A slow recovery for Puget Sound
Many of Puget Sound's declining herring populations have rebounded, the acres covered by the invasive grass spartina are half what they were a few years ago and sites once contaminated with heavy metals are slowly being cleaned up, according to a biennial report by the state on Puget Sound's health.
But toxic chemicals still can be found in the fat and livers of some fish and marine mammals; runoff continues to flush pollution from parking lots and streets into the Sound; and populations of seabirds, such as grebes and scoters, are still down dramatically from the 1970s.
The report suggests that even as progress is being made in restoring the region's signature waterway, growth and decades of abuse continue to take a toll.
"We've been at this long enough that all these years into it we had hoped the trends would be more clearly improving," said Scott Redmond, with the Puget Sound Action Team, a partnership of state agencies that has monitored the health of the Sound since 1986.
Instead, trends are mixed, and several key indicators of the Sound's ecosystem health are in such a state of flux it's often hard to characterize which direction things are heading.
For example, 1,655 acres of shellfish beds that had been closed because of stormwater runoff contaminated with human or animal waste were reopened in the past two years � even as the number of shellfish beds on the brink of closure has doubled since 1997.
"Our concern, overall, is that we not lose ground," said Mary Getchell, a spokeswoman for the Action Team.
While the region's transient killer-whale population dropped from 97 in the 1990s to 78 in 2001 -- a decline so precipitous that the federal government last month proposed protecting orcas under the Endangered Species Act -- the population since has grown to 87, including two new calves born in December.
And populations of small, schooling herring, eaten by salmon and whales, dipped across the Sound in the 1990s, but "they've been coming up pretty well, and for the most part, are now above average," said Greg Bargmann, a marine fish manager with the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. He attributed the increase to better weather, now that the warming El Ni�o has dissipated.
Yet two local populations of herring -- one near the refineries at Cherry Point and one at Discovery Bay -- are down.
The Action Team's report is timed to coincide with the beginning of the state's two-year legislative-budget cycle and forms the backbone for a work plan and a $31.5 million budget request to continue monitoring and cleanup in the Sound.
Gov. Christine Gregoire, who once ran the state Department of Ecology, said in a news release that the state needed to increase its effort to protect the Sound, and she promised to work with lawmakers to take action on the work plan.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle Times:
A slow recovery for Puget Sound
