Washington’s Oysters

Washington’s Promising Pollution Story Starts With Oysters And Ends With Victory

When Alan Barton first arrived at Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in 2007, he wasn’t expecting to stay very long. The hatchery — the second-largest in the United States — was in trouble, suffering from historically high mortality rates for their microscopic oyster larvae. But Barton knew that in the oyster industry, trouble is just another part of the job.

As manager of the oyster breeding program at Oregon State University, he had already helped one oyster larvae breeding operation navigate through some tough years in 2005, when a bacterial infection appeared to be causing problems for their seeds. To combat the issue, he had created a treatment system that could remove  vibrio tubiashii , an infamous killer in the oyster industry, from the water.

Barton made the winding two-hour drive up the Oregon coast from Newport to Netarts, thinking his machines could easily solve whatever was plaguing Whiskey Creek. But when Barton’s $180,000 machine turned on, nothing changed. The hatchery was still suffering massive larvae mortality — months where nearly every one of the billions of tiny larvae housed in the hatchery’s vast network died before it could reach maturity.

Two-hundred miles up the coast in Shelton, Washington, Bill Dewey was also stumped. As director of public affairs for Taylor Shellfish, the country’s largest producer of farmed shellfish, he couldn’t figure out what was causing the hatchery’s tiny larvae to die in huge numbers. He knew about vibrio tubiashii , so when the die-offs began, Dewey called Barton and asked if they could install his machines at Taylor Shellfish’s own hatchery in the Puget Sound. And like at Whiskey Creek, the machines did little to stop the mysterious waves of death that were consuming the hatchery’s oyster larvae.

Back in Oregon, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)-vessel rocked by persistent summer winds was approaching Newport. Dick Feely, a senior scientist with NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, was just halfway through the first-ever survey meant to measure the amount of carbon dioxide in the surface waters of the Pacific Coast. Already, he could tell from the few samples they had collected that he and his team had the material for a major scientific paper. He called his boss at NOAA to tell him that there was something wrong with the water. It seemed that an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, propelled by the burning of fossil fuels, was also increasing the acidity of the water.

Eight years later, Barton stands on the side of the same winding coastal highway that brought him from Newport to Netarts, looking out across the bay.

“I think this is the prettiest bay in the Northwest,” he muses.

Netarts Bay stretches out before him, changing from light to dark blue and back again as it expands from the rocky shoreline. It’s an early September day typical of the Pacific Northwest coast — sunny and windy with a chilly dew in the air.

Barely a foot from where Barton stands, the road drops down into the bay — a rocky, gradual slope maybe five feet long leading down into the bright blue water. At the bottom of the slope, a white pipe hums as it sucks in water from the bay, transporting it underneath Barton’s feet, under the highway, and back to the hatchery some 200 feet from the bay.

Less than a decade after the small business balanced dangerously on the edge of ruin, the hatchery is surviving. Up at Taylor Shellfish, things are markedly better, too — the company posted record production in 2009. In 2013, the Washington state legislature set aside millions of dollars in the state budget dedicated to combating the problem that Dick Feely and the team of scientists detected so near the coast back in 2007. In recent years, representatives from Washington have traveled around the country and the world, teaching other coastal communities about the dangers of and potential solutions to the increase of acidity in ocean waters caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, also known as ocean acidification.

“It’s one beautiful story of how science and government and industry work together,” Feely said. “This would have never worked out anywhere else, but it works beautifully here.”

But as global carbon dioxide emissions continue to pour into the atmosphere — and seep into the water — other states are beginning to face the threat of ocean acidification in their own waters. By the end of the century, under a business-as-usual carbon emissions scenario, some scientists think the acidity of the world’s oceans could double. If that happens, can the Pacific Northwest’s regional success help guide a global fight against the impacts of ocean acidification?

The Oystermen

Alan Barton knows how challenging the oyster business can be.

“You always have trouble in this business, it’s not an easy thing to do. It’s like a miracle if it works,” he said.

But the die-offs he witnessed when he came to Whiskey Creek — a family-run hatchery owned by wife and husband duo Sue Cudd and Mark Wiegard — were different.

“We had two awful years in a row.” Barton said. “And this is a small business, so that’s almost the end.”

Whiskey Creek might be a small business, but it’s a crucial link in the $270 million Pacific shellfish industry. As the second-largest commercial shellfish hatchery on the West Coast, it provides hundreds of small to medium-sized oyster farms with the microscopic larvae they need to make their operations work.

Oysters have been grown commercially on the West Coast since the mid-to-late 1800s, thriving in the brackish water found in the shallow, cool estuaries along the Pacific Coast. By the 1890s, oystermen were pulling 200,000 bushels a year out of the Puget Sound. But the boom was followed by bust, as over-harvesting and declining water quality decimated the native population of Ostrea lurida , or Olympia oysters. In the 1920s, as a way of saving their industry, the West Coast oyster growers began importing Crassostrea gigas , or Pacific oysters, from Japan. The Pacific oysters thrived, and oyster farmers began growing the species in large numbers.

But unlike the native Olympia oyster, the Pacific oyster was never able to reproduce quite as successfully in the wild — so in the 1970s, the shellfish industry began installing hatcheries along the Pacific Coast, in order to supply oyster farmers with the seed needed to sustain their businesses. In 1978, the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery set up shop next to Netarts Bay, five miles southwest of Tillamook, Oregon. A family-run business, it eventually grew to supply Pacific oyster larvae to 70 percent of the West Coast’s oyster farms stretching from Canada to South America.

The Scientists

Before he started studying carbon in the ocean, Dick Feely studied dirt in the ocean. And while he found it interesting, he also came to realize that it wasn’t necessarily the foundation of an illustrious career in ocean science.

“My boss said I wasn’t going to be able to make a career studying dirt in the ocean,” Feely said from his lab. “And I had to agree with him. So I started to think I wanted to start a program on carbon.”

Feely’s bright blue eyes peered out from behind round glasses as he explained his history with ocean acidification. A glint of mid-morning sunshine shone through the windows of his office at the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, bouncing off of the collection of framed awards that lined the walls. Feely paused before going on, leaned back in his seat, and apologized — he had been up through the night witnessing the birth of his first grandchild, and worried his answers might be suffering from his lack of sleep.

It wasn’t the first time the title of “grandpa” had been applied to Feely — in the field, he is playfully known as the “grandpa of ocean acidification,” largely because he sounded the alarm long before most people thought ocean acidification could become a real problem.

“He’s the guy waving his fist, and everyone thought he was crazy for 20 years,” Barton said.

Ocean acidification is sometimes referred to as “the other carbon problem,” the first carbon problem being global climate change. The two are like siblings, in that they are born from the same thing: An increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And while carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat, driving global warming, some of that carbon dioxide also ends up in the world’s oceans.

About 30 percent of the carbon dioxide that humans release into the atmosphere gets absorbed by the ocean, and when that happens, it reacts with water to form carbonic acid, which is the same thing that gives soda its signature fizz and slightly acidic bite. In the oceans, carbonic acid is not a very stable chemical compound — it tends to split into smaller chemical pieces fairly quickly, forming both a bicarbonate ion and a hydrogen ion. As the concentration of hydrogen ions increases, the pH of the ocean decreases, increasing the acidity of the water. Over the last 250 years, the average pH of upper-ocean has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 — and while that might look like a relatively small drop, it translates to roughly a 30 percent increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions.

For years, Feely and colleagues conducted surveys showing how carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by humans was changing the chemistry of the oceans. But the 2007 survey was the first time researchers had a real, data-driven sense of just how much anthropogenic carbon emissions were impacting the chemistry of the water off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.

Part of what makes the Pacific Coast an ideal place for oyster farming is something called coastal upwelling, a seasonal event caused by the northerly winds that blow along the coast from early spring to late fall. As the winds funnel down the coast, they create surface currents that flow not only to the south, but also offshore to the west. To balance that offshore flow, cold, nutrient-rich, high-salinity water comes to the surface near the coast from deep in the ocean.

While that water is full of nutrients, it also tends to be old, meaning that it has been absorbing carbon from the decomposition of all the organic matter — the plankton, the sea vegetation, the fish — that has died and sunk to the bottom, releasing carbon dioxide as it breaks down.

Source: Think Progress

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