Puget Sound estuaries turned into industrial feedlots. Why? To raise geoducks for Asia
In conjunction with KBCS, we’re posting a transcript of Martha Baskin’s latest story. Listen to her radio story here.
Some 43,500 plastic tubes covered with nets and staked with rebar may seem like an unusual site on a Puget Sound beach. But South Puget Sound citizens and environmentalists are calling the alarm. The plastic tubes are used by Washington’s shellfish industry to plant geoducks for the Asian market. Martha Baskin checks in with industrial farms on beaches and intertidal estuaries.
Narration: The waters at Puget Sound’s southern edge, near Olympia and Shelton, ripple like fingers into slender inlets with names like Totten, Eld and Budd. The inlets are inter-tidal, rich nursery grounds for salmon, and nesting grounds for heron and eagles. For hundreds of years they’ve also been harvesting grounds for shellfish, clams and oysters. But the industrial harvesting of a new type of clam, geoduck, primarily for the Asian market, has citizens and environmental groups crying foul.
“As you can see, there’s white PVC tubes that are floating around,” says Laura Hendricks with the Coalition to Protect Puget Sound Habitat. “And what we’re finding is a massive amount of plastics going into our public waters and there’s no law that protects them from using this toxic plastic. It’s non-marine grade, known to leach and it’s toxic.”
Hendricks points at rows of PVC tubes on a beach at Totten Inlet. The tubes are used by the shellfish industry to plant baby geoducks. Citing a Sierra Club study, Hendricks says the tubes contain lead and cadmium. When the tubes are ground down by waves and sand, the tiny particles are eaten by zooplankton and spread through the food chain. Hendricks and others working for stricter regulation say South Puget Sound beaches and coastal areas are becoming feedlots for the shellfish industry.
“Puget Sound is an estuary of national significance and it belongs to all the people and the public and this is not a wheat farm,” Hendricks says. “This is something we’re spending $50 million and people are paying their taxes to restore.” (Fifty million dollars is what the state is investing to restore Puget Sound waters.)
Totten Inlet (Photo from Case Inlet Shore Association)
Hendricks, Susan Macombson with the Sierra Club and Preston Troy who lives on Totten Inlet are taking me on a geoduck boat tour of Totten Inlet.
Troy seems to know every square inch and points out acres of geoducks in plastic tubes and mature geoducks spouting water from beneath the sand.
“The geoduck is taking in the phytoplankton and zooplankton. That’s their nutrition for growth,” Troy says. “So they’re very effective filters. Unfortunately, they’re filtering out the stuff that everything else needs to eat.”
He refers to salmon, flounder, smelts and sea perch. We move on to another beach. Someone is using what appears to be a high-pressure firehose to dislodge the geoducks.
“They’re literally blowing the sand apart to expose the geoduck,” Troy says. The sand and mud or benthic layer can be destroyed as deep as two or three feet, he says. “And the beach is just left to heal itself afterward and it never really does. And all the things that are living in this benthic layer are disrupted, if not killed.”
At another beach on Totten Inlet, workers position PVC tubes in the sand. As we come closer, the group recognizes an industry leader, Seattle Shellfish’s Jim Gibbons. They’ve opposed Gibbons at county and state hearings.
I ask how the crop is doing.
Gibbons: “It’s a very good way to put it, it’s just a crop out there on the beach. We actually planted the crop here five years ago so it’s all harvested.”
Geoducks take five years to mature.
“How many do you expect to plant here now?”
“We plant one tube per square foot, 43,560 per acre,” Gibbons says.
Laura Hendricks with the Coalition to Protect Puget Sound points at the silt in the water. Gibbons says the water is murky because of nitrogen.
“You’ve seen the nitrogen in Hood Canal and it’s causing nutrification. The same process is occurring here. These shallow bays and estuaries are going to die from too much nitrogen. So you need shellfish to eat the algae that results from the nitrogen,” Hendricks says. “We’re talking about silt not algae, and if you’re filling the water with silt you have other animals, especially fish and endangered species like salmon, that cannot swim in silt-filled waters.”
The boat moves on and tensions dissipate for now. The issue won’t be resolved here. But it may when scientists with the University of Washington Sea Grant program complete a five-year study begun in 2007. Commissioned by the state legislature, the study is examining “uncertainties” related to geoduck aquaculture and the health of the ecosystem.
Sean McDonald with the School of Aquatics and Fisheries Science says during harvesting “you have the turnover of the sediments, the introduction of large volumes of water and you end up with displacement of the animals and possible death of the animals.” The question, he says, is whether or not the animals and communities affected will recover. The study won’t be completed until 2013.
Hendricks, Troy and the Sierra Club’s Susan Macombson have already reached conclusions. Macombson lives at Johnson Point on the Nisqually Reach, the thumb next to the inlets fingers. Geoduck and oysters are harvested on her neighbors’ beaches. She thought she could live with plastic tubes washing up on shore, initially, but then marine life began to disappear.
“The crabs were gone. The starfish were gone. Everything was gone and my kids were mentioning there was no flounder in the water any more,” Macombson says. “And then that winter they put plastic bags all over the each to divert water — and I lost it, I was so angry.”
The Department of Ecology is reviewing regulations for geoduck farming. The new proposals will be open to public comment in August. Hendricks and others recently filed an appeal to block the approval of a new geoduck farm in Pierce County.
Martha Baskin’s reporting for Green Acre Radio is supported by the Human Links and Russell Family foundations. Engineering by CJ Lazenby. It’s produced by the studios of Jack Straw Productions and KBCS. E-mail greenacre@jackstraw.org.
Thank you for bringing this too the attention of many fishermen. As you may already know, recreational fishermen for the most part are very protective of Puget Sound waters in Washington. Our recreation depends on it, and if a few people are cashing in and destroying the habitat for so many more to enjoy then that has got to change. I will definitely weigh in on this when the regulations come to forming. Thank you, and please keep your readers informed. This may not be a “hot’ story just yet, trust me though it will heat up as fishermen realize the significance of it.
Actually, Geoducks will live for well over 100 years, with individuals over 140 years old known.
Essentially, the aquaculture industry and Dept. of Natural resources are transferring the industrial forest model into a marine environment. Its a monoculture managed for a single species and that species is harvested at a very young age. Its the marine equivalent to a Douglas Fir plantation. And likely to prove as ecologically and environmentally harmful.
“Essentially, the aquaculture industry and Dept. of Natural resources are transferring the industrial forest model into a marine environment.”
Don’t forget the tribes. While, yes, they are a large component of the “aquaculture industry”, they also are co-managers with DNR. If you are going to chastise management, you have to include tribes.
The entire geoduck aquaculture footprint is about 400 acres and a good part of that is in Willipa (65,000 acres of tidelands), Samish Bay (12,000 acres of tidelands), and parts of Puget SOund other than S. Puget SOund. Industrial aquaculture? Scientists say the geoduck aquaculture footprint is non-existent at this point.
Destroying the habitat? There is no, nada, scientific evidence of any habitat destruction. In fact, there’s plenty of scientific evidence that will tell you that bivalves and bivalve farming are the most effective and sustainable way to deal with the eutrification of our marine waters. We have too much nitrogen going into Puget Sound causing excess blooms and causing oxygen deprivation which is killing entire ecosystems. Check out what’s happening to Hood Canal or Chesapeake Bay or the dead zone at the Mississippi River.
The Department of Natural Resources has yet to lease one acre for geoduck farming. Get your facts straight.
Maybe I am a little slow but let me ask you this: If aquaculture is similar to farming, (farming clams rather than farming crops.) How is it that the argument that “aquaculture is BAD because it destroys the substrate and hinders the development of marine life” is fine to say. Yet, the methods and repercussions seem similar to traditional farming methods on land. Maybe you should go complain to the FFA and tell them that they are setting up kids to destroy the environment. As far as fishing goes, I seriously doubt that an abundance of clams buried in the ground is going to affect fishing.
If I were a betting man, I’d bet the UW study due in 2013 will show that geoduck farming produces an overall benefit to water quality and tidal zone fertility as compared to the preexisting state. They are filter feeders, their natural activity is to take in the excess algae and bacteria resulting from fertilizer loaded runoff, convert it back into fertilizer, and fix it in the beach. Once deposited there, those former contaminants might encourage the marine plants considered critical as herring nursery habitat, and therefore also critical for so many other species in the sound. If this is the UW study result, will Martha or the others concerned by this issue listen? Will SPG report it?
The big problem with current practice centers on the predator exclusion tubes/nets, and the disturbance and silt resulting from the harvest operation. If those negatives could be removed then you would have a basically invisible farming operation which improves habitat as a free byproduct (actually better than free. the permitting process yields tens of thousands of dollars per acre to the state). If done by smallholders who care about the beach because they live there and have to look at it everyday, geoduck culture could be and should be an ideal sustainable yield operation.
All of this is really moot anyway, since the state has discovered that it can make millions auctioning off harvest permits on WILD GEODUCK BEACHES (See DNR website: http://www.dnr.wa.gov/Publications/aqr_geo_invite_packet_aug). They will NEVER issue another permit for geoduck aquaculture (except to well-connected corporations, of course). They don’t want the competition. And if you think 400 acres of private production is a big problem, the states biological assessment allows for a maximum of SIX THOUSAND ACRES PER YEAR of wild geoduck harvest. It’s marine clearcutting, driven by the same thirst for revenue that powers the state’s timber lease program.