Orcasphere

Just happened upon this nice synopsis of how WDFW views the various processes by which fishing harvests are governed in the Pacific Northwest. For me, this helps clarify which processes we killer whale advocates could influence to bolster the number of salmon and other fish that are available to feed the southern residents. As usual, [...]

An awareness seems to be dawning that salmon smolt mortality is increased by human activities — both in the nearshore environment and in river systems. A recent biological opinion regarding Sacramento salmon suggested that about 8% of the smolts entering the San Juaquin / Sacramento delta make it through to the ocean. This article mentions [...]

Here we are in mid-February, a couple weeks into the blackmouth opening in the Salish Sea, and WDFW is opening up recreational fishing for spring (winter?) Chinook running in the Columbia [see today's email announcement below].  This makes me wonder where the southern residents are at the moment and what the run timing looks like [...]

Intro by Miles (Chip) Boothe Over 600 vessels have been escorted by the Neah Bay tug since it first started operating in 1999; 6 involved throwing lines to a vessel in distress.  This afternoon the legislature is looking at a new measure to fund the tug permanently (beyond the 1 year that Governor Gregoire recently [...]

Dixon Landers 2002-2008 WACAP study ocused on high-elevation and remote systems with lakes as precipitation collectors.  We weren’t supposed to inform fluxes to Puget Sound, but we may have discovered that the snow that melts into our inland sea starts out contaminated!  Data sources are snow samples, sediment cores, fish samples, lichen, and water.  We [...]

Marie Noel PCBs are transported through the atmosphere in both gas and particulate phases.  In Great Lakes and Baltic Sea, the majority of aquatic PCBs come from atmospheric transport.  Transport from Asia to BC takes 2-10 days.  One sampling site at Ucluelet as reference for Saturna Island samples (gas (86% of PCBs, 63% PBDEs), particulate [...]

Thomas Gries We collected samples upstream of the southern boundary of the lower Duwamish clean up area and then compared with samples taken further downstream.   Background: focus on Harbor Island and a cleanup site at river mile 4.8, site selection and future load inluenced by sediment transport model and analysis report: >95% sediment load from [...]

Jeff Stern Mapping C flow through the food web can help us understand trophic strucure and species interactions and ass feeding guilds and which species may be most at risk from bioaccumulation.  Our model is a steady state partitioning (Arnot and Gobas, 2004; Condon, 2007) that uses Tim Essingtons trophic structure data, diet data from [...]

N long-term fate and bioaccumulation of PCBs in Puget Sound, Models of contaminant kinetics: Davis 2004 includes an active 10cm layer in Puget Sound Field data: In Puget Sound 1400kg PCBs (estimates range from 600-3500) are in active layer compared with ~7kg in water and ~40kg in biota (estimated from Sandy’s measurments) [PCB] in water: [...]

James Maroncelli Phase 1 of toxic loadings to PS initiated in 2006 by a coalition (PSAT+WA Ecology+…): realized that air deposition was an important pathway Phase 2: spring 07 $300k from EPA, $300 from Ecology TPA, $55k NOAA funded all programs (because we established a framework for project prioritzation) Surface runoff Atmospheric depositino Permitted wastewater [...]