Feb 2, 2008 The Big Picture 2008 - 2010 Meeting · 3 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?
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