer whale recovery.

Thank you for supporting GiveBIG 2017! Schedule your donation today!

Tides: The Science and Spirit of the Ocean (Book Review)

Book Review by Joe Gaydos:

By Jonathan White
Trinity University Press, San Antonio
2017

Jonathan White's book Tides: the science and spirit of the ocean is a must-read for anybody who loves the ocean. Tides govern the ocean yet wait for no one. So why do so few people really understand how they work? Because they're complicated. Tides have both fascinated and confused the likes of Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, and Sir Isaac Newton, just to name a few of the great minds discussed in this easy-to-read, science-come-action adventure book. Despite the complex nature of the subject, White takes the reader on epic journeys around the world exploring big tides and big wave surfing, diving and sailing, shore bird migrations, and even a tidal bore in China that rears to 25 feet "terrorizing everything in its path." The writing is so accomplished and the content so fascinating, it is not surprising that by the time you have followed White's adventures trailing Greg Long surfing Mavericks, dropping below the frozen surface of Ungava Bay to harvest mussels with Inuit Lukasi Nappaaluk, or discussing climate change and sea level rise with Kuna Indians in Panama's San Blas Islands, you're begging for just one more tidally-based adventure with him. What was surprising upon finishing Tides, was realizing that White had done for me what oceanographic textbook after marine biology textbook could not, he taught me to understand the physical workings of tides and helped me to appreciate the legacy that gravity, the moon's elliptical orbit around the earth, and the earth's geology provide for the world's oceans - White taught me the beauty of tides.

Coming next: Gaydos reviews Dr. Drew Harvell's new book, A Sea of Glass: Searching for the Blaschkas' fragile legacy in an ocean at risk

UC Davis is #1 in Veterinary Medicine and Sustainability

SeaDoc Society is a program of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center at UC Davis.

Although SeaDoc is based on Orcas Island and our work is focused on ensuring the health of the Salish Sea, our story goes beyond the waters of Washington and British Columbia. Specifically, we are a program of the University of California, Davis, which recently received two great honors we’d like to share.

As a core program of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center, a center of excellence at the School of Veterinary Medicine, SeaDoc was started by UC Davis in 2000. The university has been instrumental in helping us accomplish all that we have been able to do in the Salish Sea.

This year, for the third year in a row, the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine has been recognized as the top veterinary school in the world, as determined by QS World University Rankings. The distinction comes largely in part because of the School’s reputation for applying a One Health approach to addressing critical health concerns on a local and global scale – an approach that stresses how the health of animals, people and the environment are intimately connected - a concept that is at the heart of SeaDoc’s work.

"The SeaDoc Society is a great example of how the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine is partnering with local communities, regional government agencies, and other academic groups to enhance ecosystem, animal, and ultimately human health in the Salish Sea and surrounding regions," said Michael Lairmore, Dean of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

In addition to being the top university in the world for veterinary medicine, UC Davis was recently named the Greenest University in the annual Green Metric rankings from the University of Indonesia. The ranking measures operations and policies that promote environmental sustainability. UC Davis is a leader in energy efficient transportation (bikes and busses), energy efficiency, water conservation, and green building efforts.

We like to think the launch of SeaDoc’s Refuse-to-Use Coffee Cup and Bottle Challenge with the Orcas Exchange a few months back helped move the needle as well!

We’re proud to be a part of a University that is so world-renowned and doing such exciting things. SeaDoc will always be a donor-funded program with its roots in the Salish Sea, but being a program of a world-class university like UC Davis is critical for our success.

Are Southern Resident Killer Whales Starving?

By Bob Friel

On March 6, the SeaDoc Society together with the National Marine Mammal Foundation and NOAA Fisheries assembled top U.S. and Canadian marine mammal experts for an urgent consultation on the nutritional condition of our Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKW), the fish-eating orcas that have historically "resided" in the Salish Sea.

After 2015’s encouraging “baby boom,” 2016 was a disastrous year for SRKW, which suffered seven deaths, reducing the total population of our three pods—J, K and L—to just 78 individuals.

Along with dangerously low numbers and wild swings in their reproductive success, another troubling sign is that instead of staying organized in their full pods, the killer whales have recently been observed fragmenting into smaller groups, most likely because they’re having a harder time finding prey, especially the large Chinook salmon that are their most important source of food.

Concerns about our Southern Residents have led NOAA to declare them one of eight “Spotlight” species (out of 1,652 on the Endangered Species list) considered most at risk of extinction unless immediate action is taken to stabilize and recover their populations.

With the pressing need to act butting up against science’s necessarily slow, painstaking process of collecting, analyzing, challenging and retesting data and hypotheses, SeaDoc and collaborators jumped in to help move killer whale conservation forward as quickly as possible.

We asked the gathered researchers to share their most recent data—work that may not be published in peer-reviewed papers for several years—to see if we could find the answers needed right now to expedite recovery actions.

To ensure the proceedings maintained the greatest scientific validity, SeaDoc also convened an independent panel of three world-renowned marine mammal experts: Craig Matkin, founder and Executive Director of Alaska’s North Gulf Oceanic Society; Michael Moore, Senior Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Frances Gulland, Senior Scientist at California’s The Marine Mammal Center.

This prestigious panel was charged with overseeing the workshop, reviewing all materials, and producing a review paper that is already circulating among U.S. and Canadian regulatory agencies.

A full day of presentations and sidebar meetings offered a fascinating look at cutting-edge research along with a sobering view of the state of our Southern Residents. After a second day of discussion and deliberation, the panel was able to conclude that multiple lines of evidence indicate poor body condition in SRKW, a state that is “associated with loss of fetuses, calves and adults.” They also determined that although the overall causes are complex and complicated by random tragedies like ship strikes, “food availability, contaminant burden, and noise and vessel stress would all appear to be acting in concert causing the decline of this population.”

The bad news is that things are not looking good for our Southern Residents. The good news is that the issues impacting them are all caused by human activities and thus are in our power to remedy. We can help our beloved, iconic killer whales recover—if we have the will to act.

The US and Canadian Federal Agencies tasked with managing Southern Residents are actively reviewing management options for their recovery. Thanks to private donations, SeaDoc and collaborators will continue to develop an electronic medical record keeping system for killer whales that will enable us to tease out complex relationships between threats like nutrition, contaminants, sound, and disease.

Forty-three scientists took time out of their busy schedules to make this killer whale workshop a success. The SeaDoc Society gratefully acknowledges them and their sponsoring organizations, including the Center for Whale Research, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, National Marine Mammal Foundation, NOAA Fisheries, North Gulf Oceanic Society, Sea World, Sealife Response, Rehabilitation and Research, The Marine Mammal Center, University of British Columbia, University of Washington, Vancouver Aquarium, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

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Banner photo: southern resident killer whale L41 surfaces. Courtesy of the SeaDoc Society.