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Shellfish growers Nate Wight and Amber Taulbee should have been out on the tidelands this month harvesting Pacific oysters for grocery stores, restaurants and The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
But Hood Canal, a pillar of the state’s shellfish economy, a popular draw for recreational harvesters and stewarded by Native people for millennia, has been closed to harvest all summer because of a potentially deadly biotoxin.
Scientists sounded the alarm in June when a survey at Hoodsport picked up microscopic Alexandrium catenella cells. When ingested by humans, the toxin produced by the alga can lead to paralytic shellfish poisoning, a severe illness that can be deadly. The biotoxin can’t be cooked or frozen out of shellfish.
The last closure anywhere near this scale in Hood Canal was 2015, when The Blob — a massive marine heat wave off the Pacific Coast — was wreaking havoc across marine ecosystems. It fueled a bloom beginning fall 2014. There had never before been a widespread closure due to the toxin in Hood Canal.
“It was a really bizarre shift to go from thinking of this as one of the most magnificent food sources and benevolent environments,” to something that could cause harm, said Lissa James Monberg, the vice president of retail for Hama Hama Company and the third generation in her family to grow shellfish in Hood Canal.
This year marked the first time the biotoxin spurred a closure throughout the entire fjord, according to the state.
Washington is the U.S.’s leading producer of farmed shellfish, and Hood Canal makes up roughly 15% of the state’s output, according to the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers Association. Growers are feeling the pressure in a time when shellfish sales typically peak.
It’s unclear exactly why the bloom is happening now, experts say. But modeling suggests warming due to climate change could make these blooms more common in the Salish Sea.
Wight, who owns Jorstad Creek Oyster Company and has been working these 9 acres of tidelands since 2014, was with Taulbee seeding a crop of hatchery-raised geoduck instead of harvesting oysters on this July day, waiting out the closure.
“We start to have to plan around this more and think about — going forward — what our business model would look like if we weren't selling in the hot months anymore at all,” Wight said.
Positive tests
Along the bend of Hood Canal, three shellfish experts from the Skokomish Indian Tribe crunched along the shell-strewn shore.
Dozens of tribal members’ livelihoods are tied to these beaches at Annas Bay, said Kevin Cagey, a Skokomish tribal member and technician and lead monitor on the tribe’s shellfish team. State-licensed shellfish companies will buy from the tribal harvesters. This time of year, there are typically frequent openers for harvests — coinciding with low tides.
This bay is among the popular areas along the canal for both recreational and subsistence harvests.
But the beaches were empty, with the exception of Dungeness crab and otters scurrying about. Cagey and his colleagues selected more than a dozen oysters, tossing them into buckets to be put on ice and shipped off to the Department of Health’s lab in Shoreline. The results the next day would indicate an unsafe level of the biotoxin.
Weeks into their monitoring, they weren’t in the clear just yet, said Blair Paul, who leads the Skokomish Tribe’s shellfish program. Hood Canal is usually a refuge from biotoxins, he said. Tests of clams and oysters the tribe collected here, in Belfair and Dewatto, have climbed to levels nearly 13 times the state health limit.
The first inklings of disaster surfaced in early June, when trace levels were detected in mussels monitored by the Department of Health in southern Hood Canal. The following week, a positive sample near Hoodsport set off additional phytoplankton sampling and increased shellfish tissue testing. It was really unusual to see Alexandrium pop up so far south in Hood Canal, said Michelle Lepori-Bui, who manages a collaborative monitoring network called SoundToxins.
Alexandrium would crop up this summer in phytoplankton samples at every Hood Canal site regularly sampled by community science volunteers, tribal nations, shellfish growers and others making up the collaborative, said Lepori-Bui. Hoodsport would get the hottest, with a mussel tissue sample hitting a level about 112 times the state health limit. Many of the samples came back with levels that could kill humans if eaten.
Since the state closed the beaches to harvest, nobody has reported illness from paralytic shellfish poisoning here. Scientists at the state’s tiny biotoxin lab in Shoreline have received boxes on boxes, processing and testing dozens of samples of geoduck, clams and oysters each day since the bloom began.
What woke up the Alexandrium this year is still a bit of a mystery, said Cheryl Greengrove, an associate professor at the University of Washington, Tacoma, who has led monitoring efforts in the Salish Sea for decades.
'Alex in Chains'
Alexandrium are dinoflagellates: phytoplankton with a flagella that lets them swim, but still drift with the currents. In unfavorable conditions, such as the wintertime, the swimming cells sink to the sediment and enter a resting stage — like a seed — called a cyst. They can stay like this for decades.
Certain areas of Puget Sound have high numbers of cysts.
When conditions become favorable — such as with sunlight, nutrients, warmer waters and oxygen — they can bloom, and multiply quickly. The cells can appear under a microscope in chains, of which Greengrove has dubbed “Alex in Chains.”
Filter feeders like oysters, mussels, clams, cockles and other bivalves draw in water, ingesting plankton and other food before expelling the water. They can filter up to 50 gallons each day. When Alexandrium is present, the biotoxin can get concentrated in their bodies, which doesn't hurt the shellfish themselves.
Cysts of Alexandrium have existed in the Puget Sound region for centuries. But blooms in Hood Canal were rare or nonexistent for years.
They were concentrated north of the Hood Canal bridge, Greengrove said, noting some blooms in the early 2000s. For the most part, shellfish harvests could persist uninterrupted in Hood Canal, even as closures plagued other Puget Sound waters.
Then in fall 2014, state testing found extremely high levels of the toxin in shellfish, Greengrove said.
The following winter, for the first time, high numbers of cysts were detected. And spring 2015 brought the first widespread biotoxin closure in Hood Canal. Scientists believe it was triggered by anomalously warm water brought by The Blob.
Then, things were quiet — until this year.
Nothing is jumping out as an obvious driver, and typically, it’s a culmination of factors. Greengrove and other scientists hope to take a closer look later this year.
But it sure is unusual, Greengrove said. It began in southern Hood Canal, unlike the previous bloom, and in a season when Alexandrium are not typically the dominant phytoplankton species.
A study Greengrove participated in found that warming due to climate change is expected to increase the time available for the cysts to germinate. That could mean up to about a month more of favorable conditions for Alexandrium to grow in the fjord.
The consequences of climate change — such as more frequent marine heat waves — appear to be teeing up the perfect scenario for these Alexandrium cells to thrive, said Vera Trainer, acting director of the Olympic Natural Resources Center, who has worked in marine biotoxin research for decades.
Bad timing
As Wight and Taulbee worked through the closure at Jorstad Creek Oyster Company, gathering oysters for toxin testing and prepping geoduck tubes in the salty mist, they thought about what the future may hold.
The timing was horrible, Taulbee said of the closure. Everybody wants to eat oysters during the summer, and there’s a short window to harvest to meet that demand. Late spring into early summer should’ve been their busiest time of year.
The closure represents a roughly 20% hit in their revenue, Wight said. He also operates a hatchery and is able to keep some income through the sale of young shellfish to other farmers.
The oysters, clams and geoducks continue to grow while they wait it out. As the biotoxin levels decline, the shellfish will purge them from their systems and be safe to eat again. But before that happens, the oysters might grow too big for some customers, and lose their value.
Wight ponders growing more geoduck in the future. Geoduck grow for years before they’re ready to harvest, potentially giving more of a financial buffer if these closures were to become more common. Taulbee floated the idea of taking on work elsewhere to keep them afloat.
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