Bird behavior influenced by human activity during COVID-19 lockdowns
Holly Hauser
Two great blue herons stand together.
A new University of Washington study led by Olivia Sanderfoot reports that many birds were just as likely to be found in highly developed urban areas as they were in less-developed green spaces during the peak of the COVID-19 lockdowns. The paper was published Aug. 11 in the journal Scientific Reports.
“Our findings suggest that some birds may have been able to use more spaces in cities because our human footprint was a little lighter,” said Sanderfoot, who completed the study as a doctoral researcher in the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences and is now a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Beach trash accumulates in predictable patterns on Washington and Oregon shores
Dorothea Derrickson/COASST
This litter collected at Devil’s Punchbowl on the Oregon coast in December 2012 shows a mix of bottle tops, fishing gear and plastic fragments. Analysis of larger items collected by volunteers from 2017 to 2021 shows that beaches have “sticky zones” where both organic material and litter tends to accumulate.
Citizen scientists recorded trash on Pacific Northwest beaches, from southern Oregon to Anacortes, Washington, to contribute to the growing study of marine trash. A study by the University of Washington analyzed 843 beach surveys and found that certain beaches, and certain areas of a single beach, are “sticky zones” that accumulate litter.
The study was published online Aug. 11 in Marine Pollution Bulletin.
“Thousands of volunteer hours allowed us to investigate what is driving the rubbish washing up on our beaches, and where it’s ending up,” said lead author Kathy Willis, a UW visiting scientist who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, or CSIRO, in Australia. “Understanding how trash moves through the marine environment provides us with important clues to identify sources and implement strategies to prevent more trash escaping.”
“In populated areas of Puget Sound, what the data suggest is that if you see a lot of trash, someone probably dumped it or it escaped accidentally nearby,” said co-author Jackie Lindsey, Science Coordinator at COASST. “But if there’s a lot of trash in a remote region, the people who live there are not necessarily the people who are creating that trash — they’re just the ones who are dealing with it once it lands.”
All the data were collected by volunteers with the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team, or COASST. The UW-based citizen science effort began in the 1990s to study seabirds. In late 2015 the team added a group of volunteers focused on observing marine litter.
New UW Photonic Sensing Facility will use fiber-optic cables for seismic sensing, glaciology and more
Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich
A fiber-optic cable (yellow) on the surface of the Rhone Glacier in Switzerland during a collaborative project that included Brad Lipovsky. The UW Photonic Sensing Facility has already used similar equipment at Easton Glacier on Mt. Baker.
The fiber-optic cables that travel underground, along the seafloor and into our homes have potential besides transmitting videos, emails and tweets. These signals can also record ground vibrations as small as a nanometer anywhere the cable touches the ground. This unintended use for fiber-optic cables was discovered decades ago and has had limited use in military and commercial applications.
A University of Washington pilot project is exploring the use of fiber-optic sensing for seismology, glaciology, and even urban monitoring. Funded in part with a $473,000 grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, a nonprofit based in Vancouver, Washington, the new UW Photonic Sensing Facility has three decoder machines, or “interrogators,” that use photons traveling through a fiber-optic cable to detect ground motions as small as 1 nanometer.
“Fiber-optic sensing is the biggest advance in ground-based geophysics since the field went digital in the 1970s,” said principal investigator Brad Lipovsky, a UW assistant professor of Earth and space sciences. “The UW Photonic Sensing Facility and its partners will explore this technology’s potential across scientific fields — including seismology, glaciology, oceanography and monitoring hydrology and infrastructure.”
“We’re getting to the ‘smart Earth’ concept, where we can listen to the Earth,” said Marine Denolle, a UW assistant professor of Earth and space sciences. “This technology allows seismic sensing to go to places you could not go before — where it was too hard, or too expensive, to deploy sensors. The other aspect that’s new is a density of sensors beyond what we had before.”
Annual research trip off Oregon coast gives students once in a lifetime experience at sea
UW Photography
The Thomas G. Thompson heading to the open ocean from Seattle.
Most things that humans build need a little maintenance every now and again. That’s no different for the Regional Cabled Array, a high-tech engineering marvel off the Pacific Northwest coast studded with all kinds of oceanographic equipment that gives humans a real-time, 24/7 look at what’s happening under the sea surface. The lengths that scientists and engineers go to keep the array working and up to snuff is extraordinary, and they are currently at sea providing its annual check-up.
“There are about 60 people we’ve sent offshore for 45 days with over 200,000 pounds of gear,” says lead project investigator Debbie Kelley. The team departed Newport, OR in early August aboard the R/V Thomas G. Thompson, a 274-foot research vessel whose home is at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography. Onboard is a state-of-the-art robotic vehicle called ROPOS, the workhorse that will take instruments to and from the seafloor and deep ocean. “It’s a lot to manage, but we have such an exceptional team that gets along, works efficiently and is great at their job. Which is good because being at sea for that long is tough.”
The cabled array’s massive infrastructure, including over 500 miles of submarine high-power and bandwidth fiber optic cables connected to nearly 150 instruments offshore, is designed to collect enormous amounts of scientific data in real time continuously for 25 years. Located in deep Pacific waters, data are specifically collected at two areas offshore of Oregon: Axial Seamount, the largest underwater volcano off the coast, and along the continental margin, including where the Juan de Fuca Plate dives under the North American Plate. Scientific equipment, both stationary and mobile, measure and record information about what’s happening in these dynamic environments, including changes in seawater pH, temperature, salinity, seafloor earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the life that flourishes in the unique conditions at each site. The array — which operates under the larger NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative — has been collecting data in our region since 2014 for anyone in the world to freely use.
Andrew Paley
Undergraduate Andrew Paley works in a laboratory on the R/V Thomas G. Thompson.
While keeping the cabled array fully functioning is important and exciting work, Kelley finds equal excitement in bringing 28 students on the cruise this year as part of the UW at-sea experiential learning program called VISIONS. Both graduates and undergraduates will get to experience firsthand what doing research is like on the high seas, working side-by-side with the ROPOS team as the vehicle dives nearly 10,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. Students will study the unique organisms that live in such harsh environments, and collect data, imagery, and maintain infrastructure as it comes aboard. Two students are doing their senior thesis at the Axial volcano, collecting animals and microbes that live in the extreme temperatures and pressures of hydrothermal vents — where water is superheated by magma — and decoding their genetics. The students hail from around the globe, with hometowns in the Pacific Northwest, Saudi Arabia, India, Kazakhstan and beyond, and their disciplines range from oceanography and marine biology to engineering and computer science.
“They will gain an awareness of the ocean during a blue-water cruise 300-miles offshore,” says Kelley. “That’s just cool stuff, right?”
An experience like this for students can be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “Anyone, no matter their interest, should try to come to sea,” says Andrew Paley, an undergraduate majoring in marine biology and oceanography. His interest is on the deep sea and what lives there, and he wants to understand exactly how operations like this run and how to plan them. “You get to see things only a fraction of the population will ever think about, whether that be the tube worms, weird fish, dolphin pods, whales, albatross or the 360 degrees of endless stars that are only possible in the ocean.”
M. Elend
ROPOS being deployed offshore with a tool basket attached to its underside.
Onboard, Paley is building multiple skill sets, including those needed in the laboratory which he and many other students have gone without during the age of COVID and online labs. His other duties include preparing scientific instruments for deployment, processing samples brought back to the ship, and keeping meticulous notes about what’s happening at sea. His days are anything but consistent, as he tends to switch from task to task based on what’s needed. A good chunk of his time is spent as a watch lead, where he serves as a resource and helping hand for students that need it. He is often found answering their questions about what’s happening during ROV dives, and helps identify all the critters they see on camera. “That’s become something of a specialty of mine,” he says.
Since its inception, the cabled array has recorded spectacular events that escape notice in our day-to-day lives. The ocean is a harsh, ever-changing environment, and for the most part invisible to humans; yet this project has given us a window into what’s happening on the ocean floor, and throughout the water column—providing a greater understanding of how the Earth works.
For example, 70% of volcanism on Earth occurs in the ocean, but people almost never see these eruptions hidden beneath the waves. In 2015, instruments on the summit of Axial Seamount changed all that, and scientists were able to document the start and evolution of a massive eruption. They knew it was coming because seismometers — devices that can detect even the tiniest of earthquakes — placed earlier on the seafloor recorded approximately 8000 earthquakes over a period of 24 hours. These earthquakes were too small to be detected on land. As the eruption began, scientists watched the seafloor fall nearly seven feet, all while recording over 30,000 explosions as lava fountained and spilled onto the seafloor nearly a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Three months later they were able to pilot ROPOS to the still-cooling, nearly 400-foot-thick lava flow and document swarms of microbes issuing from within it, fed by chemicals and gasses in the lava that give them life.
N. Andrews
The ROPOS control center, showing the ROV working on the seafloor.
Another example involves monitoring methane seeps along the margin off Newport, Oregon. Here, methane gas escapes through vents in the seafloor, which has both energy and greenhouse gas implications. There are over 1000 methane bubble-plumes spanning the coast from Oregon to Vancouver Island, but only a handful of these sites have ever been directly imaged. With sonars and cameras on the array, scientists monitoring the methane bubbles can watch them move towards the ocean’s surface where they feed microbial communities, which in turn feed planktonic communities, which in turn feed krill that eventually become food for whales and other marine life.
But even with all the science and discovery, Kelley’s biggest joy remains taking the students to sea. “Some of the students I have known since 2014, some go to grad school, one is currently in the White House,” she says. “It’s a long-term relationship we build, and many say that participating in these expeditions has forever changed their lives. They get to experience something that few get to do. I love working with the students and helping to open their eyes about what a remarkable place our oceans are.”
Visit the OOI Regional Cabled Array’s website for more information about this year’s cruise.
And check out their live video feed of what’s happening on the seafloor.
An 85-year-old fishing club’s records reveal the secrets of Puget Sound salmon
Doug Hanada
Tengu Club fishers angle for blackmouth in Elliott Bay
Few people would consider launching a boat into Seattle’s Elliott Bay on a winter morning. It’s cold, dark, and more often than not, wet. But the steadfast members of Seattle’s Tengu Club, a Japanese American fishing club that held its first annual salmon derby in 1946, can reliably be found doing just that.
In the 85 years since it was founded, participants have gathered on the shores of West Seattle each winter to reconnect and fish for resident Puget Sound Chinook salmon, also known as blackmouth because of their dark-colored gums. Over the course of the season, fishers compete to catch the largest salmon, vying for glory and a pot of prize money.
When he first read about the Tengu Derby in the Seattle Times over a decade ago, UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences (SAFS) Professor Thomas Quinn’s interest was piqued. With over 70 years of meticulously kept records, the derby presented an unexpected and exciting opportunity to gain insight into Puget Sound’s resident salmon population.
As they dug into the data, Quinn and his collaborators — James Losee (Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife), Mark Scheuerell (USGS, SAFS), and Doug Hanada (Tengu Club) — were surprised to find previously undocumented trends in blackmouth body size that differed from existing data on the more typical Chinook salmon that leave Puget Sound and feed along the Pacific Ocean coast.
A fishing club’s legacy
During World War II, the Japanese American members of the Tengu Club were forced into internment camps by the U.S. government. When they finally returned home, existing salmon derbies, made up of primarily white participants, denied them entrance. So in 1946, Tengu Club members started their own derby open to all nationalities, making it one of the longest continuously running derbies in the country.
Participants use a relatively simple fishing method called “mooching,” which was invented by Japanese fishers in the early 1900s here in Seattle. “They couldn’t really afford tackle so they would go out and jig up their own herring, which was free, and then put that on a hook or cut the head off and angle it so that it would spin in the water like a top,” Tengu Club President Doug Hanada explained. A wildly successful method, mooching was named because non-Japanese fishers — probably including some who had denied Tengu members entrance into their own derbies — were regularly out-fished, and would sidle up to Tengu boats to “mooch” herring.
Doug Hanada
Tengu Club president Doug Hanada shows off his 11lb 9oz blackmouth in 2012
“A small piece of the puzzle”
The Tengu Derby’s records revealed an overall decline in blackmouth body size from 1946 until about 1980, then a subsequent increase in size until 1990, followed by a second period of decline to the present. The recent declining trend aligns with research in other areas, but the changes in the derby fish differed from those of Puget Sound as a whole.
Unlike their relatives that migrate all the way to the Pacific Ocean, blackmouth spend most of their adult lives within Puget Sound. These results imply that there is something unique going on in their ecosystem, where resident Chinook may experience different ecological conditions than their counterparts in the Pacific.
“It’s a small piece of the puzzle,” said Quinn, who has spent much of his career developing scientific knowledge around why and where salmon migrate, what influences their survival, and how conservation efforts can successfully maintain their dwindling populations. Although the specific causes of the change in blackmouth size remain uncertain, the results presented in the paper represent a unique and valuable contribution to existing science, specifically in regards to our understanding of the salmon that inhabit Puget Sound year-round.
A family affair
For Hanada, the derby has always been a family affair, with multiple generations and loads of friends participating annually. But dwindling salmon numbers have changed things over time. “Back in the day we were catching a fair bit of blackmouth,” he said. “Nowadays it’s more swapping stories. Just a way of keeping in touch, even though we aren’t catching much.”
The biggest catch in the Tengu record was 25 pounds. Recently, however, winning fish have only weighed somewhere between six and nine pounds. Tengu Club members like Hanada witnessed firsthand the alarming changes occurring in Puget Sound salmon populations, far before researchers arrived to analyze any data. “We lived it, so we saw the decline,” Hanada said. “We experienced it.”
Such declines significantly impact traditions like the Tengu Derby. There have been a few winters in which the derby has been outright canceled due to low salmon numbers, while other seasons have been abruptly cut short. “It’s tough to say when we will start up again, if we start up again,” he said. “There’s a lot of ifs.”
Doug Hanada
A plaque commemorating the Tengu Club sits next to the pier at Seacrest Park in West Seattle
The human element
According to Quinn, using recreational fishing data in research is relatively uncommon, but he has had success with it in the past. “Skillful anglers know things that a lot of us in the scientific community don’t know,” he said. “There are a lot of patterns that I’ve learned about from talking to sport fishermen that have generated scientific projects. We have a lot to learn from them.” Had it not been for the Tengu Club’s meticulous record keeping and willingness to collaborate, these new findings may not have been identified. “It was a nice collaboration, because nobody could have done it without the others. We all had very important but different roles to play.”
Quinn is well aware of the important role fish and fishing play in many peoples’ lives. “You can’t study salmon and trout without understanding the human connection to them. They’re not just our food, they’re not just a product, they’re not just part of the ecosystem. They’re culturally important. I’m intrigued by that human element.”
Without healthy salmon runs, events such as the Tengu Derby cannot exist. Thus, protecting our local salmon populations is an endeavor that reaches far beyond the salmon themselves and into our own communities.
Whodunnit? Uncovering the mystery of a tiny toxin killing shellfish in Puget Sound
Teri King
Not only are oysters susceptible to yessotoxins, but so are other shellfish like clams and mussels.
Around 50 years ago, Pacific oysters in the Puget Sound started dying at noticeably increasing rates during the summer, causing residents and scientists to wonder why. Researchers in what is now the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences investigated many factors that may cause mortalities such as bacteria, reproductive stress related to spawning and changes in other environmental conditions.
The evidence collected pointed towards stress on the animals when they spawn, as the Pacific oyster spends a lot of their energy on reproduction. To help alleviate that stress, the team—led by Stan Allen and Sandra Downing, then graduate students of UW fisheries professor Kenneth Chew, in collaboration with the West Coast shellfish industry—created the triploid oyster, a genetic modification that prevents oysters from reproducing. An added bonus was it produced an “all-season” oyster, meaning the oysters would not be mushy with egg or sperm, a distasteful attribute to those who like oysters on the half-shell in the summer during spawning season.
Yet despite this successful work, oysters kept dying during the warm summer months on farms in Puget Sound. The hunt for the reason continued with more research, again looking closely at bacteria and other environmental factors with no conclusive findings.
Teri King
Countless clams and oysters killed by yessotoxins in Puget Sound.
Fast forward to the summer of 2019. Teri King, who was once a student assistant in the Chew Laboratory and is now an aquaculture and marine water quality specialist at Washington Sea Grant, found herself back at the same site she frequented when collecting samples on the triploid oyster project in the 1980s. She was contacted by residents and shellfish farmers to help figure out strange behavior exhibited by the clams in the bay; they were pushing themselves out of the sediment onto the surface where they died within a tide or two. King observed that no birds or other animals that normally scavenge dead or dying marine life were consuming this easy prey. Shoreline residents had observed a similar pattern.
King gathered samples from the dying clams and oysters, and nearby water samples too. From there, she had the information to start piecing the mystery together. Her team identified high concentrations of yessotoxins produced by the phytoplankton Protoceratium reticulatum which grows naturally in the bay but with a sinister ability to kill shellfish.
“This bay took my dignity as a student in the 80s when I literally sunk waist-deep into the bay with my lab book floating out to sea for the oyster triploid project, but gave my dignity back to me as a researcher when I found a yessotoxin link to summer mortality events,” said King.
An overlooked killer
Yessotoxins were not a new concept to King, who heard about them previously in a food science class. Discovered in 1986, yessotoxins were the new kids on the block in the phytoplankton and toxin world, and often overlooked even though they could kill massive amounts of shellfish particularly during the warmer summer months when they bloomed. As other causes of mortalities began to be ruled out, investigators finally began considering biotoxins such as yessotoxins.
Teri King
Tiny cysts from the phytoplankton that reslease yessotoxins.
Yessotoxins in Puget Sound are released from a species of microscopic plankton known as dinoflagellates, which are able to swim in the water using two tails. When conditions are not good for the phytoplankton’s survival, they are able to drop out of the water column into a cyst formation and spring back to life when conditions are right. Many species of dinoflagellates produce cysts, which set them apart from other algae by making them highly resistant to stressful environmental conditions.
How yessotoxins affect oysters
Shellfish, such as clams and oysters, consume phytoplankton and other particles floating freely in the water. In the process, they filter massive amounts of water which makes them a key player in maintaining good water quality. King refers to shellfish as the canaries in the coal mine for water quality issues, the grazers of the sea.
Knowing the animals are essentially sampling the surrounding water continuously through feeding, King examined the clam’s digestive system to see what they had been eating in hopes of determining what was causing death. She was able to match plankton cells and cysts in the clam’s digestive system to those in her water samples. This, it seemed, was a ‘smoking gun’ especially since none of the other environmental conditions could be identified as an obvious culprit.
She sent the water samples to colleague to Vera Trainer at the NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center to culture the phytoplankton species, and she sent shellfish tissue samples to Misty Peacock from the Salish Sea Institute at the Northwest Indian College hoping they could analyze the samples for yessotoxins. A shellfish farmer also sent samples to their pathologist for clinical diagnosis. The pathology report noted unexplained damage to the digestive tract. King and Trainer were also able to find reports of yessotoxin poisoning of shellfish worldwide that had similar damage to digestive tissues.
Staying ahead of the blooms
Knowing this, King reached out to the partners of the SoundToxins phytoplankton monitoring program, a group she manages through her work at Washington Sea Grant. The program trains tribes, shellfish growers, environmental learning centers, university staff and private residents to monitor and record phytoplankton at sites around the Puget Sound. Data collected by the group since 2010 helped King and Trainer further link yessotoxins to many of the die off events. Looking back through the literature Trainer found that this species of phytoplankton had been mentioned numerous times as being present when summer shellfish mortality events had been recorded.
Because research surrounding yessotoxins is relatively new, close collaboration between Washington Sea Grant, SoundToxins, the Northwest Indian College, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, tribes and shellfish growers is required to understand them more fully. Intensive surveys funded by NOAA MERHAB are planned for upcoming summers at different shellfish farms to study yessotoxins over time to see how they react to a changing climate, determine the level of toxicity that is lethal to an animal and when during an oyster’s growth is it the most susceptible to the toxin. Filling in these gaps will help researchers better predict the timing of phytoplankton blooms, allowing shellfish farmers to deploy mitigation procedures like harvesting earlier, moving the stock to cleaner waters or enhancing water filtration. There’s no way to kill these toxins, which forces growers to figure out ways to live with it and minimize its effects on shellfish.
“This work really is a team effort,” said King. “At Washington Sea Grant, it’s our job to partner with agencies, tribes, shellfish producers and researchers to bring everyone together to understand the problem and figure out solutions. It’s really important that we have a diverse group of people bringing in different perspectives and areas of expertise at the table.”
Researchers have just scratched the surface in understanding these issues and yessotoxins have been largely overlooked globally, but now researchers have another likely culprit explaining mass shellfish mortality events and can develop research approaches to understand them even further. That alone brings much needed relief to scientists and oyster farmers alike.
New study calculates retreat of glacier edges in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park
U.S. National Park Service
Holgate Glacier, shown here in June 2009, terminates on the coast and is a popular kayaking destination, especially in summer when the ice is calving. Local residents had recently observed land exposed at its terminus, but the new analysis finds that the glacier has been advancing over the past 5 years.
As glaciers worldwide retreat due to climate change, managers of national parks need to know what’s on the horizon to prepare for the future. A new study from the University of Washington and the National Park Service measures 38 years of change for glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park, a stunning jewel about two hours south of Anchorage.
The study, published Aug. 5 in The Journal of Glaciology, finds that 13 of the 19 glaciers show substantial retreat, four are relatively stable, and two have advanced. It also finds trends in which glacier types are disappearing fastest. The nearly 670,000-acre park hosts various glaciers: some terminate in the ocean, others in lakes or on land.
“In Alaska, much glacier retreat is being driven by climate change,” said lead author Taryn Black, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences. “These glaciers are at really low elevation. It’s possibly causing them to get more rain in the winter rather than snow in addition to warming temperatures, which is consistent with other climate studies in this region.”
