Report by Lyon McCandless 8/18/2006
From the Bainbridge Island ferry you can see a virtual showcase of man’s creativity. Skyscrapers compete for hill-top positions as throngs of automobiles scurry around their feet. Maritime traffic of all sorts weaves its complex patterns everywhere, deftly avoiding the ever-present massive container ships. Giant jet aircraft, the pride of Seattle, are present overhead, day and night. Above water is clearly man’s world.
But below the surface is a hidden realm of raw nature where there are few signs of man, and only the fittest survive. Low tides give a hint of marine strangeness with glimpses of tiny creatures in tide pools. But the true richness of Puget Sound life can only be sampled by an observer prepared for immersion in cold water. A diver soon realizes that he is swimming in a broth of life, of small organisms that thrive on even smaller drifting plankton: the start of a food chain.
In an area with good currents almost every square inch of rock provides a foothold for something that thrives on the living broth. Thrives so long as it can protect itself from constant assault by fish and invertebrates that consider it food. Away from the breakers, more delicate things exist: red coralline algae with white tips, clumps of yellow coral, and encrusting lavender sponge.
Visiting divers are often surprised at the spectrum of colors in the underwater world of Puget Sound. How can some animals continue to exist in their coats of bright red or yellow? Attractive plumose anemones on the tops of rocky spires or pilings stand out in the purest white. Surely they have an awful taste. It turns out that the only thing that eats them is the giant, many legged sun star, a truly ugly disgusting omnivore that never ventures into shallow water.
The beautiful blue-eyed bay scallop (It looks like the SHELL gasoline sign.) has often startled divers by swimming many feet above the bottom. This orange bivalve swims away from danger by rapidly opening and closing its shell, exposing bright yellow lips and jetting water to the rear. It looks like a comic set of animated false teeth! Up close one sees a fringe of feelers and many tiny blue eyes around the ‘mouth’. This scallop has learned to sense and flee from an approaching sun star. In nature’s experimental way, the opposite approach has been taken by its cousin, the rock scallop. The rock scallop has a very thick shell, strong muscles and an amazingly strong cement that welds it to the rock bottom. Both types of scallop are rarely seen above the extreme low tide line.
Thin-armed blood stars are often seen at low tide along with ochre stars which come in a rainbow of colors. But there is another spiny, brilliant red star that is only seen at depth of thirty feet or more. Strangely, this gypsy star travels slowly in large groups, apparently exhausting its preferred food supply and moving on. In the 1970s off Yeomalt Point there was an almost continuous carpet of hundreds of these spiny sea stars. Yet five years later not one could be found.
The striped greenling, a ten inch bottom fish, needs camouflage to hide from enemies. It uses large pectoral fins to lunge after its favorite dinner: inch long shrimp. Even with broad red-brown and white stripes, this beauty is hard to see against a background of rocks and iridescent algae. The red, spotted Irish Lord is another bottom-feeder that uses camouflage to confuse his prey: small fish and crabs. Its colorful patterns even go across the cornea of its eyes!
People who fish with a hook might never know that we have green fish! The foot-long emerald green gunnel is amazingly hard to spot in a bed of sea lettuce. He swims like an eel, sending waves of motion down his long streamlined body. His cousin, a red-brown gunnel, spends time in deeper water searching for tiny shrimp hiding in rust-colored algae covering the bottom.
Off Restoration point incoming tidal waters move up and over a vertical rock wall extending out from land. In the fall a wondrous sight may be seen as hundreds of herring loiter just behind the rising current, looking for food. The fish crowd close together and themselves form a beautiful silver wall ten feet high and thirty feet or more long.
Many marine animals use currents to bring them food. Several times a day off Fort Ward park a strange sight may be seen. A large concrete cube, once part of the WWII anti-submarine network, is now home to a variety of marine life, including about fifty kelp crabs. When the tide flows all the crabs move to the forward face hoping to catch lunch. Seeing a hundred small, white-tipped pinchers waving has sent shivers up the spines of many a passing diver even though he knows the crabs are really harmless. Right out of Aliens!
Many people think of our octopus as being red or brown. This is not always the case. Watching a beautiful deep red six-foot octopus one day, I stayed about eight feet away as it used its graceful arms to investigate nooks and crannies on the rocky bottom. After five minutes the octopus became aware of me, and started flowing away more purposely with increasing speed. When I followed along it turned on its jet, zipping along just about as fast as I could swim. It was headed straight for the nearest big concrete anchor and the safety of the large hole at its bottom. I watched it zoom in at high speed, thinking the show was over. But in a few seconds, out of the hole came a big cloud of sand and a dozen madly writhing tentacles, many of them white. The commotion didn’t last long. The hole soon spat out a pure white octopus, my old friend, I think. It blurped out a cloud of ink, shot past me and then settled down, slowly moving away, still all white. I am sure he was reminding himself: “Never, never go into the old man’s den without knocking first.”
Unfortunately, there are many signs that the world beneath the surface is in trouble. We notice the obvious things such as red tides and fish kills, but there is much more. Old timers can tell you that forty years ago the ferries sometimes had trouble finding a path through the 300 or 400 kicker boats that swarmed off Duwamish Head and West Point around salmon derby time. Today we see just a few die-hards. An almost continuous bed of bull kelp stretched along the east side of Bainbridge Island, a wonderful nursery for small fish of all kinds. Only a few small patches remain. A large run of true cod was the basis for a yearly cod fish derby in Agate Passage. The run disappeared shortly after geoduck farming started in the passage. Large ling cod, herring, smelt, rock cod and many other species that live in the unseen world are severely depleted. Local citizens were not interested in our ubiquitous but hidden sea urchins or sea cucumbers, so they permitted extensive harvesting of these scavengers for the far east trade. Now it is difficult to find any of these strange relatives of the starfish, and not even experts can estimate the impact of their removal from the complex ecosystem.
We must all encourage our dry-land friends to learn more about the marine world, to recognize its importance, and to support local and governmental efforts to restore a healthy environment.
You can learn more at the web sites listed below or you can see locally made video programs at 10:00 am on BITV channel 12 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
http://dnr.metrokc.gov/wlr/waterres/marine/photos.htm Marine Life Photos
http://www.psat.wa.gov/About_Sound/AboutPS.htm Puget Sound Action Team
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/sea/pugetsound/beaches/pool.html Dept. of
Ecology - Puget Sound Shorelines
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