Beam Reach

Marine intuition

We humans are fundamentally challenged to grasp the nature of the seas. Sound is the key to perception underwater, yet our ears are rudimentary tools compared to our eyes. Despite all our communicative abilities and sensory technologies, we really struggle to understand what is going on in our local marine ecosystems, and it’s taken us a long time to determine that a global oceanic collapse is afoot.

After spending a week with the Beam Reach students, I returned to land with a broad suite of observations. Since then, my brain has been struggling to synthesize them.

Given how difficult it is for us to predict and detect the movements of our top marine predator (the killer whale), it’s fascinating to consider how we have come to sense that a global oceanic collapse is afoot. Why is it so hard for me (an oceanographer) to witness first-hand, or at least be whole-heartedly convinced that the seas are truly troubled?

It is also tantalizing to ponder how effectively a long-lived matriarch and her pod may be able to intercept food in the Salish Sea — particularly salmon with their own complex life history, migratory mechanisms, and distributions.

“Everything’s late this year.” says Kari Koski.

Someone notes that this year El Nino conditions are developing in the tropical Pacific.

An 80=year fishing Derby in Admiralty Inlet experiences a unprecented event: only one fish is caught!

Steve Mihaly relays catch data that indicate 90+ percent of the Fraser River fall run of Sockeye are returning to the north of Vancouver Island. In “normal” years, I guess more come around the south end and are accessible to southern residents

A clerk in Kings Market says her long-time fisherman customer became sick of catching nothing locally and fished all the way out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and finally found salmon (chum, Chinook, and sockeye) 10 km offshore.

The Seattle Times publishes a series on the decline of our local oceans

Andy Foote says the herring aren’t returning to the Norwegian fiords.

Thus, I conclude that a great asset of human society is our ability to communicate, or “network.” Our environmental salvation may hinge on our innate drive to share information and our increasingly effective ways of doing so. To this end, I drafted a list of cell phone numbers for key marine observers around the Salish Sea, and I encouraged our students and staff to reach out to them. I left feeling like we should be hailing every visible boat on the VHF, especially fishermen and whale watch operators, to glean their marine insights and to share our own (primarily acoustic) ones.

I sense a similar interconnectedness of humans is critical in maintaining an accurate sense of how our local marine ecosystem is faring. The Orcasphere is a step in the right direction, but we need much more (if we continue to impact the oceans as we currently do). Georeferenced multi-species monitoring could help. The expanding network of hydrophones and underwater sensors (from Race Rocks to Athena and Neptune) hold promise for keeping us conscious of the state of the seas.

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