Orcasphere

Keynote speaker at Sound Waters 2010
Dr. Nathaniel ‘Nat’ Scholtz, NOAA/NWFSC
Coho salmon are our first choice for a ’sentinel species’ because they:

are widely distributed
inhabit lowland steams that are important and familiar to humans and areas impacted directly by stormwater runoff (if we can reduce toxics in lowland streams, then we’ll likely keep them out of the [...]

This project could help raise awareness about the risk to SRKW recovery posed by persistent pollutants.  Congrats to Anne, Chrissy, and the rest of the PTMSC team!
PTMSC awarded $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services for its Orca Project
Port Townsend, WA—Thanks to a grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library [...]

Despite the outstanding questions about measurable impacts and cost/benefit ratios, this constitutes progress for the marine environment of the SRKWs. Does anyone have pointers to the independent reports mentioned in this article?

clipped from seattletimes.nwsource.com

Victoria to stop sending untreated sewage to sea

Regional politicians last week approved a $1.2 billion [...]

Sandra O’Neill, Contaminants in salmon
We’ve heard that S and N residents are both eating mostly Chinook.  Why are the southern residents more contaminated than the northern residents?
Contaminants in fish are determined by:

where they live
what they eat
how long they are exposed
how fat they are

Chinook and Coho have elevated [PBDE] because they stay close to shore, while [...]

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 [...]