We are talking about $270 million annually the west coast oyster industry generates. "I love looking at critters," said Caren Braby, manager for Oregon's Marine Resources Program. "I love working on policy issues important to residents and the communities I love. I've lived here in Newport and the West Coast for over ten years."
The biochemist/biologist with a self-professed passion for all invertebrates gave the listeners a caveat: "I'm going to relate some pretty gloomy things in this presentation, but I will end it with some bright spots, some hope, solutions."
The attendees were introduced to the basic chemistry of ocean acidification and hypoxia with a 13-minute video: "Ocean Acidification Changing Waters On The Oregon Coast" sponsored by Oregon Fish and Wildlife, Oregon State University's College of Earth, Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences, OSU's College of Science, Sea Grant Oregon and the Turner Trust.
"The ocean may look the same, but the water is changing, especially on the Oregon coast," said Francis Chan, an associate professor and senior researcher in Oregon State University's Department of Integrative Biology. It's all tied to the amount of carbon the ocean is absorbing largely due to fossil fuel burning and deforestation. "Carbon is changing ocean chemistry faster than it has the last million years."
Tying the negative impacts of human development, consumption and resource harvesting on the environment, to lower PH in our waters is depressing and challenging. For Braby, who's big on "focusing on Oregon " describing the problem" Ocean Acidification threatens the Oregon Coast socially, culturally, economically and recreationally.
For instance, the Dungeness crab industry is Oregon's single most valuable commercial fishery at $75 million last year. While the sea snails are the building blocks for salmon and other marine species food webs, acidification effects all shell-building species, including the iconic crab.
Those four threats Braby listed, plus the fact lawmakers are concerned with the state's rural communities, are driving the legislature to follow the lead of marine scientists and stakeholders such as Confederated Tribes of the Coos, Lower Umpqua & Siuslaw Indians, the shellfish industry, commercial fishing groups, conservation organizations and others to create in 2017 the Oregon Coordinating Council on Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia (SB 1039).
Both holders of doctorates, Jack Barth, director of Marine Studies Initiative-OSU, and Brady are the OAH Council's co-chairs.
Unintended consequences should be the lesson of the century when teaching young people how to tackle all these problems scientists like Brady, Barth and Chan are "describing." For Caren Braby, acidification, hypoxia and harmful algal blooms are a triple whammy of not just alphabet soups OA, OH, OAH, HAB but could be the tipping points in this coast's livelihood, lifestyle and environmental, economic and cultural longevity.
"Even if we stop releasing carbon dioxide today, there will still be a thirty- to fifty-year increase in the atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbed by the ocean upwelling from deep within the ocean," Braby told the audience. This lag time will affect the ocean's PH level, causing more acidification. How much, we don't know.
The deep-ocean conveyor belt brings to the Oregon coast cold water, called upwellings. That water comes from deep in the ocean and carries more nutrients that sustain ocean life. However, bad comes with the good that water has less oxygen and tends to be acidified. Taking decades to travel to the West Coast, this water last touched the atmosphere decades earlier, when CO2 levels were lower than today. So future upwellings will carry the "memory" of today's annual increases in CO2.
Ice core science is now giving us an atmospheric earth snapshot that goes back 800,000 years. Today, atmospheric carbon dioxide is well over the maximum level during this long span. The rapid increase in fossil fuel burning and other man-made carbon dioxide emitters paints a gloomy picture for the past six decades 1958 at 310 ppm versus 2018 at 410 ppm.
The hypoxia dead zones is basically less oxygen in large areas of the ocean. Much of the oxygen is displaced by harmful nutrient runoff or sedimentation, as well as algal blooms. However, OSU is looking at complex climate change elements, including wave and eddy action in the oceans.
Brady emphasized that biotoxins in several algae species commonly known as a red tide closed fisheries in 2015. Again, HAB's are tied to acidified conditions in the ocean. The state's scientific and commercial fisheries are looking at not only the predictive tools for HABs, but how to mitigate the impacts to clams, crabs, oysters and other commercial species along the food web.
"A massive hypoxic event caused the halibut to go away in both Washington and Oregon," Braby stated. Add to that acidification's effects on young salmon.
"Research shows ocean acidification could affect salmon's ability to smell, which the fish rely on to avoid predators and navigate to their natal rivers."
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