A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
September 29, 2008
3. Watersheds –
Sea turtles are back, noshing on jellyfish
San Francisco Chronicle
Kelp makes diving deadlier
Thick growth of algae blamed in separate deaths of 2 abalone hunters this year
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Governor signs bill to fund initial work
Desert Sun
On California
For the first time there's no fishing for chinook salmon on the
Smithsonian Magazine
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Sea turtles are back, noshing on jellyfish
San Francisco Chronicle – 9/29/08
By David Perlman, Science Editor
(09-28) 17:04 PDT --
Endangered leatherback sea turtles, unseen off the central
The leatherbacks were spotted during a monthlong survey cruise aboard a government research vessel and repeated aircraft observations. Researchers said they were seen diving for meals close to shore and snacking now and then in deeper waters much farther out.
"We're getting a better understanding of the leatherbacks and their coastal habitat here after several years when the population was much lower than usual - and after we observed none at all in 2006," said Scott Benson, chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's leatherback survey mission based in Monterey County at Moss Landing.
Benson led teams of specialists aboard the NOAA research ship David Starr Jordan that carried sonar gear to scan for the jellyfish while crew members tagged the leatherbacks with temporary tracking devices - simple devices attached to their shells with suction cups - to record their enigmatic diving and feeding behavior.
The rare and little-known leatherbacks have been around during 100 million years of evolution, and their migration patterns are amazing: They nest and lay their eggs in the sandy beaches of
The abrupt decrease is largely because of egg-hunters raiding their nests, commercial long-line fisheries whose hooks can ensnare the turtles as "bycatch," and most recently the erosion of many nesting beaches because of small rises in the sea level caused by global warming, said Michael Milne of the Sea Turtle Restoration Project, an environmental group based in Marin County.
The huge abundance of jellyfish (Chrysaora fuscescens), commonly known as sea nettles, is apparently caused by increased upwelling of nutrients like krill and plankton from just above the sea floor this year, Benson said.
Spotters aboard the NOAA Twin Otter aircraft found six leatherbacks "surrounded by miles of jellyfish" - along with humpback whales and large ocean sunfish - off the
Another leatherback that was equipped with a more permanent satellite tag a year ago had returned to the same area this year, apparently after spending the winter a few hundred miles south of
During one segment of the cruise off Pescadero, the mission's trawling team of jellyfish specialists encountered huge hauls of the creatures, including one weighing 24 pounds with a bell 21 inches across and tentacles "taller than any of our scientists," the team reported.
Hungry as they are, leatherbacks don't eat the jellyfish's transparent globular bells - it's the viciously stinging tentacles they love, and Benson and his colleagues found themselves "covered with stinging jellyfish slime" whenever they hauled any of the turtles aboard, he said.
Although the survey found most of the leatherbacks feeding amidst the jellyfish no more than 30 miles from shore, the ship did venture as far out as 150 miles, and even there, Benson said, the turtles were feeding amid an abundance of jellyfish.
Eddies of cold and warm water there attracted the jellyfish, Benson said, "and it made the area a fast food stopover for the turtles - a good place for a quick snack on the way in toward the coast after that 7,000-mile swim." #
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/09/29/BAI31353SK.DTL
Kelp makes diving deadlier
Thick growth of algae blamed in separate deaths of 2 abalone hunters this year
Santa Rosa Press Democrat – 9/29/08
By Laura Norton, staff writer
Abalone diver and retired Sacramento City Fire Captain Ron Long had driven along the
From Bodega to Sea Ranch, the offshore forests of kelp had grown significantly. The lush canopy was visible from the car he shared with his best friend and longtime diving buddy Rich Baer of
He remembered their conversation: "From the time we left Bodega until we got to Sea Ranch, we were making comments. . . . We said, 'There's a lot of kelp.' "
That conversation was one of the last ones the two friends would share. Hours later, Baer was dead. He drowned when he was caught by a kelp column that wrapped around his waist and shoulders and held his head five feet under water.
Baer was one of seven abalone divers to die along the coast this year and his death is the second attributed to kelp. His many years of diving experience were worthless against their hold.
Since 1987, 71 people have died while abalone hunting along the
Baer and Craig Belluomini, a 54-year-old experienced diver from
"It's just in more places. It's everywhere," said abalone diver Bill Mashek of
Marine scientists said they, too, have observed a noticeable increase in the size of the
Calling the algae's growth "lush" and "excessive," Karl Menard, a marine biologist at UC Davis' Bodega Marine Lab, said it is a danger for all divers working in kelp beds.
"But it's a Catch-22," he said. "Good kelp is pretty important in the larger scheme of things. A lot of organisms feed on it."
That includes abalone, which brings the promise of a rich future harvest.
Kelp, a large, leafy algae or seaweed, anchors to rocky seabeds and grows up toward the surface, where leafy blades have access to sunlight. At the ocean's surface the leaves and vines tangle and create a canopy, much like the upper layers of a forest or jungle.
The amount of growth and number of kelp varies from year to year, depending on the amount of nutrients in the water, said Pete Raimondi, director of UC Santa Cruz' s Long Marine Lab.
He said increased kelp has been noted in the
That this year's kelp could be the thickest and strongest in decades, as some divers claim, is likely true in many places, Raimondi said.
"Kelp is having a very good year, after a series of bad years," Raimondi said. "It could be the most kelp many people have seen."
An upswelling of extra nutrients, likely created by cold water and stronger-than-normal winds, have fed this year's growth, Raimondi said.
Abalone divers, who are prevented by law from using air tanks, may use kelp to pull themselves to the seabed where abalone can be pried from rocks, but the thicker the kelp, the greater the risk of getting tangled.
In August, Mike Guerrero, a novice abalone diver from Castro Valley was diving in Stillwater Cove north of Jenner, when Belluomini became tangled in kelp and drowned.
In a posting on an industry bulletin board, Guerrero described the attempts of Aug. 9 to rescue Belluomini, who was "floating like a scarecrow with his hands touching the surface" but trapped underwater by a piece of kelp that had wrapped around Belluomini's leg.
Belluomini must have attempted to free himself of the kelp because his knife was missing from its scabbard, Guerrero wrote on the ScubaBoard bulletin, and his weight belt was missing.
Sonoma County Sheriff's deputies said Belluomini may have been underwater for 10 minutes before being cut free and pulled to shore where CPR was unsuccessful.
With nine weeks left in the 2008 season, the seven
"(Kelp) doesn't have to be a problem, but more kelp does mean more problems," said Scott Taylor, store manager of
Divers, even experienced ones, need to be extra aware of kelp and surges which change the structure of the canopy,
While the kelp will remain thick until winter storms thin it out, safety conditions are expected to improve and become safer over the coming weeks.
Water clarity typically improves in the fall, and soon divers will be able to see problem kelp before they tangle with it,
But that isn't likely to convince Long to dive again.
"The best thing we could have done was to be within 10 feet of each other and have one guy dive and two guys watch," he said. "And even that, I don't think is safe now. He was trapped so significantly and he was wrapped in the kelp so tight. The hazard is significant."#
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080929/NEWS/809290304/1349?Title=Kelp_makes_diving_deadlier
Governor signs bill to fund initial work
Desert Sun – 9/28/08
By Jake Henshaw
SACRAMENTO — Restoration of the Salton Sea got a boost Saturday when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation to help fund initial work to preserve the troubled inland lake.
Senate Bill 187 by state Sen. Denise Ducheny, D-San Diego, would establish the ground rules for spending $47 million in previously approved bond funds to aid the dying sea.
Ducheny had intended for the bill to commit the state to a long-term restoration of the sea, which one plan estimated would cost $8.9 billion.
But the measure was amended to limit the state's commitment to activities outlined in what's known as Period One of the plan.
That period, which runs through 2013 with a $508 million mostly unfunded budget, calls for a variety of work including initial projects to preserve endangered fish populations as well as developing a baseline of data on air, fish, birds and sea sediment, according to state officials.
The 2008-09 budget signed last week by the governor appropriated $17.8 million from the bond funds targeted by this legislation for the initial work.
Funds for the work from the $47 million bond money will have to be appropriated annually.
Salton Sea Authority President Peter Nelson previously had welcomed the amendment limiting the scope of the work outlined by the state, arguing that his agency had developed a cheaper, more efficient plan.
The SSA plan is estimated to cost $5 billion and, unlike the state plan, addresses economic development.
Another major issue still pending about the sea is deciding how restoration work, which the state plan anticipates could take 75 years, will be overseen.
State Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman, who directed preparation of the state restoration plan with local input, is responsible for the work.
But he and Ducheny, along with other parties, have been trying, unsuccessfully so far, to create a governing panel and rules for its operation.
Life in the
http://www.mydesert.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080928/NEWS0701/809280326/1013/news07
On California
For the first time there's no fishing for chinook salmon on the
Smithsonian Magazine – October 2008
By Abigail Tucker, staff writer
The salmon-boat cemetery in Fort Bragg, a fishing port tucked into shaggy pines about 150 miles north of San Francisco, is full of bleached and peeling hulls. Over the years many
Bruce Abernathy himself doesn't watch the demolitions. He finds somewhere else to be, or he stays inside his house, with its many framed prints of trim little ships atop frisky seas. The fisherman turned resale man, and lately junk dealer, has "a lot of remorse" about what's happening outside his window beyond the hot pink rhododendron bush. "I know almost everybody who owned these boats," he said. "Boats become part of you, like a wife."
Thirty years ago there were several thousand salmon boats in
The sudden decline of
Salmon is the third most popular seafood in the
What's more, local chinook, chrome-colored and strong enough to charge up waterfalls, are revered as a symbol. We savor the salmon's story almost as much as its flesh—its epic slog from birth stream to sea and back again, its significance to Native Americans, who saw the fish as a dietary staple and a religious talisman. Salmon still retain something of that spiritual power. Called the "soul food of the North Pacific," king salmon is the flavor of healthy rivers and thriving coastlines. It is a pepper-crusted or pesto-smeared communion with nature, gustatory proof that in a region where cities are sprawling, wildness still waits below the surface—if you will only cast your fly and find it.
There are about a half-dozen salmon species worldwide, and populations are further defined by their rivers of origin and migration seasons. Chinook (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) are found from
The fish typically stay at sea three years, ranging thousands of miles in the Pacific and gaining 90 percent of their body mass (between 10 to 50 pounds, though the largest weigh more than 100). Then they head for home, tracing the smell of minerals and organic materials to find their natal streams. It is a brutal journey. The fish stop eating once they hit fresh water, and their bodies begin to deteriorate even as they ascend rapids (the word "salmon" comes from the Latin salir, to leap). Ready-to-mate males flush crimson and grow tough-guy hooked jaws for fighting; females search for gravel for a nest. Soon after laying and fertilizing eggs, the exhausted adults die. But the life cycle doesn't stop there. The kings' spawned-out carcasses nourish not only the baby salmon that will take their place but also living things up and down the food chain, stimulating whole ecosystems. Salmon-rich streams support faster-growing trees and attract apex predators like bears and eagles. In certain
This is the elegant narrative that people in the West are fighting to preserve, a tale of determination and natural destiny that somehow touches even those of us who don't live there. And yet this ideal of wild salmon is increasingly an illusion.
Coleman National Fish Hatchery,
It dawned on me that the gray current shifting and flickering below the surface of Raceway 5 was actually hundreds of thousands of three-inch-long fall-run chinooks. A hatchery worker scooped up a couple: squiggles with woeful expressions, they were barely princelings, never mind kings. But every so often one would snap itself suddenly out of the big pond, a hint of the athleticism that would one day launch it upstream.
We were there because the hatchery was taking a historic step. Usually, the federal facility—at the northern end of
The shipment was an effort to rekindle future fishing seasons, Scott Hamelberg, the hatchery manager, said: "If you truck a fish from Coleman and bypass certain areas where mortality can happen, you may improve survival. You take out hundreds of miles of avoiding predators, water diversions, pollution, any number of things."
We spoke in his office, which held a shrine to Popeye, a cat who must have enjoyed an extremely happy tenure at the hatchery. Despite the low numbers of returning
Outside, a worker standing waist-deep in the raceway crowded the fish toward a hydraulic pump, using a broom to goad stragglers. Their shadowy forms shot up a transparent tube and into a tank on a waiting truck. In a few hours they would be piped into net pens in the bay, then hauled by boat farther out and released to swim out to sea. Some scientists say the hatchery fish are less physically fit than their wild brethren, with a swimming-pool mentality that does not serve them well in the ocean. And yet in years past, many survived to maturity simply because they were introduced in such overwhelming numbers. Some wildlife experts speculate that the hatchery-born fish may even be weakening wild populations they were meant to bolster by competing with the river-born fish for food and space, and heading home with them to breed, altering the gene pool.
The trucked fish won't know where home is, exactly. Many will likely never find their way back to
If this is the price of keeping the species going, so be it, said Hamelberg, who wears a wedding band etched with tiny salmon. "There's a greater public good here," he told me. "We're providing fish to the American public to eat, and also for aesthetic reasons—just for people to know they're in the system, that they returned. Our obligation is to keep these runs as sound as possible."
The hatchery workers looked weary as the trucks pulled away. As it turns out, chauffeuring tons of pinkie-length fish hundreds of miles is trickier than it sounds. During shipping the day before, the circulation system in one of the trucks stopped working, and 75,000 chinooks died.
Native peoples of the
But the
By now,
Then came this summer's calamity. The official list of possible causes is more than 40 items long, ranging from bridge construction in migration areas to a surging population of Humboldt squid, grabby predators that may or may not have a taste for chinook. Scientists are looking back to 2005, when the fish that should be returning to the river now would have been sea-bound juveniles, small and vulnerable. There were poor ocean conditions off the West Coast that spring. A shift in weather patterns—possibly related to global warming—delayed the seasonal upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich water that supports the base of the marine food chain. As a result, "everything that was expecting something to eat in May died," including juvenile salmon, said Bill Peterson, a fisheries oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Other experts cite freshwater dangers, since fish weakened by a stressful trip downstream are less likely to survive in a hostile ocean. This is a politically loaded argument: many of those stresses, from pollution to introduced species, are man-made. "Protecting this icon means protecting the watershed, from where these things spawn in the mountains down to the ocean," said Jon Rosenfield, an aquatic conservation ecologist based in
In addition to being the most populous state,
Such problems are expensive to fix and the solutions can mean water shortages, especially for farmers, which heighten the conflict between interest groups. "The environmental community exploits the problems in nature and ignores human problems," said Jason Peltier, deputy manager of the sprawling Westlands Water District, which supplies hundreds of farms in the
Over the past decade or so changes have been made to
But it's doubtful that any amount of effort or money can restore the salmon's world. I didn't fully understand this until I visited the most altered ecosystem of all, the one environmentalists are most likely to lament when discussing the king. It's where ocean and river meet: the vast and troubled estuary at the
Just east of
But 150 years and 1,100 miles of man-made levees later, the wetlands have been transformed. During the gold rush, they were drained and converted into a web of farming islands with winding channels in between. Ninety-five percent of the original marsh is gone, and what remains is the epitome of an artificial landscape, so squarely under civilization's thumb that it's almost impossible to imagine it otherwise. The islands—many of them ten feet or more below sea level due to soil decomposition—are a patchwork of crops and alien species: palm trees, European sycamores, Himalayan blackberry bushes, spindly grapevines propped up on sticks, extensive plantings of Bartlett pear trees and fields of lawn turf as green and smooth as a pool table. At times the air suddenly smells of licorice—wild fennel, another invasive species. Go around a levy bend and there might be a beached World War II landing craft used by a local duck-hunting club, a sign for brand-new mansion developments "Coming Soon" or the pink explosion of a garden-variety rosebush.
The waterways surrounding these islands are about as hospitable to salmon as drainage ditches. The remaining marshland teems with nonnative species, many of them ravenous stowaways from the cargo ships of nearby
And then there are the pumps. Naturally brackish, the delta is now managed as a freshwater system, because fresh water is what's needed to fill bathtubs and irrigate fields and quench the thirst of Californians, about 25 million of whom rely on the delta for at least some of their water. Mammoth federal and state pumps in the delta's southern end, near the city of
The pumps are powerful enough to alter the currents miles away, confusing migrating salmon. Often, salmon are siphoned along with the water. More than half of these are salvaged near the pumps at fish-collection facilities, where the buckets are checked every two hours, the operators pawing through seaweed to find the tiny fish, which are then loaded into trucks and driven back to the delta. But the smallest chinooks can slip through; in past years tens of thousands have died. In 2005, that fateful year for this season's salmon, the pumps exported record amounts of water from the delta.
"The higher the export rate, the more fish are lost," said Tina Swanson, a biologist and head of the Bay Institute, an advocacy group that monitors
Constructed mostly in the middle of the last century, the pumps are relics of a time when fish populations were not much valued or understood. Lately
"I can't be without [that] water," said Daniel Errotabere, co-owner of Errotabere Ranch, which grows some 5,600 acres of almonds, lettuce and other crops with the help of delta flows. This summer the farm got just 40 percent of the water it had ordered from the pumps. "We're not wasting anything. All our crops are pretty much spoonfed. I can't do any more than I'm doing, unless there's a way to find a crop that doesn't need water."
My guide to the fantastical Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta was Peter Moyle, of the
Moyle has spent much of the past 30 years in the grayish-brown marsh mud on the outskirts of the delta, and he's the authority on local fish—the California roach, the Sacramento sucker, the tule perch—much less glamorous than salmon. He's the go-to person on the delta smelt, a homely little fish that smells like cucumber and faces many of the same challenges as the chinook.
Moyle's rickety aluminum research vessel, The Marsh Boat, was crewed by two graduate students. We pulled on waders and life vests and then bounced off into a stiff north wind, which made the tall grasses on the shore roll like waves. We were surveying fish populations on the outskirts of the delta in the Suisun Marsh, which has not been tampered with as much as adjoining areas and is reminiscent of what the whole place might have looked like before the gold rush: an expanse of bulrushes and brownish water, with snowy egrets stalking the perimeter and white pelicans flapping overhead. It was almost possible to ignore the bellow of an Amtrak train bound for
The boat stopped by a muddy beach, depositing Moyle, me and a graduate student studying invasive jellyfish from the
Nearly everyone's unhappy with the delta as it is today. Some say that rising sea levels and earthquakes threaten its structure, and since Hurricane Katrina there have been calls to armor the levees to maintain the delta as a freshwater system. Others advocate reducing water exports from the delta, doing away with the levees and unleashing the river to become brackish again in places and flow where it will.
The plan that has lately gained the backing of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger involves digging a canal upstream of the delta that would send fresh
But the peripheral canal, as it's called, is so controversial it's known as the "third rail" of
Our nets yielded plenty of fish that morning on the marsh, many of them nonnative: baby carp, yellowfin goby and inland silversides, transparent little fish with a stripe like thermometer mercury. Moyle held flapping palmfuls as he measured them one by one, then tossed them back into the water. He had been right: we saw no young salmon.
To fishermen, the chinook is known as a fighter, and likewise its advocates won't let the fish die out without a struggle. People desperately want to save wild salmon. "DEMAND Wild Californian King Salmon" stickers adorn car bumpers, and products like Butte Creek Brewing's Spring Run Organic Pale Ale benefit the kings. A SalmonAid concert stirred up support in
Even as the crisis deepens, the nation's appetite for salmon grows, thanks largely to the farmed variety. In 1980, almost none of our fresh salmon meat came from fish farms; now three-quarters of it does. Corporations in
Salmon fishing in
Cyrus believes he has inherited the family instinct to clear the jetty in a thick fog, to pick the perfect psychedelic-colored salmon lure. I asked him if he ever considered a more stable line of work—serving
The family boat, Kromoli, spent most of the summer at anchor with much of the rest of the town's fleet. Some fishermen contemplated putting their boats up for sale, on the off chance someone would buy them. And yet, even in
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/salmon-king.html?c=y&page=1
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