Showing it knows how to read a judge’s memo, NOAA says it will spend the next three months reworking the Obama plan for salmon and steelhead in the Columbia Basin.
Friday’s announcement was a response to federal district court Judge Redden, who strongly suggested this action nearly two weeks ago.
The Metro regional government is “almost” at a decision on urban reserves.
The latest plan, as proposed by a committee called the Core 4, includes setting aside 27,000 acres for urban reserves and 270,000 acres for rural reserves. That leaves about 2300 acres in the “undecided” category.
The leatherback sea turtle was listed as endangered in 1970. Photo from NOAA.
For the first time, NOAA wants to set aside large sections off the Pacific coast as critical habitat for the leatherback sea turtle.
The area under consideration is about 70,000 square miles of ocean, and includes waters off most of Oregon and Washington, plus a large area off California.
It’s a boost of sorts, for one of the world’s most endangered species. The Pacific population of leatherbacks have fallen an estimated 80-95% over the past three decades.
A commercial halibut boat in Sitka, Alaska. Photo from NOAA.
Hoping to rebound fish stocks and boost coastal economies, NOAA is calling for big changes in how commercial fishermen go about their business.
The agency says it’s starting a voluntary program to encourage the industry to move to what’s called Catch Share systems. These rules are already in place for 13 commercial fisheries around the country. Four more fisheries will adopt the rules over the next year.
So how does this work?
A new report from NOAA looks at the economic impact of a long lasting algae bloom off the coast of Washington. The potential cost? How does $22 million a year sound to you?
Razor Clams. Photo from NOAA.
The report looks at what would happen if a particularly bad bloom of the Pseudo-nitzschia alga were to force a year long shutdown of razor clam digging. This is a very popular type of recreation along the SW Washington coast, drawing as many as 30,000 people a day during peak clamming season.
Should those tourists stop coming, NOAA says reduced lodging, transportation, and dining sales would take a $22 million dollar chunk out of coastal economies.
Short term closures of recreational shellfish harvesting due to algae blooms are fairly common. But massive closures aren’t all that unusual either. NOAA says the most recent ones in Washington happened during 2002-2003 and 1998-1999.
This year in Oregon, the clamming harvest was closed for about three weeks this fall. Mussel harvesting was closed several times this year and remains closed along the Southern Oregon Coast.
Microscopic image of Pseudo-nitzschia. Photo From NOAA
The Pseudo-nitzschia produces domoic acid, which builds up in shellfish such as razor clams, crabs and some fish. When levels get too high, people who eat the shellfish can be sickened with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal cramps. In severe cases it can lead to respiratory difficulty, seizures, coma, and even death.
Other types of blooms can produce what’s called paralytic shellfish toxins. The symptoms usually start with a tingling in the mouth or tongue. Really bad cases cause dizziness, numbness and tingling in the arms and legs, paralysis of the arms and legs, and paralysis of the muscles used for breathing.
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Some impressions of the new Obama Administration plan to protect salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin.
First and most important, the Obama plan doesn’t stray far from the 2008 plan written by the Bush Administration. The new version defends the old one as “fundamentally sound”, bureaucrat speak for “don’t expect too many changes here”.
But the new plan also says the Obama team isn’t so confident in the Bush predictions for salmon recovery. The new guys want to learn more about how climate change, invasive species and predators are impacting salmon populations.
The Little Goose Dam on the lower Snake River. Courtesy BPA.
The second headline is about dam removal.
The plan raises the slight possibility of breaching the four dams on the lower Snake River. Dam breaching would only be done “as a last resort” and there’s a lot of conditions that have to be met before we get that far. For now, the only step the Administration is willing to take in this direction is to study how they would study dam removal.
Here’s a loose description of the overall plan:
So far, no reaction from Northwest environmental groups. But I don’t expect a change of heart. The enviros have long believed that removing the four dams on the lower Snake River is necessary to help salmon recover over the long term. Another point of view to watch out for, how will Governor Kulongoski and the Nez Perce tribe feel about this. They were opposed to the Bush version and it’ll be interesting to see how these groups react.
Update: For reaction from the environmental community, please see, Northwest Environmentalists: Obama Plan Fails To Help Salmon.
It’s the first step in what could be a long crackdown on pesticide use in the Pacific Northwest.
The Environmental Protection Agency is placing new limits on the use of three organophosphate pesticides – chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion. The rules apply to Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California.
A Chinook salmon. Courtesy NOAA.
The EPA is trying to keep these chemical out of streams and rivers that are home to salmon and steelhead. Research shows that these pesticides can interfere with a salmon’s ability to smell, making it harder for the fish to hunt prey. The chemicals may also kill prey and reduce the salmon’s food supply. In high enough concentrations, the pesticides can outright kill salmon.
How do the new rules work? First, they require buffer zones around salmon and steelhead habitat. These are areas where the pesticides can’t be used. The size of the buffer zone will depend on weather conditions, and how the pesticides will be applied. The idea is to keep the pesticides from drifting into fish waters.
Other restrictions including no spraying on windy and rainy days, or when rain is in the forecast, to prevent the chemicals from running off fields and into streams.
For the most part, these rules follow recommendations by NOAA Fisheries. The EPA is asking manufacturers to voluntarily adopt these limits, with the threat of taking regulatory action if they don’t.
But what’s especially important about today’s announcement is that it may be the first in a very long series of new rulings on pesticide use. The EPA and NOAA will spend the next couple of years studying three dozen pesticides in the Northwest. So far, six of them have been labeled as threats to salmon and steelhead. That includes the three pesticides mentioned above.
It’s a good news/bad news kind of story for the North Atlantic Right Whale.
First the good news. Researchers at Oregon State University, working with NOAA, have discovered a population of right whales they thought were extinct. They found them off the southern coast of Greenland, in an area known as Cape Farewell Ground. This was a major whale hunting area in the early 1900s.
North Atlantic Right Whales. Courtesy NOAA.
Scientists believe they are only a few hundred right whales left in the North Atlantic. Most of them live off the coasts of the U.S. and Canada. They’re listed as an endangered species. Right whales used to be found off Northern Europe too, but whalers killed off that population decades ago and they haven’t been seen since.
Until now that is. This new finding raises the possibility that a small group of “European” right whales has survived.
“The technology has enabled us to identify an important unstudied habitat for endangered right whales and raises the possibility that – contrary to general belief – a remnant of a central or eastern Atlantic stock of right whales still exists and might be viable,” says David Mellinger, an assistant professor at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport and chief scientist of the project.
Scientists including Matt Fowler, who works for both Oregon State University and NOAA, deploy a hydrophone in the North Atlantic aboard the Icelandic Coast Guard cutter Aegir that will record sounds emitted by endangered whales and other species. Courtesy Dave Mellinger, Oregon State University.
The technology Mellinger refers to is called a hydrophone, or an underwater listening device. These devices can pick up sounds from hundreds of miles away. OSU and NOAA deployed a small number of them off southern Greenland starting in 2007. Since then, they’re recorded more than 2000 right whale vocalizations.
“We don’t know how many right whales there were in the area,” Mellinger says. “They aren’t individually distinctive in their vocalizations. But we did hear right whales at three widely space sites on the same day, so the absolute minimum is three. Even that number is significant because the entire population is estimated to be only 300 to 400 whales.”
And now the not-so-good news.
The whales may be the indirect victims of global warming. With the Arctic ice cap slowly melting away, there’s growing pressure to allow shipping through the area. Scientists are worried about collisions between ships and right whales.
“Newly available shipping lanes through the Northwest Passage would greatly shorten the trip between Europe and East Asia, but would likely cross the migratory route of any right whales that occupy the region,” says Phillip Clapham, a right whale expert with NOAA’s National Marine Mammal Laboratory, who participated in the study. “It’s vital that we know about right whales in this area in order to effectively avoid ship strikes on what could be a quite fragile population.”
NOAA says ship collisions and entanglement in fishing gear are the biggest threats to right whales. The long term outlook is uncertain. According to NOAA, there’s not enough information to know if the population is rising, falling or stable. But a recent computer model suggests that under current conditions, the North Atlantic right whale will be extinct in less than 200 years.
Columbia River Salmon Courtesy WDFW
Three pesticides have been added to a growing list of chemicals that are considered a threat to endangered and threatened salmon and steelhead populations across the Northwest.
That finding, just released by NOAA Fisheries, covers pesticides containing carbaryl, carbofuran, and methomyl. The pesticides are used in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California on a wide variety of crops including fruits, vegetables, nuts and grains.
Exposure to these chemicals can kill salmon, or damage their central nervous systems, making it harder for them to catch food, avoid predators and spawn. An even bigger problem is that when these chemicals wash into streams and rivers, they kill the aquatic insects that salmon eat.
If you’re looking for a silver lining in all the bad economic news, this isn’t it. Despite the global slowdown, we’re still pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Research released today by NOAA shows the amount of carbon dioxide and methane released in 2008 is up from the year before. Worldwide, we added another 16.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide and and another 12.2 million tons of methane.
NOAA says even major events, like the Great Depression of the 1930′s and World War II, only led to temporary pauses in the build up of carbon dioxide. Instead, the build up of CO2 is closely tied to population increases, regardless of how the economy is doing.
