Collecting data by boat at one of the SSRC's monitoring locations.
BIOTOXIN MONITORING
The Coast Salish People have been fishing in the Salish Sea since time immemorial, and depend on the shellfisheries for subsistence, ceremonial, and commercial purposes. Harmful algae and biotoxin events are common along the west coast of the US and are a persistent threat to shellfisheries. The Northwest Indian College and Lummi Nation have work together to monitor for biotoxins in Bellingham and Lummi Bays.
At the SSRC, we maintain four monitoring sites within the Salish Sea. At each site, we collect plankton samples and measure water clarity, salinity, oxygen concentration, and pH. Together with experiments in the lab, we use these data to study how water conditions effect the growth and toxin production of the algae known to cause harmful algal blooms (HABs), commonly called “red tides”. These are the first steps in a larger project at SSRC to improve our ability to predict HABs in the Salish Sea.
Testing Reality: The validation of passive sampling methods and real-world monitoring for Paralytic Shellfish Toxins
The Salish Sea Research Center (SSRC) at Northwest Indian College (NWIC) has been conducting targeted harmful algae projects for the last three years, expanding harmful algae and biotoxin monitoring with our tribal partner, Lummi Nation, to safeguard commercial and subsistence harvesting of shellfish for Lummi people. This work is guided by Lummi Natural Resources (LNR) which is deeply concerned with expanded instances and durations of shellfish closures in the last decade, as well as long-term predictions of increased harmful algae events (HAE) due to climate change (Wells et al. 2015). Coast Salish People have been harvesting shellfish in Northwest Washington since time immemorial, and HAE are not uncommon in the Pacific Northwest (Trainer et al. 2003; Williams 2006; Lewitus et al. 2012). But, with added anthropogenic influences, shellfish safety concerns have prompted implementation of monitoring strategies that quantify the impact from these events to safeguard the wealth of subsistence, spiritual, and commercial resources for Indigenous and non-native people alike.
Emerging Algal Toxins in the California Current System: Responding to Known Threats, Preparing for the Future
HABs have emerged as an increasing threat to California Current ecosystem health, with frequent and widespread impacts to both wildlife and humans through direct toxicity, economic loss to fisheries, artisanal harvesting, recreation, and monitoring. While attention has focused on the “traditional” HAB events caused by Pseudo-nitzschia and Alexandrium, there is increasing recognition that the west coast is not immune to numerous other HAB issues. Surveys of wide swaths of California have highlighted the co-occurrence of multiple (order 12) toxin groups but these are severely under-reported threats driven by interactions at the land-sea interface where freshwater and marine toxins mix. A fundamental requirement for monitoring and management of these issues is to develop a more holistic approach to understanding and predicting, i.e. not treating each HAB as an ecologically unique issue. Solid Phase Adsorption Toxin Tracking (SPATT) could be leveraged to address the science/management gap regarding the simultaneous occurrence of multiple toxins. SPATT is well-supported by previous MERHAB and ECOHAB projects and has been widely adopted by agencies and organizations in California and Washington. There are still fundamental issues, including (1) the focus by most researchers and agencies on single-toxin data sets, and (2) the difficulty in standardizing SPATT toxin values. This proposed 5-year effort focused on (a) evaluation of modified SPATT under laboratory and field conditions; (b) development and comparison of methods for analysis of multiple toxins from the same SPATT; (c) analysis of historical SPATT extracts and continuation of existing time-series; (d) development of statistical models linking (multi)toxin data from SPATT to environmental conditions. Years 4-5 will continue the multi-year SPATT times-series, focusing on Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay, CA, and Bellingham Bay, WA, with the full 5 years of data used to identify environmental drivers of toxicity and trophic transfer.
Outcomes include:
• Characterization of multiple toxins, providing quantifiable results comparable to grab samples;
• Development of a 10+ year time-series for Monterey Bay, San Francisco Bay, and Bellingham Bay, leading to multivariate statistical analysis of environmental drivers;
• Addition of SPATT to existing databases, and two community workshops to facilitate uptake and standardization of SPATT within existing monitoring programs.
California mussel, Mytilus californianus.
Art by Thayne Yazzie