Posted on Categories Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Sonoma Coast, WildlifeTags , ,

California’s early June heat wave cooked coastal mussels in place

Eric Simons, BAY NATURE

Bodega Marine Reserve research coordinator Jackie Sones has worked in or walked on the rocky shores of the North Coast almost every day for the last 15 years. But while she was surveying the reserve for sea stars in mid-June, she saw something new: strips of bleached algae draped across the rocks, like frost, and a swath of dead mussels, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, black shells agape, orange tissue shining in the sun, stretching across 500 feet of rocky tidepools.

“It’s one of the first things you see, coming down the rocks into the middle of the intertidal zone,” she said. “They were very visibly dead.”

In all her time in Bodega Bay, she wrote in her blog The Natural History of Bodega Head, she’d never seen a mussel die-off that size, or affecting so many individual mussels.

She suspected immediately that the algae had bleached and the mussels had overheated earlier in the month. While many Bay Area residents fled toward fans or movie theaters or air-conditioned libraries to escape the record-breaking early June heat wave, the mussels, which attach themselves to rocks with super-strong threads and never look back, would have just roasted in place. The air temperature in Bodega Bay on June 11 hit an unusually warm 75 degrees Fahrenheit. The normal June sea breeze disappeared. A series of mid-day low tides stranded the tidepool animals out of the water for hours while the sun beat down from high overhead.

“In the past we’ve seen patches die, but in this case it was everywhere,” Sones said. “Every part of the mussel bed I touched, there were mussels that had died.”

She went back to the lab and talked to BML marine biologist Eric Sanford, who had seen the same thing in the part of the reserve where he’d been working. The next day Sones walked a longer stretch of shoreline, covering about a quarter-mile, and still saw the same pattern of mussel death. Further reports came in of die-offs around Bodega Bay at Dillon Beach and Pinnacle Gulch, at Sea Ranch, and at Kibesillah Hill north of Fort Bragg.

Northeastern University marine ecologist Brian Helmuth, who studies the effects of air temperature on marine creatures, said that on a 75 degree Fahrenheit day, the tissues inside a marine creature glued to a rock out of the water might rise to 105 degrees. The animals try to vent the heat building up inside of them but can’t without a breeze to carry it away. The mussels’ black shells trap even more heat. “They were just literally cooking out there,” Helmuth said. “Unfortunately this was the worst possible time.”

Read more at https://baynature.org/2019/06/26/californias-early-june-heat-wave-cooked-coastal-mussels-in-place/

Posted on Categories Sonoma Coast, WildlifeTags , ,

Warning about sport-caught bivalves extended to Sonoma Coast

Mary Callahan, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

State health officials have extended to the Sonoma Coast recent warnings about the risks of consuming sport-caught mussels, clams, oysters, whole scallops and other bivalves in the wake of testing that has turned up evidence of naturally occurring paralytic shellfish poisoning in recent weeks.

The expanded notice comes as Marin County Public Health announced its first confirmed case of human illness, which occurred in a patient who ate mussels harvested Sunday at Dillon Beach, officials said Wednesday.

The unidentified patient had been hospitalized for neurological symptoms and is “getting better,” Marin County Public Health Director Matthew Willis said in a news release. “Fortunately, the clinician was aware of the elevated PSP (paralytic shellfish poisoning) levels in locally sport-harvested shellfish and made a timely diagnosis,” he said.

State health officials last week issued notices about the dangers of eating recreationally caught shellfish off the coast of San Mateo, San Francisco and Marin counties because of unhealthy levels of harmful toxins produced in phytoplankton blooms that tend to thrive in springtime conditions off the Northern California coast.

Read more at http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/8114493-181/warning-about-sport-caught-bivalves-extended

Posted on Categories Sonoma Coast, WildlifeTags , , , Leave a comment on West Coast toxic algae bloom worst in decade

West Coast toxic algae bloom worst in decade

Glenda Anderson, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
An explosion of toxic algae along the West Coast has launched an expansive seagoing research project aimed at uncovering the roots of the growth, which contaminates shellfish and small fin fish with a poison that can kill the marine mammals, birds and people who eat them.
The current outbreak is the worst toxic algal bloom in more than a decade, stretching from California’s Central Coast to Washington, and possibly to Alaska, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The algae is producing toxins in unprecedented amounts in some “hot spots” along the coast, officials say.

“Researchers in both the Monterey Bay and the Central Oregon Coast have found some of the highest concentrations of domoic acid that they’ve ever seen,” NOAA Fisheries spokesman Michael Milstein said.

Scientists are hoping that a three-month ocean expedition, launched Monday, to monitor and collect samples of the single-celled marine plants producing toxins along the West Coast will help answer why their numbers have skyrocketed.

Unlike the algal blooms that have plagued freshwater bodies like Clear Lake, the microscopic algae — also called phytoplankton — are not visible to the naked eye. But when their numbers are large, the water takes on a brownish-green hue. Some types turn the water a red color, leading to a common moniker for the outbreaks — “red tides.”

Read more at: West Coast toxic algae bloom prompts extensive study | The Press Democrat