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By Rowan
Jacobson
A multi-disciplinary
team surveyed remote sections of British Columbia's coastline in July to
document the existence of Olympia oyster beds. Credit: Rowan
Jacobson
In the early 1990s, a Canadian marine scientist named
Brian Kingzett was engaged in an ecologist’s dream job. The province of
British Columbia wanted to know how much of its remote and convoluted
coastline had the potential for shellfish aquaculture, and it hired
Kingzett to find out. Kingzett was following a long line of explorers,
including James Cook and George Vancouver, commissioned to mess about in
boats along one of the wildest and most breathtaking coasts in North
America. He surveyed the shore from Victoria all the way to the border with
Alaska, recording the locations and characteristics of the beaches,
surveying the species present, and snapping photographs of the most
promising spots. Camping in the bush for days at a time, he came to know the
coast like few others and saw some amazing things. One night he navigated
by the luminescent seas as waves broke against reefs. He watched sea otters
leave glowing trails like shooting stars as they dove. On a different trip,
he anchored near remote hot springs every night.
One thing Kingzett saw stuck with him. He had pulled into
a long inlet near Nootka Island at low tide and, pressed for time, was
surveying the pocket beaches as quickly as possible. Most of the inlet was
sheer rock plunging to depths of a hundred feet just a few yards offshore,
but wherever a stream flowed out of the mountains, a cobbly delta had built
up over the millennia, forming beautiful shellfish habitat. Kingzett would
nose his boat onto each beach, leap ashore, jot down his notes, snap a
photo, and zip on to the next. As soon as he set foot on the first beach in
this particular inlet (name withheld to protect the innocent), he noticed
something unusual. There were a smattering of mussels and Pacific oysters,
plenty of barnacles and clams underneath, but portions of the beach were
absolutely littered with small, round oysters—Natives. Native oysters
(known as Olympias or ‘Olys’ in the U.S.) weren’t one of Kingzett’s
specialties and he wasn’t familiar with their status elsewhere on the
Pacific coast, but it was unusual enough to see them in such abundance that
he made a mental note of it. In his seven years of surveying the coasts, he
found just a handful of beaches burgeoning with Natives.
Fast forward ten years. Kingzett was at a shellfish
conference and met Betsy Peabody. He asked her what she did. She told him
about her Oly restoration efforts with Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF).
He said, “That’s funny, ten years ago I came across acres of those little
guys.” As you can imagine, Betsy was just a wee bit interested.
In July 2008, I accompanied a multidisciplinary team,
guided by Kingzett himself, into the fjords of Vancouver Island, not far
from Nootka Island. Our goal was to find these oly populations, if they
still existed, and to learn what we could from them—to use these natural
beds, which may have been around for millennia, as a kind of role model for
the habitat enhancement efforts PSRF is leading in Puget Sound. Team
members such as Joth Davis, lead scientist on PSRF’s native oyster
enhancement projects; Brian Allen, PSRF staff ecologist; Mike Beck, Senior
Scientist for The Nature Conservancy’s Global Marine Team; Sarah Davies, a
biologist with Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans; Stephanie
Richards, master provisioner and Captain with the Centre for Shellfish
Research at Vancouver Island; and David Hyde, a producer with an NPR
affiliate station in Seattle (KUOW), helped put the “multi” in
multidisciplinary. Betsy Peabody supplied the team’s discipline.
Imagine that somebody in the future stumbled upon one of
the last cars in existence. It was a Ferrari, scattered in pieces, and
wasn’t functioning, but a lot of the pieces seemed to be in pretty good
shape. This future dweller wanted to put the thing back together, but he’d
never seen a working car and didn’t even have a manual. How would he go
about doing it? Well, he’d start tinkering, using his common sense, and if
he was really handy, maybe he’d get it running and firing on a couple of
cylinders. He’d roll across the land at five miles an hour and consider it
a success, having no idea that there were missing pieces he’d never seen,
and that a car is capable of much, much more.
That’s the situation facing those working to restore the
Puget Sound ecosystem. The system still works, but decades of poor
maintenance and occasional breakdowns have left it limping along. Few
people can even remember that it used to run differently. But it is capable
of doing much more for us.
If you wanted to restore a vintage Ferrari and you
couldn’t find a manual, the first thing you’d do is to take a look at
another Ferrari of the same model. When Brian Kingzett met Betsy Peabody,
what he was basically telling her was, “Hey, when I was poking around those
fjords, I came across a 308 GT in excellent condition.” So we went to check
it out.
The ecosystem of Vancouver Island’s west coast is still
firing on all cylinders. Its intertidal zone is a biological hotspot
teeming with mussels, barnacles, oysters, clams, rock scallops, periwinkles,
limpets, crabs, sea stars, sculpins, and seaweeds of all kinds. Black bears
camp out on the beaches, rolling rocks to get at the gunnels beneath.
Eagles loiter in the spruce tops and black crows scoop up clams and shatter
them on the rocks. Offshore, the kelp beds are thick with rockfish and
urchins. Gangs of sea otters cruise the lanes, hustling up pounds of clams,
urchins, and crabs every day. They even excavate geoducks, leaving bomb
craters in the sand.
One of the lynchpins holding all this together is the
oyster beds. Like little rivets bolting the sea to the land, they are what
makes the ecosystem one seamless whole. But would they still be there? As
we boated for hours through the fjords aboard the MV Atrevida, a research
vessel whose name means audacious and whose namesake was one of the ships
Captain Alexandro Malaspina used to explore these very inlets in 1791,
Kingzett worried about the oysters. It had been fourteen years, after all,
since he’d last seen them.
On our first full day, we arrived too late to catch the
low tide, so Kingzett steered the inflatable near one of the pocket beaches
and we dangled our heads over the side, noses pressed against the glassy
surface. Nothing but clams, mussels, barnacles, more clams. Then, suddenly,
the surface dropped a foot and there they were: oysters everywhere. The
mother beds had survived. Soon, Joth Davis and Brian Allen were in the
water, snorkeling with their favorite bivalve.
The
expedition brought together journalists, scientists, managers and
conservationists to describe some the best remaining Olympia oyster beds in
the world. Credit: Joth Davis
The next morning, we yanked ourselves awake early enough
to catch the 7 a.m. low tide, concentrating our efforts at the head of the
inlet, where an oyster bed several acres wide spread in glorious profusion.
We set to work taking an oyster census, keeping a watchful eye on the bears
foraging a bit higher on the beach. We counted oysters, measured beds, and
asked some questions. What were they setting on? Who was living with them?
What were they eating? Who was eating them? Did they prefer intertidal or
subtidal living? We wanted to know why these oysters had persisted here for
so long and whether the same conditions might benefit Puget Sound’s olys.
Mike
Beck, Senior Scientist with The Nature Conservancy's Global Marine Team,
collects data on Olympia oysters density in a remote pocket beach.
Credit: Brian Kingzett
A few important things we learned or observed:
- Unlike Pacific oysters,
Native oysters are not reef builders, per se. Rather, in the Port
Eliza area, they form flat beds, little more than one oyster deep, on
rocky substrate, with a rich layer of clams underneath.
- Rock seems to be the
preferred substrate in this location, followed closely by native
oysters and native oyster shell.
- The pocket beaches
associated with drainages in this otherwise steep glaciated fjord seem
to have no shortage of setting substrate (rock in this case), as
compared to places like Puget Sound where setting substrate can
sometimes be the limiting factor.
- Perhaps most important, we
learned that Native oysters and humans can live well together. This
was no pristine inlet. Logging was heavy on the upland slopes and had
been for decades. According to Vancouver
Island’s West Coast, a history of the area written by
George Nicholson in 1962, “Acres of native oyster beds occur at the
head of the inlet, from which thousands of sacks were once shipped to
Vancouver and Seattle…. Now they are free to anyone who wishes to
gather them.” Within certain limits, Olys don’t need to be coddled or
walled off to thrive. They have been and can continue to be an
important source of food and habitat for a variety of creatures in the
area, including Homo
sapiens.
In addition to its array of quadrats, calipers,
shellstrings, hobos temperature sensors, fyke-net traps, plankton pumps,
and algae presses, our team used its sophisticated sensory apparatus to
analyze several Olys for qualities such as salinity, amino acid content,
and yumminess. The samples proved to be high in all three categories. Thus
encouraged, we performed the same analysis on a number of other species in
the area. We dug clams. We shucked pacific oysters. We caught sole. We ate
beach onion and pickleweed. Let it be noted that the high tides gave us
some down time.
When it came to procuring seafood, the only animal in the
vicinity that could give the sea otters a run for their money was team
member Brian Allen. With wetsuit and speargun, Allen plunged into the kelp
beds offshore and emerged with a string of rockfish. He cut a six-foot
strand of kelp so that I could make miso soup with the fronds and Betsy
Peabody could make pickles with the stalk. He popped limpets off their
rocky purchases and grilled them in their inverted shells for the ultimate
beach appetizer.
All this foraging gave us a profound sense of the
abundance of the area, which is perhaps the defining characteristic of the
Pacific Northwest coast. We love the Pacific Northwest for its drama and
its stark, misty beauty, but we especially love it because for ten thousand
years it has been a really, really good place for people to live. Evidence
of that was all around us on Nootka Island. At Friendly Cove, we spoke with
the descendents of the Nuu-chah-nulth tribe that welcomed Captain James
Cook to these shores in 1778. From our base in the Nuchatlitz Islands, we
could look down a sinuous tidal canal and see a line of boulders placed as
a fish trap by that same tribe centuries ago. And on one particularly
stunning pocket beach of oysters, I worked around a mysterious semicircle
of rock for hours before Brian Kingzett pointed out that this, too, had
been a fish trap. Fish came in on the high tide, then got trapped as the
receding waters trickled out between the rocks. All you had to do was scoop
up the stragglers. Easy livin’.
That pocket beach proved to be the prize find of the
trip. We didn’t discover it until our last day, when we fanned out to
survey new spots. Mike Beck and I had been dropped off to check this particular
beach, and it took us all of about three seconds to see that this one was
special. The red, green, and black cobble was gilded with a nearly
continuous sheen of white-gold oysters. We excitedly snapped photos and
tossed quadrats. Densities in some spots exceeded 600 oysters per square
meter—a concentration unheard of in Puget Sound—and gave a hint of how
beautiful and productive a Native oyster bed can be. “Look at this,” Mike
said. “These oysters are the dominant life form on this beach. They are the structure.” If
all you’ve ever seen of olys are the patchy survivors in Puget Sound, and
you’ve wondered how such critters could have fueled a vast industry from
San Francisco to Vancouver for decades, one look at this bed would make it
all clear. We had only the briefest of chances to learn about this Ferrari
of an oyster bed that goes by the humble name of Pocket Beach #3, so a
return trip is vital for future restoration efforts, not to mention our
newly attuned culinary appreciation for the rich assortment of coastal
offerings.
As the Atrevida
pulled away from shore, Mike Beck posed a question to us—one that has yet
to be answered. “From a conservation perspective,” he asked, “what would
you do about something like this? It probably isn’t the only beach like
this on Vancouver Island, but say there’s three or four, and maybe another
twenty like the one at the head of the inlet. And that’s it. In the whole world. What
would you do to make sure this ecosystem doesn’t vanish?”
Data from Olympia
oyster beds found along Vancouver's remote coastline may help to guide
future restoration efforts in Puget Sound. Credit: Brian Kingzett
Rowan Jacobsen is the author of A Geography of
Oysters, a 2008 James Beard Award winner, and Fruitless Fall: The Collapse
of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis
www.rowanjacobsen.com
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