Northwest Straits Commission Marine Resources Committee surveys show Skagit sites ‘extremely healthy’
A drysuit, water shoes and a sun hat aren’t the usual garb of a detective, but they’re essential gear for the group of volunteer sleuths paddling out from Washington Park in Anacortes.
The three kayakers are looking for clues — water depth, temperature, maybe a crab — to better understand what drives the health and recovery of bull kelp in the Salish Sea. For Lynne Wenberg-Davidson, who leads the kayak surveys in Skagit County, it’s a sort of chase for information.
In general, she said, the kelp survey sites in Skagit have been “extremely healthy.” Then one of the two kelp beds she monitors near Shannon Point in Anacortes suddenly disappeared.
“For three years, all we saw were just a handful of bulbs and not a real kelp bed, so we were quite sad,” she said, adding that this year it’s finally back. “This is the year of kelp. It’s grown so much bigger than normal…but we still don’t know why kelp disappears and why it suddenly reappears or why it disappears and never comes back.”
Bull kelp is found up and down the coasts of North America and has been on severe decline since the turn of the century. In the Salish Sea, however, bull kelp is doing quite well in some places and waning in others. Researchers aren’t sure what’s causing the mismatch.
Wenberg’s team is one of several monitoring bull kelp across the Salish Sea as part of Northwest Straits Commission’s Marine Resources Committees, or MRCs, which are county-based, volunteer committees working on marine conservation.
Hilary Hayford, Puget Sound Restoration Fund’s habitat research director, said the MRC kayak surveys have been essential to better understand bull kelp in the region.
“There’s some really interesting things that they’ve learned, kind of about the structure of kelp forests and how much they change over time,” Hayford said. “This has been one of the data sets that’s really done a good job of demonstrating that we can have a lot of variability in bull kelp beds, and that’s natural.”
But the research is still in early stages.
“It’s like we’re hypothesizing what we think is important at this point, because we don’t really know,” Wenberg-Davidson said. “It’s frustrating, but it’s also kind of exciting to be part of the ground-up of trying to understand what’s going on because it really is the beginning of the research.”
Hayford said a couple of hypotheses regarding what causes bull kelp to decline include increases in temperatures, pollutants and grazing animals that mow down the kelp too quickly.
“We don’t know mechanistically, like inside the organism, exactly what is changing. But we think that environmental conditions, on the whole, have become more stressful,” Hayford said. “There’s a lot of variability in those things from place to place, and we’re not quite sure which places have which stressors.”
MRC teams survey the bull kelp at their respective sites once a month June through September as the weather allows. Since bull kelp typically dies back in the winter and grows back in the spring, surveyors get to see the plant’s lifecycle in the fourth months they survey.
On a summer morning at Shannon Point, Wenberg-Davidson’s group has a small window late morning based on the competing currents and tides — any earlier and the current would be too high; any later and their chance of seeing would be slim to none.
“Because this is trend data that we’re collecting over time, we are very careful about making sure that we do it at the same tide and the same current every month, which is challenging,” she said. “We’re chasing it all month long, all summer long, to find when those dips and curves all line up perfectly.”
The team follows a strict set of protocols to ensure the data collected are accurate over time. As the team lead, Wenberg-Davidson uses a Garmin tracker as she paddles around the shape of the kelp bed to measure its size. Each kayaker snaps photos of both the kelp and shoreline during the outing.
At certain points, Wenberg-Davidson takes waypoints. This is where the other kayakers come in, shouting out the water temperature and depth and observations, like marine life in the kelp bed, the presence of invasive species like Sargassum seaweed or any abnormalities. In other counties, for example, surveyors are seeing brown, fuzzy matter on the kelp.
As the team shouts out their observations, Wenberg-Davidson scribbles them down on a dive tablet to scribble down the observations. Those datapoints, said Wenberg-Davidson, will hopefully allow the MRCs to map out what’s happening to kelp and then “connect the dots.”
‘Volunteer driven’
The MRCs span seven counties — including Whatcom, Skagit and San Juan — and consist of over a 100 active members. They work on a variety of projects and priorities in their individual counties, such as nearshore restoration, protecting eelgrass and restoring native shellfish.
“People are just like, how can you do so much with so little? Because all the labor comes from volunteers; it’s 100% volunteer driven,” Wenberg-Davidson said. “The volunteers love it, especially if you can find something that people want to do year over year…We have some 80-year-old kayakers that are just hearty stock, man, and they do great.”
Hayford said the MRCs have served as a model program for community involvement.
“Down Sound here, we really admire the MRC program,” she said. “We’re just always trying to look for ways we can extend that monitoring and involve community in the counties that don’t have MRCs.”
Kay Shirey, a volunteer kayaker, knew almost nothing about kelp before joining the Skagit MRC six years ago.
“I love kayaking and I had just moved to Anacortes,” Shirey said, adding that the kelp surveys were her first choice to give back within the MRC. “It’s been really cool.”
A piece in the puzzle
Volunteer kayak surveys are one piece in a much larger puzzle to conserve bull kelp that cross both state and international borders.
The Washington State Department of Natural Resources, for example, conducts fixed-wing aircraft surveys of kelp, and researchers in British Columbia are working on satellite-based surveys. The Puget Sound Restoration Fund and Samish Indian Nation, meanwhile, are replanting and monitoring growth of the kelp. Reef Check, which recruits volunteer divers to survey kelp forests, has partners, including the fund, all the way from British Columbia down to Baja California.
“The larger puzzle is actually quite large,” Hayford said. “Being able to look at all these different scales and put that larger puzzle together from a lot of different agencies…it’s to understand where kelp is threatened and where it’s doing fine or well.”
The data the kayak teams collect, for instance, goes into a map-based database used by both the Northwest Straits Commission and professional researchers.
Danielle Claar, the State Department of Natural Resources’s kelp lead, said the kayak surveys have filled in gaps in areas where the state has limited data.
“They’re really important, because they provide us with information at sites where we otherwise wouldn’t have any information,” Claar said. “And these teams of kayakers have been really dedicated and reliably collecting these data…it’s some of the only data that we have currently for those areas.”
Hayford said that while the kayak surveys don’t generally overlap with Puget Sound Restoration Fund’s outplant areas, they have been insightful nonetheless.
Solving the mystery of why kelp disappears and other unknowns about bull kelp could unlock answers about the broader ecosystem at a time when climate change adaptation is becoming more and more important.
In Washington, bull kelp is essential for a healthy habitat, Claar said. They act as a beautiful, diverse ecosystem that benefits everything from small invertebrates to fish and orcas.
“They’re starting to realize that kelp is sort of like the canary in the coal mine,” Wenberg-Davidson said. “When it starts to fail, other things are failing, and so they’re realizing that the more we can learn about what’s going on with kelp, the more we can understand the health of our marine nearshore systems.”
—By Sydnee Chapman