Scientists collaborate to mitigate climate impacts in the Northwest
Taylor Shellfish Farm’s Quilcene hatchery perches on a narrow peninsula that juts into the sinuous waterways of Washington’s Puget Sound. On the July day I visited, the hatchery and everything surrounding it seemed to drip with fecundity. Clouds banked over darkly forested hills on the opposite shore, and a tangy breeze blew in from across the bay. But the lushness hid an ecosystem’s unraveling.
Climate change is altering the very chemistry of surface seawater, causing ocean acidification, a chemical process that is lowering the amount of calcium marine organisms can access. Acidification is a relative term; the oceans are not actually turning into acid and will not melt surfboards or sea turtles anytime soon. Still, with enough acidification, seawater becomes corrosive to some organisms. Hardest hit are calcifiers, which use aragonite, a form of the mineral calcium carbonate, to make shells, skeletons and other important body parts. Examples of calcifiers include crabs, sea urchins, sea stars, some seaweeds, reef-forming corals, and a type of tiny floating marine snail, or pteropod, called a sea butterfly. Shellfish, including oysters and clams, are also seriously affected. With the disappearance of many of these sea creatures, oceanic food webs will be irrevocably altered by century’s end.
People have harvested shellfish in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Today, the industry generates more than $270 million annually in the state of Washington alone. A decade ago, the region’s shellfish growers were already reeling from harmful effects of climate change, so they have been in some ways at the forefront of climate adaptation. I’d driven to Taylor Shellfish Farm to learn how they were working, with scientists and others, to save their livelihoods and the coastal ecosystems they’re built on.
Dave Pederson, the hatchery manager, met me in a bright building full of burbling saltwater tanks of assorted mollusks. A tall, fit man with a graying beard, Pederson led me outside behind the hatchery. Two hundred feet below us, glittering blue water splashed against the steep cliffside, while inside the hatchery, tiny oysters, mussels and geoducks — pronounced “gooey ducks” — filtered algae soups, carefully concocted by hatchery staff. Yesterday, workers had spawned Pacific oysters, which within hours built their first shells from seawater calcium. Throughout the hatchery, millions of baby bivalves grew from mere specks to identifiable mollusks, fated to gleam on half shells in trendy Seattle oyster bars, or be whisked off to Asia by FedEx flight.
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Maya L. Kapoor, High Country News, 18 September 2017. Full article.
