A cabezon, one of the REEF survey animals. Photo by Ann Dornfeld.

Fish Counters

Ann Dornfeld
05/20/2009

As the nation prepares for the 2010 Census, there's another inventory going on right now in Western Washington. The only difference is this census is taking place underwater. Recreational divers have volunteered as fish counters to help survey the fish populations in Puget Sound.

TRANSCRIPT

It's the kind of cloudy, wet spring day that most Northwesterners spend indoors. But the cold and wet doesn't matter as much when you're planning to spend your day at the bottom of a Puget Sound fjord.

These divers are conducting volunteer surveys for REEF, an organization that monitors fish populations around the world. The data helps researchers understand where fish live, and in what kind of numbers. It even lets them compare populations of the same species in different parts of the world. For instance, how's a sea slug in Puget Sound faring compared to the same species in Japan.

Back on the boat, surveyor Janna Nichols has just emerged from the 48 degree water. She pulls out her survey and goes down the list marking off what she's just seen.

Nichols: "Sunflower stars, definitely, many of those – saw a lot of those around. No sand dollars, no sea urchins. Ah! Ooh! Ah! Here's an exciting one! I saw a giant nudibranch! A very small giant nudibranch. But those are very cool to see – a treat!"

Nichols started doing REEF surveys when she began diving in the Caribbean nine years ago. When she realized what she could see back home in the Northwest, she became an avid diver and surveyor here. She now leads classes to teach fellow divers how to ID the marine life they see in this region.

Nichols: "Black–eyed gobies were everywhere. I would say under a hundred of them. And they were mating! Because I don't know if you noticed, they had black pelvic fins. And they kind of hover around and say 'Hey, baby baby, look at me!'"

As much fun as these "citizen scientists" have, professional scientists take the data these divers collect seriously. Christy Pattengill–Semmens is the Director of Science for REEF, and based in Seattle. She says before the survey program started 16 years ago, there wasn't much data available on overall fish populations. The idea for volunteer surveyors came about when two naturalists were writing an underwater field guide. They couldn't find even basic data about where the different species could be found, and how abundant they were in each location.

Pattengill–Semmens: "They realized that there were thousands of scuba divers and snorkelers with their faces in the water every day. So they decided to capitalize on the power of those numbers of volunteers who are interested in the marine environment to get them to report information back into a centralized database."

Those scientists teamed up with researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Nature Conservancy to develop fish and invertebrate surveys that snorkelers and divers could use to track what they saw underwater. Semmens says since 1993, more than 120,000 surveys have been submitted for thousands of sites worldwide.

Pattengill–Semmens: "And so the information as it grows through time is really becoming a good baseline to evaluate change through time. Especially in sensitive and protected areas such as a marine reserve, being able to evaluate how a fish population may change through time once it's protected as a no–take zone."

Volunteer surveyor David Jennings is on REEF's Advanced Assessment Team – its most experienced surveyors. Last summer he joined the team's annual survey of the Olympic National Park Marine Sanctuary.

Jennings: "I was pretty excited because from what I'd read the rockfish populations there – a lot of diversity, a lot of really fun species to see: tiger rockfish, chinas, vermilions, canaries. But when I got there, we did the surveys, I was actually very disappointed in how few rockfish I saw."

Jennings was surprised to learn that even though the park is called a sanctuary, fishing is still allowed there – even for some rockfish species that can live to 115 years old. He wanted to see how tiger and china rockfish populations in the Sanctuary had changed over time. So he looked at the past six years of REEF survey data.

Jennings: "One of the best sources was someone that wrote up a diving experience he had in 2002 where he saw dozens of tigers and many chinas. Whereas, I, in a week of diving, saw two tigers and just three chinas. So it was a very big contrast to what people saw in the past."

Jennings gathered more survey data, and took it to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. That's the agency that decides fishing limits. Greg Bargmann is a department fisheries biologist who's working on next year's catch limits for different rockfish species. He says the REEF survey isn't as precise as the survey the state uses. But the REEF rockfish data is more current and covers a wider area.

Bargmann: "The REEF survey shows a very dramatic decrease in abundance over the last five years. Our state surveys don't show that, but we have a lot of imprecision in our surveys so we're relying on the REEF surveys to look for changes in population."

Not all of the REEF survey data will end up in researchers' hands. But Christy Pattengill–Semmens with REEF says that doesn't matter.

Pattengill–Semmens: "At the very basic level, engaging members of the public in a "citizen science" program is valuable just for the sake of exposing the public to science, and enabling them to participate in a data collection activity that can have meaning and be useful."

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife will issue a recommendation for new rockfish fishing regulations within the next two months. Meanwhile, NOAA has just proposed listing three of Puget Sound's rockfish under the Endangered Species Act. That decision is due out next year.

Ann Dornfeld, KUOW News.

© Copyright 2009, KUOW