[Vision2020] Spokesman Review: July 3, 2012: Business "Ocean acidification puts pressure on oyster growers"

[Ted Moffett]

July 3, 2012 </2012/jul/3/> in Business </business/>

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/jul/03/ocean-acidification-puts-pressure-on-oyster/
Ocean acidification puts pressure on oyster growers
Seattle Times

SEATTLE – After 34 years rearing shellfish in Washington’s Willapa Bay,
Dave Nisbet was in a bind: Nature had stopped providing.

Oysters were no longer reproducing naturally on the Washington coast.
Oyster larvae were even dying in nearby hatcheries, which use seawater to
raise baby shellfish that get sold as starter seed to companies like
Nisbet’s Goose Point Oysters.

But when, in 2009, Nisbet heard oceanographers identify the likely culprit
– increasingly corrosive ocean water, a byproduct of the same greenhouse
gases that contribute to global warming – the oysterman did the unthinkable.

Nisbet took out a loan and spent three years testing and building a new
hatchery that opened recently – in Hawaii.

Most of Washington’s $100 million-a-year oyster industry has been whipsawed
in recent years by ecological problems. But Nisbet’s oyster company appears
to be one of the first businesses in the Northwest – perhaps anywhere – to
shift part of its business to a new region in response to ocean
acidification.

“I just got nervous,” Nisbet said. “I was afraid if I didn’t do something,
then our business would just slowly die.”

Now, rather than relying on oysters that have spawned in Willapa Bay or on
juvenile oysters purchased from a nearby hatchery – as he has for years –
Nisbet raises larvae in tanks in a million-dollar, 20,000-square-foot plant
in Hilo, Hawaii. The tiny larvae are then sent by mail to Washington, where
Nisbet and his team oversee the rest of the multiyear growing cycle in
Willapa Bay.

“It would have been much easier and cheaper to start a hatchery here,”
Nisbet said. “But we just saw the hatcheries having failures, the larvae
dying in the tanks, and just decided to sidestep the issue completely.”

Nisbet’s move is just the latest sign of how the threat of ocean
acidification is altering the way Washington’s shellfish growers do
business.

Scientists for years have warned that excess carbon dioxide from the
burning of fossil fuels eventually would be taken up by marine waters and
begin lowering the pH of the world’s oceans.

In the past five years, oceanographers at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration working along the West Coast repeatedly have
documented that ocean chemistry is already changing, decades earlier than
anyone predicted.

Scientists are still learning just how those changes ultimately may upend
marine food webs. Researchers have shown that less-alkaline seawater causes
sea urchin larvae to change shape, makes squid more lethargic and prompts
clown fish to race toward rather than away from predators.

But the type of calcium carbonate used by juvenile oysters during the
initial stage of forming their shells is particularly vulnerable to even
slight increases in acidity. And the dark, frigid water that wells up from
the deep along the Northwest coast during north winds already is naturally
richer in carbon dioxide than most ocean surface water.

Those natural conditions combined with greenhouse-gas emissions, scientists
reported earlier this year, have turned the tidal currents on Washington’s
once oyster-rich coast into a death trap for juvenile oysters. “We’re the
tip of the spear for the worst of the worst because of the way the ocean
circulates,” said Bill Dewey, with Taylor Shellfish.

Oysters now haven’t reproduced on their own in Willapa Bay since 2005, so
every grower now relies on hatchery-produced larvae. Once the oysters make
it to that stage, they can survive acidic conditions just fine.

Goose Point Oysters employs 70 people and processes several million pounds
of shellfish a year, which are sold all over the world. Since water quality
is important to an oyster grower, the company had been following the
changes closely.

“We didn’t know what was going on, but we knew by 2009 that we could no
longer depend on our current seed supply,” said Kathleen Nisbet, Dave’s
daughter.

When her father attended a meeting with NOAA oceanographers, the depth of
the problem became clear.

“They said, ‘We’re on an escalator with this thing,’ ” she said. “The
problem is going to get worse, and we’re going to have to adapt.”

Kathleen Nisbet had attended the University of Hawaii-Hilo and had contacts
there, including Maria Haws, an associate professor of aquaculture. Hawaii
also doesn’t experience the same upwelling events and acidification doesn’t
appear to be a problem – at least not yet.

“The Northwest is really the canary in the coal mine, though sooner or
later we won’t have any place to run if we don’t somehow reverse the
trend,” Haws said.

She and the Nisbet family spent several years working out kinks and started
operating the hatchery earlier this year.

“Luckily we’ve come out of this not too scarred,” Kathleen Nisbet said. “We
think we’ve come up with a way to work around things.”

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