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.

—–

Lure of the sea

A full moon sets over Haro Strait.

As a co-founder of the Beam Reach program, I have a great drive to make the second season successful. So I have to admit I was nervous and had a lot of questions in mind as I drove up from Seattle for a first visit during the third week of the fall program. How were Jason and Donna faring during their initial weeks as instructors? Had our admissions process selected a group of students who could learn and live together? Would I still feel excited about my plan to go to sea for a week this fall with a new baby and her lovely family beckoning from Seattle?

I gathered data to answer these questions during the busy week. Lecturing on marine geology and physical oceanography of the Salish Sea gave me a sense of the students’ inquisitiveness and academic endurance. Participating in a peer-review of proposal drafts gave me insights into the students’ mutual respect and Jason’s and Donna’s talents as facilitators and collaborators. More insights into each student’s curiosities and demeanor came when we asked questions after great guest lectures from Dave Bain, Jeff Nystuen, Lynne Barre, and Peter Westley, and short talks by Brad Hanson and Robin Baird. I think I may have increased anxiety unnecessarily when I reviewed what methods of provisioning, living, and researching worked (and didn’t) last year during the sea component, but the group persevered, tackled all the logistical tasks with amazing teamwork and efficiency. I was astonished that shopping for $800 worth of provisions took us only two hours!

By the end of the week, all of my concerns had dissolved. Jason and Donna have formed a resilient teaching partnership and they are well on their way to pioneering a team-teaching culture at Beam Reach. They have already derived ways to coordinate their efforts and be more efficient than Val and I were during the pilot program. Their best innovations, I think, are lunchtime meetings for lesson planning and mentoring 3 students each, rather than all students together. As a teaching team, we still have ideas to try (Skype conferencing may help coordinate between on-campus instructors and intermittent teachers, like Val, me, and the guest experts), but Jason and Donna are clearly excelling as they implement and improve the Beam Reach curriculum.

It was a real treat for me to meet Beam Reach class 061 in person. I met Peggy and Rena on the ferry as they returned from a respite in Seattle. Erin, Emily, Colleen, and Juliette introduced themselves as class started on Tuesday morning. I was immediately impressed with their amiable personalities and the progress they had made (in just 2 weeks!) on drafting their research proposals. They had already figured out how to shop, cook, and clean together, and I could sense that as a group they had the potential to survive the intensity of going to sea together for an extended period. In fact, after just a day or two, I was confident that I wanted to go to sea with them — and that’s a critical measure of the effectiveness of our admissions process! Our challenge as a school is to admit students who will be challenged enough to grow, but not so challenged that they compromise unduly the experience of their peers or instructors. There’s a lot of sea time and stress ahead, but my first impressions suggest this group will flourish together.

So, I will go to sea again, but I realize now that I’m lured for many reasons. Haro Strait surprised me during my visit by tantalizing me anew with mystery and beauty. Strange sounds surged from the hydrophones and kept me peering from the bluff, rocking Cora for hours. (I’m now in agreement with Val that the “heavy breather” is the local harbor seal.) Wild currents pulled my imagination into the realm of vortices, temperature profiles, and estuarine flow theory. The resident orcas were strangely elusive, making me wonder if they were reacting to the unusually high fraction of the Fraser fall-run Sockeye that is reportedly returning via the northern end of Vancouver Island. As the full moon set over Haro Strait and I sang my son back to sleep, I realized that my own curiosities about the ocean have been left unsated too long. I’m enthusiastic about this class and I’m clearly still lured by the sea itself.

—–

First impressions from the first Beam Reach

It has been marvellous and frustrating to be administering Beam Reach from Seattle on the first days of the fall 2006 program. I feel a simultaneous urge to rush up and be part of every moment in the syllabus and a great satisfaction that the Beam Reach ship is sailing along without me being involved in adjusting every line.

I hope this first blogbook entry will inspire new students and instructors alike to share their experiences on-line. It really is a rare thing these days to delve deeply into a critical issue and one’s own curiosities. That our research theme centers on orcas, an inherently awe-inspiring and communicative species, just makes the opportunity that much more intriguing.

I’d like to share two journal entries I made almost precisely a year ago, during the first couple days of the first Beam Reach program. They drive home the sense I have again today: that we are just scratching the surface of our human involvement in the decline and unprecedented alteration of the oceans.

Sunday 08/21/2005 05:30

“How much does an ecosystem have to change before we alter our values to restore it? To answer the question, one really has to do two difficult things: understand the ecosystem well enough to determine which human actions are driving the change; and discern what changes in human behavior will benefit the ecosystem at least cost.

Beam Reach is all about addressing this question in the marine environment through sustainability science. This is daunting because it is technologically difficult to analyze how marine ecosystems function and to quantify the costs/benefits of human actions within them. It is also a challenge because scientists are used to understanding a ecosystem problem, but have not traditionally studied how to solve it (through economic, technological, and/or political methods).

In the Pacific Northwest, we have an interesting range of cases in which this broad question has been tackled. Invariably they begin with the decline of a species — whether high-profile or obscure — and evolves to a broad investigation of its ecosystem. At present, we are considering a charismatic megafaunum, the southern resident orcas. We are also currently struggling with another deeply valued animal, the wild salmon. We can report the successful restoration of the iconic American bald eagle. Great sums have been invested recently in assessing the Stellar sea lion, which most people don’t value in particular. And we are still evaluating the status of the northern spotted owl, a species that many people hate as much as orcas used to be reviled.

If it turns out that noise from cargo ships is the main risk to orcas staying in residence, at what point will human individuals and society mitigate the acoustic impact? Will orcas, inherently wonderful and with ecotourism value of about $1M/animal, be compared economically with the goods being transported through the great ports of our region? How much would it cost to make those ships quiet?”

Wednesday 08/24/2005 (2:05am 8/25)

“It is strange to reside in such a beautiful marine setting while reading articles and hearing speakers declare emphatically that marine ecosystems are in collapse. With a nostalgia as invigorating as the fresh evening air, I stepped out onto the Fernald Lab deck to gaze at the half-full, waning moon. Friday Harbor rippled in the dark waters and the wet beach glistened beneath me. After strolling back to the duplex, I found emailed news about marine extinctions and prepared to introduce 2 speakers who document the decline of pelagic fish and orcas in our oceans.

Bleary eyed, I ease into bed wondering where the southern residents are tonight. Are we really helping the whales, as I tell my son Liam when he asks what I do with Beam Reach?”

Just as I came across unnerving news regarding the marine plight last year, today I came across an L.A. Times series called “Altered Oceans.” Reading through the part on ocean acidification while my newborn daughter snored beside me, I was felt downright worried about the anthropogenic perturbations of the globe we are set to experience in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I am optimistic that Beam Reach is a small step in the right direction and I’m very excited to continue contemplating how to forge a sustainable relationship between humanity and the seas.

—–

Open Boat 2006