April 15, 2008 Beach Seine with Kurt Fresh et al · 15 April 2008, 21:12 by Julie Loyd
Kurt Fresh of NOAA Fisheries is part of the Big Picture Salmon project in the Puget Sound. Our group has volunteered to help him do monthly beach seines until fall. Also, we are collaborating with KWIAHT to look at juvenile salmon stomach contents to see how their diet relates to what’s available. Our ongoing baseline plankton project will probably feed into the conclusions we draw.
On April 15, we seined at Cowlitz Dock, Mail Bay, Little Hammond Cove, and the Chev’s Beach.
At the dock, we caught a sculpin the size of a puppy.
There were some penpoint gunnels.
There were also two mystery fish about one inch long
At Mail Bay,
there were dozens of two-inch chum salmon.
We found a starry flounder and an English sole (pointy nose, silky back, left-sided).
The net oodled with baby sculpins. A lemon nudibranch, an herbivorous underwater slug, was washed up on the beach.
At Little Hammond Cove, we decided to do gastric lavage on one of the many pinks and chum juveniles we found there to see what was in its stomach. Eventually, the plankton group will identify the contents.
At Chev’s beach, there was only time to do one seine, which gave sparse results.
Fire History · 10 April 2008, 19:53 by Julie Loyd
Carson’s thesis as well as the 2005 CAP plan for TNC land can be found here and as a link over on the side.
April 8, 2008 Peter Olesiuk on Pinnipeds · 8 April 2008, 22:36 by Julie Loyd
Peter Olesiuk a biologist from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, at the Pacific Biological station in Nanaimo, spoke at Camp Orkila about his department’s seal population research.
We have five seals in this area, two true seals (short foreflippers & limited land motility, ear holes) and three eared (can rotate hind flippers and walk around, ear flaps).
The Harbor Seal is found from California to Alaska. It’s non-migratory. In the 1970’s, their population was at an all-time low and both Canada and the US passed conservation laws. With protection, the Harbor Seal population has rebounded back to the numbers recorded around 1890. Olesiuk thinks the current population is at the natural level.
To study seals, they glue satellite trackers, depth meters, and stomach temperature meters to the seals’ fur. A typical Harbor Seal spends long sessions foraging in repeated dives. This takes 53% of its time. At low tide, it hauls out for 19% of the time, and the remaining 28% it is “milling,” or dozing around on the surface of the water. At low tide, about 61% of seals are hauled out, so when Fisheries does aerial flybys and photographs them, they can then extrapolate what the actual population must be.
Harbor Seals eat fish from fry size to 15 kilograms. Dedicated biologists collect their scat and analyze it. While regional seal diets vary, in general only about 3% of their diet consists of salmon. The rest is mostly forage fish, hake, and herring. They concentrate on hake from March to November and on herring from December to March. Since hake is a major salmon predator, large numbers of seals may actually help salmon. Indeed, when seal numbers rebounded from the ‘70’s, so did those salmon runs that were not overfished by humans.
How far do seals move from their haulout? In one study, they tracked seals out to 10 km from home. But in a more recent study, seals with trackers glued on to them really traveled, from the mouth of the Straits of Juan de Fuca up to the Queen Charlottes and back. This change could be because the seal population is now just about maxed out as far as available prey, and they have to look further afield.
The Northern Elephant Seal goes ashore in California twice a year, once to breed and once to molt. For the rest of the time, they are pelagic, going up the coast as far as Alaska. Recently, elephant seals have been molting at Race Rocks south of Victoria. This new site possibly reflects their recovery to over 100,000 seals after a low of only a few hundred. Now and then, an elephant seal is seen near our island.
The Sea Lion has greater mobility on land than the Harbor Seal. There are two species. The California Sea Lions are smaller, darker, with a steep forehead. They make the distinctive “ork, ork, ork” call. The Stellar Sea Lion is much larger and blonder, with a deep throated call.
The California Sea Lion was rare here before the 1960’s. Local numbers increased to about 300 in the 90’s, and are now even higher. As with the other seals, their numbers were lowest in the 1970’s, but are higher now.
There are no Stella Sea Lion rookeries in Washington, but there are some further north and south. The Western stock, from the Aleutians to the Kiril Islands north of Japan, have declined 85%, but our Eastern stock is doing okay.
Males arrive at the rookeries in May to compete for territory. Females come in June and almost immediately pup. After a week of staying with the newborn, the females mate with the male in the territory they’ve pupped in. Then they alternate days, one day foraging at sea, the next nursing their pup, and back to foraging. After about a month the pups can swim, and in August, they swim off with their mothers. Pups may suckle for up to three years.
To survey the population, scientists wait until the early pups are not yet a month old and the late mothers have already arrived, in July. As with the abovementioned seals, their population low was in the 1970’s at about 5,000. In 1910, the population was around 14K, in 2005 around 16K, and today around 14K.
Daily food requirements are estimated at:
Yearling Harbor Seal: 1.5kg, Yearling Stellar Sea Lion: 15kg
Female Harbor Seal: 2.4kg, Female Stellar Sea Lion: 20kg
Male Harbor Seal: 2.7kg, Male Stellar Sea Lion: 30kg
Stella Sea Lions are a dominant predator around here. Their scat reveals that they eat about equal parts rockfish, forage fish, and salmon.
The Northern Fur Seal breeds up along and on either side of the Aleutians. In winter, they migrate to about 10 to 200 km off the coast of California. By March they are off the Washington coast, and then in April they’re back north. Their population is declining, possibly due to competition from Sea Lions.
After Olesiuk’s talk, Glen R asked about the relation of Orcas to seals. Olesiuk said he was surprised to find that there is a close relationship. The graph showing the rise in Harbor Seal population matches the rise in the transient Orcas, the Orcas that eat seals, now at about 150.
March 9 2008 Hammond walk with Jim Johannesen · 10 March 2008, 09:24 by Julie Loyd
Scroll down to find three more related articles about Jim’s visit. Please note that underlined phrases are related links that you can click on. Some changes to this post were suggested by Jim, which were incorporated April 4.
We started at Mittelstadt’s with a geological map of the area.
The map shows that the bulk of the island is glacial till left by the Frazer Glacier, called Outwash gravel, Vashon Stade. Disney is composed of Cretaceous Nearshore sedimentary rocks, from the Nanaimo formation.
Jim answered questions:
Turbidite deposits come from submarine landslides, making a unique sequence of underwater rock: 1. Big rocks fall first, making a conglomerate layer. 2. sands catch up. 3. Layers of fine sediment precipitate out of the water column.
The Pacific Ocean Plate acts as a conveyor belt bringing material up from the south. Vancouver Island is Wrangellia terrane, as are parts of the Yukon and Vietnam – partly deduced from the presence of foraminifera. See John McPhee’s Assembling California.
As the conveyor belt goes along, islands are scraped off and glued on to the continental plate. These terranes go as far east as the Idaho panhandle. That was about 100 million years ago.
Every 260 – 1150 years, there’s a subduction zone earthquake as the ground under us shifts 30 – 40 feet. It has been about 300 years since such a quake, deduced from tree-ring and Japanese tsunami records.
The San Juans were scraped off in layers, so our geology is a mish-mash. The Nanaimo formation, found at Disney, is 90 million years old, and is very hard, deepwater sedimentary rocks, mostly composed of conglomerate and sandstone, also with basalt (ocean floor rock).
Now we ventured out to the beach, walking towards Hammond. What evidence do we see of littoral drift? In the standard model, you would see boulders and cobbles at one end of the beach, tapering off to a broader sandy beach at the other end where the wave energy was less. On this beach, either end has cobbles. This reflects that, whatever the littoral drift is doing, the forces that most strongly shape a beach are the storms. Our Northeasters come from a different direction than the prevailing winds.
Look at the bluffs. You can see various striation patterns. As the glacier advanced, streams would be running in front, perhaps frozen at night. Diagonal striations show where the stream bars advanced laterally. Where rounded (cup-shaped) deposits are present, that is called cut and fill structures as areas were eroded then filled in.
Does each different stripe represent a daily pulse due to ice melting and then freezing? Or some other time unit? Anyway, we know the darker bands have more organic material in them. The oldest sand would be at the bottom, deposited 30 – 20,000 years ago. Then, near the top of the bluffs, you see gravel. This material would have come from the glacier itself, instead of the streams running ahead of it. Gravel melts out as the glacier advances. Finally, at the very top you have glacial till, concrete-like material with occasional boulders.
On Whidbey Island, you can see evidence of yet two more glacial ice sheet advances beneath this one.
At Little Hammond, we talked about the two bars extending seaward. Underwater sand movement is not well understood, nor is its role in shorelines.
Little Hammond Bay shows a clear log spiral (see article below) where the southernmost bluff portion is deeply eroded.
The tombolo at Hammond has been getting smaller over the years. Don thought it was eroding from the bluff. Jim said it was mapped (by him in 1992 for WA Dept of Ecology) as the area where two net shore-drift cells converge, such that it was deposited by littoral drift. That does not preclude cyclical erosion, as much of the island’s shores are eroding.
We looked at the scallops in the clay. We looked at the scallops in the clay. The clay shows that the last of the glacial ice sheet was floated up by rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial advance around 11,000 years ago. All of the sediment that was left in the ice was dropped in place forming “glaciomarine drift”, with the scallop shells buried simultaneously.
If you took pollen samples, you might be able to track the typical post-glacier pattern. First, arctic grasses appear, then alders, then pines, then firs, and finally, cedars. Our personal cedars appeared here about 5,000 years ago.
Geologically, what happens while the plants are reestablishing, is that the ice melts, then marine water floods in with its attendant flora and fauna. Eventually, the land rebounds when it finally notices that the weight of the glacier is gone, and an arctic tundra is formed. The climate warms and soils redevelop.
You can date plant and animal matter with carbon dating. Thermoluminescence can show the last time that a rock saw daylight. Zircon dating is used for older rocks.
The thrill of the day was when Jim stood on Hammond, and said – Sure looks like Chuckanut sandstone to me! – The 45 million year old soft rock, with its typical honeycombing, does not appear on the geological map but there it was, plain as day.
March 8 2008 TNC Beach Walk with Jim Johannesen · 10 March 2008, 08:05 by Julie Loyd
Jim Johannesen March 8, 2008 TNC Beach Walk 3:30 p.m.
At the TNC pond were Buffleheads and possibly an American Widgeon.
Barry said that Mike L. talked to Ralph Wood, who said that the lagoon used to have a tidal inlet. They’d go in and out with a rowboat from what is now the TNC swamp.
Jim said there are maps from the 1880’s, T-shoots, which you can download from the Internet that would show what Cowlitz and the lagoon looked like then.
Standing on the bluffs just past the wild cherry grove, we looked down on a sandy beach punctuated with large rocks. Jim said that just a few rocks can act as a groin and cause a small embayment. The sand from these TNC bluffs may have come from mountains in BC, ground into sand by glaciers and pushed here. 18,000 years ago, the ice advance peaked well south of here. Sometimes you can see a semicircle of boulders which mark an old landslide.
Ryan spoke about clam gardens. The Indians ground up clam shells and made terraces for new clams to grow in, at the zero tide line where butter clams like to live. You can find these terraces by looking for shell-rich areas or asking the natives.
On the trail we saw scat with gray and white feathers. Fox? Owl? Otter (probably not)?
The stand of firs may have been where the Indians from the longhouse down in the flats put their dead to be picked clean by raptors. The location’s about right; just far enough from the village site, overlooking the water, and rather solemn feeling. The early settlers may have refrained from logging there for that reason.
At the Nature Conservancy sign, Jim dug about half a foot down to cobbles. This is primarily a gravel beach. They’re called pebbles if they’re less than 1 1/4 inches, cobbles to 10”, and boulders if they’re larger.
At the water’s edge in the shallows, was the step, the zone where the energy from returning waves and incoming waves balances to make a ledge. A small pink Purple Varnish Clam shell moved about 15 feet towards Sandy Point in as many minutes, indicating that the littoral, or net drift is thataways.
Three foot-long salmon jumped as we watched. Shredded seaweed floated at water’s edge, food for filter feeders like clams.
We looked at the lagoon near the nest box site. A small flock of mergansers flew off. At our feet was the edible Lomatium nudicale, found at Indian longhouse sites.
Ollie found a dinner bowl sized coal hunk. The Bellingham coal mines were open until the 1950’s. There are some old shafts by State Street. Jim said the coal would have been from about 45 million years ago after the dinosaurs died out and the area was still warm … of course, here was somewhere else then.
Ryan found a fish net weight, a hand-sized stone with two points that could also have been used as a fish stunner. He’s found several over the years.
Coastal Processes with Jim Johannesen Part I · 10 March 2008, 08:03 by Julie Loyd
Jim is an engineering geologist, with a consulting business aimed at customers (often government or NGO’s) that want to restore coastal areas.
He had a fistful of possible talks and slides, which we may want to call him back for:
Removal of impediments to egg hatches on forage fish beaches.
Restoration projects.
Big picture, Western Washington Geology.
San Juan County Coasts and Bluffs and County roads near the beach.
Bulkheads in the wrong place.
Climate change and sea level rise.
Vertical and oblique aerial photos from 1977 and current. (These images will be archived at the WCL).
By consensus, we settled on Coastal Processes in the Puget Sound Area, an introduction to terminology with examples. A related website (not checked out by Jim) may be found here.
Coastal processes are an interconnected set of inputs from bluffs, rivers, beaches, the subtidal zone, spits, lagoons, saltmarshes, and, of course, people.
Beaches
A beach is an accumulation of non-cohesive sediments, fine sand to boulders, that can be moved by wave action, The term excludes cliffs and mudflats. A beach goes out to the end of the photic zone where a useful amount of light can no longer penetrate to the bottom, which is basically the end of the kelp zone.
The foreshore is the intertidal zone.
The backshore extends landward until beach sediment to where the terrestrial vegetation begins.
The nearshore is the high tide beach.
Waves
Waves are measured trough to trough or crest to crest. They move energy forward but water in ellipses. The depth of water rotation is half the wavelength, so waves break at a depth of half their wavelength.
Waves slow down at shallower areas. If the shallows are around a bluff, the waves refract, curving around, which effectively focuses wave energy on headlands and makes embayments between headlands calmer. Typically, eroded materials collect in embayments.
Waves that come at an angle to a headland may form log spiral beaches, where they refract around the point and deposit sediment at the back side of the headland. The coarsest deposited material would be at the embayment, sorting to finer at the headland.
A step is a moving underwater shelf that follows the tide up and down in a 12.5 hour cycle. The null point, where the energy from incoming waves and outgoing waves cancels, is where the largest sand grains are. Grain size is sorted from larger to smaller from both shoreward and seaward of the step’s null point.
The Bruun Rule predicts that a change in sea level causes a proportional change in the beach profile, depending on the slope of the beach. A beach with a 10:1 profile, or a 10 meter run to a 1 meter rise, with a one centimeter rise in sea level would be expected to erode ten centimeters.
Coastal Processes with Jim Johannesen II · 10 March 2008, 07:58 by Julie Loyd
The second half of the lecture. 
Please note that words that are underlined are links. Click on them to go to a website related to that word.
Tides are caused by the gravitational effects of the moon (stronger) and sun (46% weaker). Water is pulled towards the moon on the side facing the moon, causing a bulge of water on the moon side of the planet. The earth is also swinging around the moon, causing a bulge of water opposite the moon side of the planet. Strong spring tides happen when the sun and moon are lined up, weaker neap tides when the moon seems to sit 90º to the sun in the sky. We have one or the other every two weeks. Puget Sound neap tides s are around 8’, spring tides around 13’. This makes us mesotidal. Macrotidal zones would get tides as greater than 4 meters, microtidal zones get lower than 2 meters.
In addition, the moon does not usually hang directly over the equator. When the moon is near our latitudes, the tides are higher than 12 hours later, when it is closer to southern latitudes. So, in general, higher latitudes have a bigger difference in daily high tides, though this can be modified by sounds and even embayments. For example, in the Puget Sound, the momentum of the tide rushing down to Olympia means that while in Friday Harbor the tidal exchange is around 8 feet, in Olympia it is around 13 or 14 feet.
The relative motion of the moon to the Pacific means that the tidal high is rushing around the Pacific rim, going north from California to us, up, and then around down the China side. If you imagine the Pacific as swirling tea in a teacup, you could predict that Hawaii would have a relatively milder tidal exchange than we do.
Tidal erosion is greatest in microtidal areas because water transfers energy to the same spot all day long. Beaches also erode and accrete seasonally. Maurice Schwartz, speaking about a Canadian beach, found a 1 to 2 meter erosion from winter to summer, and a 1 to 2 meter accretion from summer to winter.
Wind
The most common are prevailing winds, and the strongest are predominant winds.
In winter, we’ll get strong winds from the SE, switching to S with rain, then swinging SW. In summer, Northwesterlies come down the Strait of Georgia bringing sand.
It is the storms that change beach shapes the most. A high tide combined with a high wind causes storm surges. For example, in a Jan. 2003 storm, the predicted high in Tacoma was 13.1, but the recorded high was 14.26 feet. Here is our local predicted vs. actual tide table.
Building setbacks are often based on zoning, but they should be based on erosion rates and predicted life of the building. For our area, we don’t really have erosion rates. From wind data you can hind cast wave data sometimes, but often it’s from an area that doesn’t apply here. For the “Coastal Zone Atlas” 1977, 78, they took the wind record from Bellingham Airport, and used it to predict sand movement in San Juan County. They were wrong 50% of the time. Jim re-did it based on actual data.
Sediments
Bluffs typically provide 90% of beach sediment, the rest comes from streams and rivers. We don’t understand deepwater sand contributions.
Drift logs typically slow erosion, particularly with a root wad locked in to the sediment. Wind blown sand drops behind the logs. They encourage deposition of wind blown sand and vegetation and buffer wave attack. If they are cut logs, they can act as battering rams.
Historically, there were miles of wood locked up in the lower rivers. They used to pay Indians a dollar a day to cut and burn so they could get their steamboats out. There would have been more beach stability. Those truly big pieces would have been almost never mobile.
In lakes, fish like deadfall habitat. We don’t have that anymore on our shorelines. It’s thought to be important for hiding places, as a source of nutrients, and as a source of terrestrial insects, but it’s not studied. See Brennan’s Marine Riparian Vegetation Communities of Puget Sound. and Johannesen’s Beaches and Bluffs of the Puget Sound
They used to make loggers clear wood out of streams to help the fish. Now, they make them leave some wood in the streams.
Rain-on-snow events are the biggest wood-moving storms.
Coastal Erosion
A Florida hurricane can remove 20 feet of shoreline in one night, but here, erosion’s at about the same rate as fingernail growth, 1 to 3 inches a year.
Littoral or net shore drift is the direction that material moves along a beach. That’s the key to understanding a beach.
Big Picture Highlights · 4 February 2008, 17:46 by Julie Loyd
The Big Picture 2008-2010 meeting is high-graded here. For a more complete transcript of what was said, see the article below.
We would like to:
1. Conduct surveys of zooplankton abundance and species composition to develop indicators of change.
2. Create a sustainable, long-term sampling program through citizen science.
3. Educate the public.
4. Demonstrate that locally initiated science can be relevant and self-sustaining.
In the short term, we will sample the following in a standardized way:
1. Zooplankton
2. Fish
3. Birds (seabirds)
4. Water (temperature, salinity, currents).
In the longer term, we also want to sample:
1. Contaminants
2. Other animal surveys (amphibians, reptiles, insects)
3. Bird nesting census.
In order to tie in with NOAA’s “Big Picture 2008 – 2010,” and continue our own studies, we will:
Once monthly, beginning in March, from 10 – 4 pm:
1. Do a beach seine coordinated with the NOAA seines, with three replicates at five beaches, or whatever is practical.
2. Do our customary zooplankton tows
3. Measure Temp, salinity, turbidity at each site.
4. Count the birds at the seinings and report their activity.
Question: How do we want to present this information later on?
Feb 2, 2008 The Big Picture 2008 - 2010 Meeting · 4 February 2008, 17:08 by Julie Loyd
This was a REALLY long meeting. To just review the highlights, see the article above.
Present: Donna A, Fred A, Russel B, Linnea B, Anne B, Bill C, Freeda C, Laurie G, Makena H (Lopez), Camilla L, David L, Julie L, Chuck L, Madrona M, Chris S, Tony S, Gretchen W, Stan W.
Agenda:
1. Discuss project objectives and research questions.
2. Goals for final product of research.
3. Study design:
a. sample sizes b. sampling schedule c. field/lab protocols4. Next steps. Who’s doing what.
Project objectives:
David: I want to change the world.
Bill: Doing this research makes me feel good.
Stan: There are other ways, Bill. (general laughter)
Fred: I want to sustain this for a long period of time.
Julie: I want to expand the meme, have a charismatic project.
Laurie: I want to learn enough to teach my warm season neighbors and inspire them to become citizen scientists.
Stan: We need to know what we’re doing is scientifically sound and has been checked.
Chuck: I’ve been here since ’49 and I’d sort of like to know what’s going on. (laughter)
Julie: I want to develop predictions and indicators of change.
Research Questions; what we want to know about:
Fred: What other things could we sample for when we’re doing plankton tows? Salinity? Temperature? We are starting to count birds. – opportunistic sampling.
Stan; We’re all interested in discovering new things.
Julie: Contributors to the Community Observation sheet report on everything. Birds, insects, fish, zooplankton.
Russel: How do you tell what birds eat? Use binoculars and watch, or do a DNA analysis of bird poop.
Anne: It’s hard to tell the difference between a sand lance and a herring when all you see is a flash.
Stan; You can’t see them fish for zooplankton.
Russel: You can look at what is in the water that’s available for birds, when they are around. That’s an easy way to start.
David: This last week when there was surf in Cowlitz, there were birds working the surf zone, pecking away, at maybe something that was being washed up. I took the tow net but didn’t have the time to do a tow.
Russel: That will help zero in on what might be attracting birds. Emotionally, I think beginning to take the bird situation seriously is important. The stunning losses in this area affect everyone. It’s more difficult to tackle than the salmon question but getting a start would be useful, it would eventually make a difference. The bird situation might be a lack of adequate prey, or it may not be how many fish are available for the birds, but the timing relative to the nesting. Birds don’t have an awful lot of flexibility in terms of nesting. If they’ve got the nest and the eggs, and the fish don’t come until a week later, they’re out of luck.
Gretchen: What about pollutants?
Russel: Yes, PCB’s and PCBD’s and other pollutants affect large animals. Some synthetic organic molecules are easy to test for, others require expensive equipment. We can have people sample here and send them to labs for testing. We’re flushed by all the garbage from every big city on the Salish Sea. We may not be the most polluted because we don’t have direct dumping, but we get all the dissolved pollutants. Nobody’s tested for it. The Sate of WA has omitted the San Juans from their test of toxic sediments because they assumed we didn’t have any.
Linnea: Do people study bird nesting?
Russel: Fish and Wildlife does colony censuses.
Linnea: We could do the same that was done for peregrines.
Russel: Especially if it’s combined with looking at what’s in the water at the same time.
Stan: On your list of speakers, you had an expert on seabirds.
Chuck: I’ve seen some real changes. Seagulls used to lay their eggs on Pt Disney. Cormorants would build their nests there on top of each other until they were about 6 feet high. I wonder why the seagull and cormorant numbers have fallen.
David: We had a pair of mature forage fish in early January. We don’t know what they are.
Russel: There were two kinds of larval fish in the sample you sent me recently, sand lance and greenling.
David: Last year we had larval pollock.
Anne: With your baseline plankton study, you will be able to see short-term changes and, eventually, long-term changes.
Stan: We’ve been here since 1990 and have seen tremendous changes. I used to row through huge flocks of Bonaparte’s Gulls in Mail Bay, and they’re gone. We’ve lost 70 – 80% of our Bonaparte’s.
Gretchen: Will there be that kind of change reflected in the plankton?
Anne: Probably. They’re so dependent on the physical processes. Is what’s happening here affecting things? Or is it from what’s happening throughout the San Juans?
Laurie: A visitor from the East Coast said, “jellyfish mean the ocean’s unhealthy.” We are seeing a steady increse in Lion’s Mane Jellies.
Anne: Jellies are called “gelatinous zooplankton.” The increase has been seen oceanwide, and does mean something.
Russel: Huge regional studies of ocean nutrients, which generally only go for a few years, don’t deal with anything bigger than zooplankton. Some of us in ecosystems think that in small-scale whole trophic relationships is the way to see patterns. We’ve moved from seeing what’s in the water, fish, zooplanton, birds, to seeing what’s eating what; how some of the larger organisms graze on the smaller ones. Maybe we can move on to what the birds are eating. Based on what you’ve done this last year, we’re ready to look at the relationship of what’s available in the water to what juvenile salmon choose to eat. We have some prey studies showing what salmon are eating, and where they are, but don’t have long term data sets showing the relationship between the two.
Anne summarized the above discussion in the following list:
1. Conduct surveys of zooplankton abundance and species composition to develop indicators of change.
2. Create a sustainable, long-term sampling program through citizen science.
3. Educate the public.
In the short term, we will sample the following in a standardized way:
1. Zooplankton
2. Fish
3. Birds (seabirds)
4. Water (temperature, salinity, currents).
In the longer term, we also want to sample:
1. Contaminants
2. Other animal surveys (amphibians, reptiles, insects)
3. Bird nesting census.
Further discussion:
Donna: Volunteers want to know, “How long does it take, and when is the effort needed?”
Fred: In summer you get a lot of interest. Are there phases of these projects that could have a summer component, where you accomodate a big increase in interest?
Russel: Insects. We could look for big bug hatchouts and get the timing, or we could do it like looking for bugs in the plankton tows. With bugs, most of adult activity will be in summer.
Linnea: If something was designed for bug sampling, I could do it.
Russel: You could have a battery of insect traps that were checked.
Anne: That goes back to what our questions are. If insects and zooplankton are the prey of juvenile salmon, we should sample them at the same point in time. Otherwise, we should just do the insect study on its own. Definitely zooplankton and fish should be done at the same day.
Laurie: For insects, we’d have to develop a team. The marine group is somewhat formed. There’s a lot of interest in what’s going on in the forest, it’s an island-wide concern. I don’t want to see the insect thing just related to salmon.
Madrona: We have a lepidopterist who can come out.
Linnea; Mondays are good for the farmers in summer.
Julie: As long as we have a protocol and the leadership for each of the components listed, I think they would be guaranteed to fly.
Study design:
Anne: How do we want to do the things on the top of the list? The two beach seining protocols looked thorough and good, we should go with them. When will seines be conducted? Every two weeks at a certain tidal condition? A certain time of day?
Donna: There’s the baseline plankton sampling that occurs on the 1st and 15th of each month, on five set beaches. Last year’s seining fell into the event sampling category, rather than regular. If we seined on the 1st and 15th, that could tandem up with the tows. The problem is that that adds to the counting, which is more time consuming than the sampling.
Stan; Tides change. The optimum time for towing might be at midnight.
Fred: We try to catch the tows on the flood. But you can’t always do it.
Stan: Do we have the salinity and temperature things available so we can drop them in the water when we do a sampling?
Russel: I can loan you old and funky things, or we can spend a couple hundred dollars for new ones.
Chris: Can you measure turbidity?
Julie: We have Secchi disks that we made but haven’t used.
Chris: You want to make sure you don’t mix up high catch with turbidity issues.
David; If we’re going to tie more stuff into the plankton tows, we should do it in only a few sites.
Fred: Sampling every two weeks was picked out of a hat. We’re waiting to see if we need to keep that up.
Anne: I can be here on the weekends for beach seining. Same with Anna.
Russel: The big question in a research project is what time scale you’re interested in, and can you afford to sample at that rate? We tested for dissolved solids in Cascade Creek. It looked pretty uniform when it was tested monthly. The continuous logger shows pulses every five minutes or so.
Fred: Noctiluca and cladocerans come in pulses. It’s risky to thin out your sampling too much.
Russel: Some animals are in the water column briefly, others are steadily available to be eaten. That could make a big difference in how they’re used in the trophic system.
Anne: There’s also the spacial consideration. If you did three tows in one patch of water, you’d get three results.
David: When we get the embayment situation figured out, judging from bird activity, you’d get different results.
Russel: Keep an eye out for a young person interested in doing an internship on a full-time basis in the summer.
Anne: Beach seines are the most limiting, so let’s design a study around them.
Russel: We know from the seining we did in 2005 & 6 that pinks and chum show up in March. As the season progresses, we see more kings and silver. In early summer, there’s sockeye and steelhead, we know this from spotty seining. Would we see other results if we did more seining? The Feds think they’ll learn enough from April to September.
Fred: Are Beamer and Fresh sampling year round?
Russel: Spring, Summer, and early Fall.
Stan: Last summer we saw that we were getting an awful lot of herring. Everybody’s focussed on salmon but herring are really important.
Anne: Current protocols call for counting all fish.
Josie: In summer there’s enthusiasm for many things. Maybe we can’t maintain twice a week.
Anne: Can we start once a month in April and May?
David: I think we need a minimum crew of six, which is a major commitment, a tenth of our population right now. Some people not interested in plankton are interested in beach seining action. Once a month would be feasible.
Laurie: It’s not a known system. We know the pieces. As we do it, it will become more feasible to do it twice a month. Now, we don’t have momentum.
Donna: Could we keep the options open to do event sampling?
Russel: Anything will add to the knowledge base. It won’t fit the larger county-wide design. But having more frequent sampling here will help us understand here.
Russel: NOAA Fisheries is not sampling in the same places. They want Lopez and you to subcontract to sample for them. Federal and tribal biologists will sample the rest of the County. To make that work, we’d have to be sampling on the same days as the rest of the County, for comparability. Doing additional sampling just means we know more about here.
Stan: Does contract with NOAA Fisheries mean money?
Russel: Yes, it will mean money for lab supplies. We use their permits and personnel.
Anne: The permitting can be really nasty, that’s a big thing.
Russel: NOAA will have somebody available on the beach, likely Anna Kagley, a salmon biologist and Kurt’s assistant, at least once a month to help make sure everybody is doing things more or less the same way everywhere. She would have the endangered species permit in her pocket. The quid pro quo means fishing on the days that they plan to do so in the rest of the county, and planning on the same density of fishing that they will. They’re planning on sampling “outer” coasts and “inner” coasts in the county. They asked the state for enough money to bring their own crews up to do the whole thing, and at the same time committed to subcontracting, such as here and Lopez. Here, they’d want five locations, three net sets at each location.
Madrona: It’s better to synchronize time rather than tide, because then you know you’re not catching all the same fish.
David: The stocks may fish differently, according to what tide it would be.
Julie: It takes around a 1/2 hour to do the seining, and and another to do the beach stuff, the counting. If we did three tows at five sites, that’d be fifteen hours, not counting lavage.
Russel: I want to know more what they are eating than where they are in the County. The Feds decided the opposite, they only want to count fish.
Madrona: The fishing could be happening asynchronous with the lavage.
Laurie: What’s the ownership of this research?
Russel: If we subcontract the piece of the Big Picture, we are required to share data on fish abundance. They have a public reporting requirement. The lavage and what they’re eating, and the plankton counts, would be here and Lopez labs, and is up to us.
Anne: Would it be useful to outline our ideal sampling, and bring it back to them and say, “this is what we can do?”
David: Details can be worked out later. I’m curious how many people could commit a day a month for the beach seining process? It would probably be a full day: Stan, Laurie, Gretchen, Julie, David, Anne. That’s six!
Anne: Let’s do a plankton tow on the weekend closest to the first or the 15th, do temp, salinity, turbidity stuff. Doing it on a flooding tide works.
Chris: You want to see indicators of change in the broad ecosystem. If you’re looser about the tide, you might get a whole species of fish that’s tide-dependent.
Julie: Practically, people will show up between 10 am and 4 pm.
Anne: Standard replicate is to do three for statistical purposes.
David: Towing is easy, counting is hard.
Julie: What if we do three samples as you suggest, and evaluate the result, if the three are statistically similar, then we’ll only do one.
Donna: We’ve collected about 80, and have counted all but 16. But every two weeks we add five more samples.
Madrona: Ideally, you wouldn’t split.
Chris: In Lake Washington, they’ve been taking 60 years of samples. They do vertical pulls. They dilute the sample to a liter, shake it, take one scoop, and count it.
Stan: That’s basically what we’re doing.
Chris: Try comparing larger tows with smaller tows. Perhaps collecting five samples with lesser effort is more important that collecting one.
A discussion followed, explaining that because each sample is split until it takes about an hour and a half to count, every sample, large or small, requires the same time commitment.
Russel: If you’re looking to see if a particular thing is there at all, that’s one thing. If you’re looking for biomass, that’s another.
Fred: Plankton counting takes an hour and a half for each sample you count, that’s the bottom line. It’d be easy to overwhelm the rest of the project with counting, you don’t want to demoralize people.
Anne summarized the above discussion
In order to tie in with NOAA’s “Big Picture 2008 – 2010,” and continue our own studies, we will:
Once monthly, beginning in March, from 10 – 4 pm:
1. Do a beach seine coordinated with the NOAA seines, with three replicates at five beaches, or whatever is practical.
2. Do our customary zooplankton tows
3. Measure Temp, salinity, turbidity at each site.
4. Count the birds at the seinings and report their activity.
Anne: Think about how you want to present this information later. A report? The Puget Sound Conference? What?
Beach Seine Jan 9, 2008 · 10 January 2008, 08:51 by Julie Loyd
Watch this post for pictures.
Objective: To see what fish are around in January.
Future plans: To make videotapes of the fish in January.
Crew: Glen, Barry, David, Julie, Camilla, Laurie, and Kiayah
Location, weather: Between the dock and the first two rocks in the water at Cowlitz, the east lobe of Frances’ Cove, and waterwards of the junipers at TNC. Air temperature was 8 degrees and water temperature off the Cowlitz float was 7 degrees. It was cloudy, with the wind less than 12 knots. Slight surf. Tide high and rising.
Cowlitz: 10:40 caught 2 fish, probably smelt, at 7” and 6.3”.
Birds sighted were: a Horned Grebe, 4 female Buffleheads, 15 crows, and a Bald Eagle with a fish
Frances’ Cove: 11:15, caught a sculpin at 3.5”, and a 6.5” green snakey thing with a tube snout.
Birds sighted were: a Horned Grebe, 2 Bald Eagles, a male Bufflehead with prey, a male Common Merganser.
TNC: 12:00, caught three 3” sand dabs, one 2.5” spherical fish with suctions on its belly (a clingfish, or Gobiesox maeandricus. Gopher snakes eat them), and a 3” sculpin. The catch of the day was an adult salmon! It was very plump, over 12”, and didn’t fit well in the bucket. It got away while I was trying to fill the bucket with water (don’t ask). As I remember in the excitement, it was greenish-silver, with duller greenish spots distributed randomly. About 5% of its scales were missing.
Birds sighted were 2 female Buffleheads, 2 Bald Eagles in a tree and a juvenile in the air, 2 Horned Grebes, 1 Surf Scoter
What we need to do a good beach seine:
Net storage is fine. We pile it on a plywood board and store it under a tarp at Fred & Donna’s. It’s got a 100’ line attached at either end, on the spreader bars. (The bars themselves may not be a good solution).
We have 4 white restaurant buckets and a collection of soft-meshed nets. We used hands instead of nets this time. We also need a larger tub.
We didn’t bring, but should have, a measuring thing and more data sheets.