jeffrice's blog

In early 2016, scientists at NOAA made headlines when they reported finding 81 different man-made chemicals in the tissues of juvenile Chinook salmon in Puget Sound. Among those chemicals were drugs such as cocaine and Prozac.

This was the first time scientists had made these findings for the region’s salmon, but it was already well-understood that local waters — and marine waters the world over — are becoming an alphabet soup of rogue chemicals. In varying degrees, these chemicals are settling into the bodies of every species analyzed in Puget Sound, including humans.

Can we really wait 700 years to remove all of the armoring along Puget Sound's shoreline? Let's do some of the math.

A story this week in Salish Sea Currents delves into the connection between environmental change and culturally important foods. Writer Sarah DeWeerdt interviewed social scientists at the 2016 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference about how this affects the spiritual and physical health of Salish Sea tribes and first nations. “The loss of subsistence and cultural identity cannot be estimated,” Joe Schumacker of the Quinault Department of Fisheries told her.

Some of the most important fish in the Salish Sea food web are also the most mysterious. Researchers have only begun to understand how many there are, where they go, and how we can preserve their populations for the future. University of Washington graduate student Margaret Siple describes how scientists are looking into the problem in the latest issue of Salish Sea Currents. 

Invasive species are among the three greatest threats to the environment worldwide, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Species ranging from microscopic viruses to larger creatures like rodents and non-native fish can alter the balance of entire ecosystems. The threat is well-known in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea, which face their own unique challenges.

Watch for several new articles in Salish Sea Currents in the coming weeks. On Monday, senior writer Christopher Dunagan takes an in-depth look at new theories on the transport of PCBs through the Puget Sound foodweb. Conventional wisdom points to contaminants in the seafloor sediment, but new studies may show a radically different source. If the studies bear out, they will have big implications for Puget Sound's endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales, which are among the most contaminated marine mammals in the world. 

One of the hot topics at the Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference this week is the impact of shipping noise on marine mammals such as the region's endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales. As vessel traffic increases in the Salish Sea, so does chronic noise, which scientists say can alter whale behavior or even mask communication between species. Now scientists are saying that this may be an even bigger issue, affecting species across the board.

Watch for updates and stories from the 2016 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference in Salish Sea Currents. We are sending ten science writers to Vancouver to cover key findings—from the fascinating to the decision-critical—emerging from more than 450 talks scheduled for this week's conference. These stories will be published throughout the year on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound. If you want a sense of what is happening during the week, our writers and others will be posting to Twitter using the hashtag #SSEC16.

More than 1100 scientists and researchers converge on Vancouver, B.C. this week to attend the 2016 Salish Sea Ecosystem Conference. The conference runs from April 13-15 and will include a combined 600 presentations and posters. It's the region's largest gathering on the state of the ecosystem, and we'll distil some of the best of it in our Salish Sea Currents series. 

It's easy to forget that when we talk about Puget Sound, we don't just mean the salty areas. Puget Sound is the sum of the water that flows into it. The cleaner the land and its thousands of streams and wetlands, the cleaner the Sound. It's that simple.