Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
Peter Lang and his buddies like to go diving by Blake Island, just across Puget Sound from West Seattle, where they can scoop up delectable Dungeness crabs.
But when they showed up last spring, the lush meadows of eelgrass where crab like to hide were nearly gone. In the sandy expanse below, they could pick out just a cell phone and an old car radio.
Where they normally spotted scads of crabs and fish, they saw just one sick-looking Dungeness -- with only one claw. It didn't bother to run from them.
The place -- within sight of Tillicum Village, where tourists savor salmon and celebrate the Sound's bounty -- had turned into an underwater desert.
In three other places where Lang and his friends expected to chase after bountiful sea life, they instead found a barren expanse.
"The shallows of Puget Sound are mostly dead," asserts Lang, who has been diving here since 1988. "Something's drastically changed in the last two years."
Lang's story and similar anecdotes match the findings of scientists who study the Sound. Their conclusion: Marine life is disappearing, and fast.
Seabird populations are plummeting. The state's largest seabird-nesting colony last year saw a catastrophic failure. In the south Sound -- years after fishing was cut way back for Pacific cod, whiting and walleye pollock -- populations are still in critical condition.
Salmon stocks stand at perhaps 10 percent of their historic abundance, and individual fish are much smaller.
The orcas that eat those salmon are the highest predator trying to eke out a living in Puget Sound. The federal government last year awarded local orcas the strongest protection available for species slipping toward extinction. Later this year, federal scientists will announce which areas of the Sound must be preserved to keep the population afloat. Whale lovers wonder if the effort will be enough.
The orcas are victims of decades of politicians' broken promises, industries' resistance to stricter regulations and -- perhaps most damagingly -- the inability to convince residents to live and work more gently on the shores of the Sound. It all has resulted in a failure to turn the environmental tide in favor of the salmon on which the orcas depend -- much less launch the broad-based rescue of Washington's unique inland sea that scientists say is necessary to prevent the loss of species.
Continue reading this story from the Seattle P-I:
Marine life is disappearing from Puget Sound, and fast
