Ocean acidification impacts local economy

On Earth Day last week, Maria Cantwell convened the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, taking input from shellfish growers, commercial fishing and seafood industry representatives about ocean acidification.

We at the NEWS associated this issue to the recent deaths of five whales in the region.

Cantwell launched the discussion, “A grave threat lies hidden beneath the surface of the oceans, called ocean acidification.”

Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have increased the global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration by 35 percent. Apparently carbon dioxide is not only accumulating in the atmosphere, it is also being absorbed by the oceans, thus changing the water’s chemistry, and all that lives there.

As seawater becomes more acidic, it changes the basic chemical building blocks needed by many marine organisms. Scientists predict, Cantwell said, that a more acidic ocean could dissolve the shells of the tiny organisms that make up the base of the ocean’s food chain.

We are seeing the results of this change more and more frequently right here in Puget Sound.

Most recently, the recent death of five whales was attributed to starvation, not to mention all the garbage in their guts.

In May of 2008, Cantwell held a field hearing at the Seattle Aquarium to examine the impacts of ocean acidification and climate change on Washington state’s marine environment.

For her, the most vivid testimony came from a fifth-generation shellfish farmer named Brett Bishop. Mr. Bishop’s family shellfish farm is on Little Skookum Bay in Mason County. His two teenage sons are the sixth generation to live on the homestead and grow clams and oysters. Bishop attributed the decimation of his source of oysters to ocean acidification, which dissolved the oyster larvae’s shells and increased their susceptibility to dangerous marine bacteria.

Severely diminished natural reproduction is threatening the entire shellfish industry in the Pacific Northwest, Cantwell said.

Cantwell was a cosponsor of Senator Lautenberg’s Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act that established the nation’s first comprehensive research program to study ocean acidification.

In a letter to the committee, shellfish growers and commercial fishermen asked Congress to mitigate the causes and reduce the economic harm resulting from ocean acidification.

The U.S. seafood industry generates approximately $70 billion annually, fueling jobs and businesses that sustain many thousands of families along the country’s coasts. According to the letter, ocean acidification is real, with a clear link between carbon emissions and change in the oceans’ chemistry.

It has been proven that ocean acidification results from an excess of CO2 dissolving into the ocean from the atmosphere. This CO2 is primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, followed by deforestation and cement manufacture, and is compounded by river runoff containing high levels of nitrogen and carbon.

Acidification poses grave risk (and in some cases outright harm) to the marine food web and commercially important species.

For example, clams are dissolving before they can grow beyond their larval stage in many East Coast bays and on the West Coast, acidified water was documented in 2007 at a level not anticipated until 2050. Oyster beds in the Pacific Northwest have experienced a multi-year recruitment failure, producing no commercially significant oyster sets.

Meanwhile, in a letter to the NEWS, Steve and Kyle Bova of Ocean Shores link the recent whale deaths to starvation and the extinction of mud and ghost shrimp in Willapa Bay and Grays Harbor from the use of biocides.

And north of us, in Bellingham, the state Department of Ecology, Port of Bellingham and U.S. Coast Guard are responding to a diesel fuel spill from a 102-foot fishing boat at Squalicum Marina that left a 100-by-200 yard rainbow sheen on the water. While agencies and the boat’s crew collected the fuel using the latest technology of pads and an absorbent boom, the fish and the critters in the sea continue to suffer.

After many years of efforts by many different organizations, it seems the waters around us just keep getting more and more unhealthy.

It makes sense, since everything goes downstream.

But a threat to the economy and peoples’ pocketbooks may be just what we need to get inspired to take action and stop contaminating the Earth and the oceans that feed us.