SeaDoc Finds Millions of Scuba Dollars Bubbling Through Local Economy

For most folks, the surface of the Salish Sea exists as a beautiful albeit slightly forbidding border. Our inland sea is wonderful to ferry or paddle across and a fine comfy home for seals, killer whales and other critters. But jump into that cold water? No thanks.

There’s an entire subclass of people, though, who look at our chilly green water and see opportunity. Escorted around reefs by curious kelp greenling, local divers regularly engage in staring contests with lingcod, link arms with giant octopus, peep at nudibranchs and attend rockfish schools.

This hardy band of deep breathers knows that underwater images in books like The Salish Sea: Jewel of the Pacific Northwest aren’t just exotic, aspirational fantasies; divers see these colorful creatures every time they strap on a mask. With such awesome diving in our front yard, it’s no wonder that Washington State has the 3rd highest number of certified scuba divers per capita in the U.S.

A newly released SeaDoc study led by Dr. Katharine Wellman, resource economist with Northern Economics, asked local divers about the most important factors in choosing underwater sites to visit. Not surprisingly, number one was “abundant wildlife.”

Spending their down time literally immersed in the environment, divers naturally tend to be passionate advocates for healthy marine ecosystems. Many even volunteer as citizen scientists, doing underwater surveys, deploying fish-tracking instruments, and acting as early warning systems for unusual mortality events like the 2013 Sea Star Wasting Disease outbreak.

Research has also shown that divers do more than their share to contribute to a healthy local economy, spending more per activity day than any other outdoor enthusiasts. Our new study found that just the approximately 1,000 state residents who belong to Washington’s scuba clubs contribute five million diving dollars to the state’s economy each year.

“Considering that there are an estimated 100,000 certified divers in the state,” says Dr. Wellman, “and thousands more in British Columbia, plus all those who travel to the area to dive, we’re talking about a deep financial impact on the region." Diving, together with other recreational activities like fishing, kayaking, coastal hiking, wildlife and whale watching, contributes billions to our local economy in direct and non-market benefits.

Each one of those dollars and all the related jobs are dependent on a functional, flourishing Salish Sea ecosystem, something we at SeaDoc are constantly working on whether we’re at our desks, in the lab or when we’re lucky enough to be getting down with our dive buddies.

Read the full report here: Economic Impacts of Washington State Resident Scuba Divers.

SeaDoc would like to thank Rick Stratton of Diver News Network; Mike Racine of Washington SCUBA Alliance;  Josh Reyneveld and Maya Kocian of Earth Economics; Dan Tonnes, Adam Obaza, Steve Copps and Leif Anderson of NOAA; Janna Nichols of REEF; Craig Burley and Dayv Lowry of Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife; Patrick Christie at the Univ. of Washington; Fran Wilshussen and Preston Hardison at the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, and the many dive shops, clubs, and recreational divers who helped scope this project and collect data used for the economic valuation.

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Banner photo: A diver gets an audience with a Puget Sound King Crab (Lopholithodes mandtii). Photo courtesy of Brandon Cole.

First Guardians to Future Scientists: New Board Members Expand SeaDoc's Reach

Connections to the Salish Sea run deep for the SeaDoc Society’s two newest board members.

Ardi Kveven

“My grandparents had a cabin out on Lummi Island,” says Ardi Kveven, who was born and raised in Everson, WA. “Growing up, I spent time every summer exploring the beaches and experiencing all that the Salish Sea has to offer.”

Those early adventures sparked Ardi’s life-long interest in marine science and her passion for sharing what she learned with others. Earning a biology degree from University of Washington and a Masters in Science Education from Western Washington U, she embarked on a career teaching oceanography to high school and college students.

In 2003, Ardi founded the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA), the only program of its kind in the US. Along with core classes, ORCA students receive an intensive, hands-on, college-level marine science education that enables them to graduate with both their high school diploma and an associate degree from Everett Community College.

Working with grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Science Foundation, Ardi has developed ORCA into a world-class educational program complete with a waterfront lab and its own research vessel.

“Exposing our young people to the Salish Sea provides a connection to the place they live,” says Ardi, who’s excited about the chance to foster close connections between her students and the SeaDoc Society.

“Powerful programs are about the passion of the individuals who choose to be a part of them,” she says. “I appreciate the passionate people who choose to be part of SeaDoc, and I applaud their enthusiastic efforts to save the Salish Sea. I look forward to strengthening the opportunity for our students to join those efforts and to feel empowered to make a difference.”

In recent years, some of the most powerful and effective groups making a difference in the Salish Sea’s health have been the Coast Salish tribes and First Nations. And another new SeaDoc board member we’re thrilled to have join the team, Larry W. Campbell, Sr., is a distinguished elder of one of those tribes, the Swinomish.

arry Campbell

Larry, whose tribal name is Wanaseah, is currently the Community Health Specialist For Climate Change in the Swinomish Environmental Health Program.

"Ninety percent of our tribal land borders the water," says Larry. "So we're very sensitive to changes in sea level and chemistry that will effect everything from our economy and health to our salmon runs and ancestral sites."

Before beginning his three decades of service as a Swinomish government and cultural leader, Larry made his living out on the water as a salmon fisherman. He first worked with SeaDoc several years ago on a project to evaluate the impact of increased energy development in the Salish Sea region.

“We know how to measure impacts and classify threats to wildlife,” says Joe Gaydos, SeaDoc’s Science Director, “but Larry helped us identify the species that were of particular economic, cultural, and spiritual value to the Coast Salish tribes and First Nations.”

Since the tribes are co-managers of Salish Sea natural resources, concerns for species important to their way of life carry extra weight when it comes to management decisions, and can often determine whether impactful projects like coal ports move forward.

The Coast Salish philosophy that every species and element of the ecosystem are important and interconnected meshes perfectly with the SeaDoc Society’s scientific beliefs, just as Ardi Kveven’s dedication to educating young people meshes with our belief that SeaDoc's work is pointless if we don’t engage those who will continue the mission into the future.

“We’re so fortunate to add these two new board members,” says SeaDoc Director Markus Naugle. “Ardi connects the society to the next generation of marine scientists and conservationists, while Larry further bonds us to the very first guardians of the Salish Sea. We look forward to calling on their ideas, guidance and wisdom in the years to come.”

Please join us in welcoming Ardi and Larry aboard!

It's a Small, Small World

How did this Washington State crab buoy wind up in a tree on Wake Island?

Ever have one of those “What a small world!” moments? Well, SeaDoc recently experienced a remarkable one when our founding director and current board member Dr. Kirsten Gilardi received an email from out of the blue—from way out of the blue.

The message was from her brother-in-law, John Gilardi, who’d been out doing his quarterly survey of seabirds on Wake Island, a miniscule coral atoll that’s 2,300 miles west of Hawaii, 1,500 east of Guam, and 1,000 miles south of nowhere.

“I’d gone to the windward side of the island to count gray-backed terns,” says John, an ecologist who the islanders call Birdman. “They like to nest there amid the coral rubble thrown up by storms.”

Of course coral isn’t the only thing cast ashore by the wind and waves. “That side of the atoll collects all kinds of flotsam, jetsam and other man-made debris,” says John. “I always keep an eye out hoping to find old Japanese glass fishing floats, but mostly it’s trash like bottles, buckets, cigarette lighters and shoes. The folks on Wake do cleanups every few months, but it just keeps coming.”

On this particular beach survey, John spotted a flash of color that turned out to be a modern fishing float. When he got closer, John noticed that the buoy still had its Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife commercial crab license tag attached. That’s when he had an "aha" moment. “I thought, ‘I bet Kirsten would be interested in this!’”

There’s even more to the coincidence beyond the gee whiz improbability of a SeaDoc-family relative finding a Washington crab float that somehow navigated the great Pacific gyres on a three-and-a-half-year odyssey to a speck of land less than two square miles in area some 4,300 miles from the Salish Sea. As it happens, John’s sister-in-law Kirsten has been wrapped up in lost fishing gear for years.

Her involvement started at a SeaDoc board meeting more than a decade ago. “I remember board member Tom Cowan bugging me about this great fishing gear recovery program they had going on in Puget Sound,” says Kirsten.

Tom was the first director of the Northwest Straits Commission, and back around the year 2000 he’d asked several groups of scientists to come up with a priority list of actions the NWSC could take to begin restoring the Salish Sea.

“They all came back saying derelict fishing gear, especially nets, was a huge problem,” says Tom, who then received a grant from NOAA to come up with a safe and effective way to remove nets lost on Puget Sound’s rocky reefs.

Derelict nets keep ghostfishing for decades, and SeaDoc got involved by developing a statistical modeling program that predicts the killing capacity of lost gear and the cost/benefit ratio of removal. The resulting scientific paper written by Kirsten, Tom and others proved beyond any doubt the great economic benefit of clearing derelict nets.

“We showed that every year, along with killing huge numbers of seabirds and marine mammals, these nets were destroying millions of dollars worth of commercial seafood like Dungeness crab,” says Tom. “When we figured out a way to remove them at relatively low cost by hiring fishing-industry divers to haul them up, the program really took off.”

Kirsten caught gear recovery fever from Tom, and brought it back with her to UC Davis, SeaDoc's administrative home. After several years of operating a program using divers just like Washington, though, SeaDoc gave the concept a Golden State twist. While Puget Sound’s program involved paying sea cucumber divers to clear fishermen’s gill nets, Kirsten’s idea was to incentivize fisher folks to recover gear lost within their own industry.

“For the last few years, our program has focused on the Dungeness crab fishery in California,” says Kirsten. “When commercial crabbers can’t work because it's off season or there's a closure due to algal blooms, we figured out a way they can still get out on the water and get paid to recover lost crab traps.”

The program SeaDoc started was such a success that it has been turned into a California State law called the Whale Protection & Crab Gear Recovery Act (crab gear is also a major entanglement threat to migrating whales). It's hoped that the act will become financially self-sustaining through the fees crabbers pay to buy back their lost gear.

And there’s yet another circle-of-saving-sealife aspect to this story. After recovering more than 5,900 fishing nets from the Washington State portion of the Salish Sea and thereby transforming nearly 900 acres of killing zones into healthy, productive habitat, Northwest Straits has now turned its attention, like SeaDoc in California, to lost crab pots.

The float that went on walkabout all the way across the Pacific until it was found by the brother-in-law of SeaDoc’s lost-gear guru was originally attached to one of an estimated 14,000 commercial and recreational crab pots that are lost each year in Washington State waters.

The Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife runs a program in the state’s coastal waters that allows commercial crabbers to get a special WDFW permit and head out after the season to scour the Pacific coast for lost gear. The arrangement cleans the habitat and clears potential entanglement risks, and the benefit for the keen-eyed crabbers who recover gear is finders keepers. But the program doesn’t include the waters of the Salish Sea, where some 12,000 of those crab traps go missing every year.

Northwest Straits has already recovered 4,700 lost traps in Puget Sound, but obviously there’s a lot more for all of us to do. Recreational crabbers and shrimpers can do their part by making sure their traps don’t go missing in the first place by using enough weight to hold them in place, rigging more than enough sinking-type line to account for the depth, having proper biodegradable escape panels, and by not setting traps when the tides and currents are too extreme.

The gear recovery programs SeaDoc has been involved with in Washington and California are both huge successes and have become models for similar efforts around the world. Out on Wake Island, John "Birdman" Gilardi hung that well-traveled crab float on a Casuarina tree as a symbol of our interconnectedness.

All the world’s oceans and seas share problems like marine debris and ghostfishing gear that kills wildlife and damages habitat. But by sharing solutions and supporting restoration efforts, we are making a difference.

Zoning Issues: Using Science to Inform Decisions on Orca Protection

A difficult truth we're facing is that the Salish Sea’s Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs) are at serious risk of extinction.

Due to their population structure and dynamics, limited fecundity, high toxin load and food-supply challenges, the orcas of J, K and L pods are vulnerable to having a single disease event, oil spill or just a terrible year that takes out too many breeding-age females signal the end of our iconic killer whales.

Even without a random disaster, the long-term prospects for Southern Residents are not good and are likely to get worse, with proposals for multiple Salish Sea port and pipeline projects threatening to greatly increase the dangers of ship strikes, fuel spills and underwater noise pollution (read the paper SeaDoc published on this topic).

When the SRKWs were placed on the Endangered Species List in 2005, there were 88 whales in the three pods. Today, after a dozen years of recovery planning and efforts, the official count from the Center for Whale Research shows that the population has actually dropped to just 78 individuals. With the recent sharp decline, people are pushing regulators to do more.

Underwater noise increases with a boat’s speed.

One example is a petition by three NGOs asking NOAA Fisheries to declare a whale protection zone (WPZ) along the west side of San Juan Island. The area has historically been known as the best place to spot SRKWs, both from boats and from the shore, as well as to fish for Chinook salmon, the orcas’ favorite food.

The petition asks that no vessels (with a few necessary exceptions) be allowed to enter the WPZ, which will extend three-quarters of a mile from shore, with an additional quarter-mile no-wake buffer zone. Excluding boats, say the petitioners, will reduce noise and disturbance, allowing the orcas to hunt and communicate more efficiently and to transit or rest in a favored foraging area without being stressed.

A previous proposal for a smaller WPZ in the same location was sunk by strong opposition, primarily from recreational fishers, whale watch operators, and the local tourist industry. This time around, similar battle lines have been drawn. While there’s no debate that the SRKWs are in trouble, the arguments start when it comes down to which specific recovery actions to take and who those measures will impact.

All parties agree that the best thing for the Southern Residents would be to fully restore the Chinook runs on which they depend and to rid the Salish Sea of toxins. Those efforts have already been underway for decades, though, with billions spent showing mixed results at best. Many Chinook runs, in fact, still share space on the Endangered Species List with SRKWs.

The proposed WPZ, petitioners argue, is an achievable action that could be quickly put in place. The question is: will it help the Southern Residents? If the answer is no, then there’s no reason to potentially disrupt the local economy. If yes, then citizens need to wisely judge the benefits versus the possible economic impacts. This is where SeaDoc and good science enter the picture.

Transient killer whale surfaces in front of a sailboat.

“Science cannot tell you what your priorities are, and it doesn’t make decisions,” says Kit Rawson, SeaDoc Board Chair and former conservation science program manager for the Tulalip Tribes.

Kit says that issues like this are good reminders that the SeaDoc Society is a scientific organization, not an advocacy group, and that its job is to conduct and translate research that is free of bias and insulated from political, emotional or economic concerns.

“SeaDoc’s value is derived from that credibility,” says Kit. “It’s imperative that we communicate to the public and to policymakers facts that are objective, rigorously tested and evidence-based so that they can use them to inform their decisions whether or not to support actions important to marine conservation.”

As we’re now in a period where efforts are being made to deny, devalue and defund science, with calls to seriously hobble research supported by NOAA and EPA—both critical partners in Salish Sea salmon and killer whale restoration—it’s more important than ever to remember that science isn’t about opinions, ideology or alternative facts. It’s about going wherever the evidence takes you.

To that end, SeaDoc’s science director, Dr. Joe Gaydos, examined the data used to support the current WPZ petition—just as we do for many regulatory proposals that affect the Salish Sea, whether they come from fishermen, whale watchers, government agencies or concerned citizens groups.

In Joe’s review of the scientific literature, he found some of the supporting science unsettled due to data uncertainties, while other lines of evidence were strong enough to draw conclusions.

In short, there is ample scientific evidence to suggest that vessel noise, disturbance from vessel traffic, and a limited supply of salmon are having an interactive effect on our resident orcas’ health, and clearly need to be addressed. The science is there to support strong actions to recover the Southern Residents. Exactly what form that action takes is now up to informed citizens, elected officials, and management agencies.

Joe strongly recommends, however, that if NOAA Fisheries does move forward with a WPZ or other regulatory mechanism to protect our killer whales, they need to invest in a process to address any concerns of the co-managing tribes as well as stakeholders including whale watch operators, commercial and recreational fishing interests, and recreational boaters to ensure that whatever guidelines are developed will be respected by all parties.

With many federal and state governmental science programs that partner with SeaDoc facing drastic budget cuts, we’re reminded again just how crucial private donors like you are to continuing our mission to use science to heal the Salish Sea. We couldn't do it without your support. Thank you!

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Banner photo: vessels of any size can disturb orcas, with propeller noises masking echolocation and communication calls, and the simple presence of nearby boats causing behavioral changes. A boat crosses the path of a male SRKW. Photo courtesy of Bob Friel.