Orcasphere

This is a brief letter from Alexandra Morton that cuts to the chase re B.C. salmon farming management. Maybe WA should move it’s pens on-shore, too? Note the connection she draws between Lake Washington sockeye collapse and diseases from B.C. pens.
Land-based salmon farms can work

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 promised) [...]

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 looked [...]

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 (porportionally [...]

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 upstream
50% fine [...]

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 John [...]

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: measured mean ~60-100 ng/gD.
Model says [...]

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
CSO discharges
exchange with ocean
exchange with contaminated [...]

Lyndal Johnson, NWFSC
Pre-spawn mortality of salmon is occurring in restored urban streams.  It is associated with urban development, road traffic, and storm water runoff, but concentrations of toxics aren’t high enough to account for the convulsions and lethargy.  We suspect a synergistic effect of multiple pollutants.
PAHs affect embryo development in spawned herring eggs (e.g. heart [...]

Persistent organic pollutants as chemical tracers for Puget Sound marine biota, Gina Ylitalo
Chemical tracers can be used to determine geographic ranges.  Persistent organic pollutants (POPs) like PCBs and PDBEs in Salish Sea herring (3 yr old males collected ‘99 and ‘04) showed elevated levels in Puget Sound relative to Georgia Strait, though difference was small [...]