Here in the Puget Sound,
the carbon factories are the kelp communities.
Many mistake kelp
as an annoying weed, yet it's invaluable to fish and other wildlife.
But there is a problem.
We're interested in learning more
about how we can create conditions in which kelp can thrive.
Puget Sounds kelp forests are diminishing.
Now organizations are teaming up to research and restore the supply.
Work is nearing completion on a rest stop designed to benefit migrating salmon.
Salmon are incredibly resilient.
They will figure out a way.
And so what we're trying to give them a little bit of a boost.
These stories and more next on City Stream.
Hello, I'm Jeff Renner.
Welcome to a special environmental edition of CityStream
from Elliott Bay Park.
From the skyline
to the shoreline, this park offers stunning views.
Pier 90 sits to the west and the grain terminals are next door.
But across Puget Sound,
something happening beneath the surface is a concern.
The sound was
once filled with kelp forests, long strands of algae
that provide food and habitat for fish and other wildlife.
And while kelp forests exist in the waters behind me,
they have drastically declined
in other parts of the sound.
The Puget Sound Restoration Fund is now teaming up with partners
to devise innovative ways to restore it.
If you thought kelp was just an annoying weed, think again.
Producer Pete Cassam explains why it's so vital
to the marine ecosystem.
Puget Sound is an estuary and it's one of the largest on the continent.
Estuaries are productive places.
Here in Puget Sound,
the carbon factories are the macro algal
and kelp communities that are taking all of these nutrients
and minerals that are coming off of the land in our watersheds
and turning it into something that can be used in the food web.
Whether you're talking about mussels or shrimp or crab
or salmon or whales,
they have kelp carbon in them.
And that functionality and that productivity
starts with kelp.
We don't know why,
all of the reasons why kelp has declined.
Kelps were being surveyed
initially because it was important for navigation.
And because of that, we're able to document losses in Puget Sound.
It's those historic areas that right now
we're looking at targeting for some kind of restoration.
We're at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Manchester Research Station.
This is where the Puget Sound Restoration Fund operates
the Ken Chew Center,
which is shellfish hatchery, shellfish research center.
But also it's where our kelp lab facilities are.
This one looks really good. Wow.
One of the things that the lab allows us to do
is to curate and manage a seed bank.
So we will go to a kelp forest and we will make a collection of material
there from the wild kelp, and we'll bring it into the laboratory.
And we can collect the spores that those kelps are producing.
Right now we have roughly 20
populations in Puget Sound of bull kelp that are in our seed bank currently,
and that's what we'll use for our field experiments on the enhancement trials.
We are headed to Point Jefferson.
We're going to go check on our experimental kelp bed.
Between these two bouys here and this is what the Suquamish tribe
calls the Doe Kag Wats estuary.
There is lots of species of kelp that live in Puget Sound.
We're concerned with the canopy species because of its
particular function as structured habitat.
Our historic kelp bed
was right along this stretch of shoreline.
That's the bull kelp.
So that's what we call Nereocystis.
And so we planted that here from seed
that we produced in our lab in February.
It grew from microscopic to what
we see here today in the adult sporophyte.
If it's healthy, we should see
abundant kelp where we planted it.
Generally, if it is doing what the adult should be doing,
which is producing spores
that's the best indicator of health.
Size and shape
and we monitor that over time to see how it grows.
We look at the condition of the blade and whether it's producing a lot of blades.
So we actually go through and enumerate the number of blades.
All right, 28 blades.
Also damage from grazers. There's all kinds of things that like to eat bull kelp.
Plants look good.
They're growing well.
They're right where they should be at the right time.
And they're doing what they're supposed to do, which is to produce the spores
for the natural substrate here.
This site is naturally occurring,
which means no one's planting kelp here.
A piece of cobble.
It's really exciting to see so much that's
creating all the habitat and the other functions of kelp
right along an area where there's hundreds of thousands of people living.
And each crop of bull kelp is an annual crop.
So the one that we see this summer has to sufficiently
seed the bottom with kelp for there to be kelp next year.
And so how do we cause that paradigm?
How do we facilitate that?
That's the work that we have to do right now.
The Puget Sound Restoration Fund has partnered with the Port of Seattle,
which has been monitoring kelp fields in Elliott Bay for years.
And the port has teamed up with the Seattle Aquarium, which is using
an underwater drone to learn how kelp can be restored and protected.
That part of the story as CityStream continues.
As we mentioned, Puget Sound has seen a dramatic reduction of kelp
forests, a vital resource essential to the marine ecosystem.
But in the last few years, something surprising has happened.
There's been a resurgence of kelp in Elliott Bay.
All this is being studied
by the Port of Seattle in partnership with the Seattle Aquarium.
One of the tools being used is an underwater drone known as ROV Nerio.
They hope it'll help
them understand how to protect Puget Sound kelp forests in the future.
Producer Pete Cassam has more.
We have a century agenda goal
to become the cleanest, greenest port in North America.
We also have goals around habitat restoration.
We're interested in learning more about how we can create conditions
in which kelp can thrive.
Kelp is really the manna of the sea.
It provides numerous services that enable fish and wildlife to thrive.
Elliott Bay is ringed with kelp.
Not continuously, but there are certain chunks of the waterfront
that have these mats of kelp forest.
This is an area of urban kelp habitat.
What we're seeing are kind of more substantial kelp beds in the north
part of Elliott Bay and then patchier smaller
kelp beds further south.
The genus of this species
is Nereocystis, which means mermaids bladder.
And that's what keeps it floating at the surface.
So you can see the fronds are rather like the hair of the mermaid.
And it's really quite a beautiful sight, but it's also remarkable.
It can grow a hundred feet in a season, like a foot a day.
These are kelp forests, just like trees in the in the woods.
These forests allow for not only plants and animals to survive around them,
but also can sequester carbon.
And we have a strategic relationship now with the Seattle Aquarium
to see why it grows in some places and not others.
And taking those lessons and applying it to our habitat restoration efforts.
We're experimenting
and trying to learn more about how to restore not only kelp,
but also eelgrass beds and oyster beds, which are all keystone
kind of habitats here in Puget Sound.
We are in front of the breakwater at Elliott Bay Marina,
and there's an extensive kelp bed that runs along the entire
breakwater here.
And today looks like a pretty good day to see what these kelp beds looks like here.
Part of our partnership with the Seattle Aquarium
we are using an underwater remotely operated vehicle.
ROV, Nereo, short for Nereocystis.
And we do indeed use an Xbox game controller to fly the vehicle.
That's good.
And we have cameras facing downwards and a camera facing forwards.
And we have lights and various sensor equipment.
And our objective is to gather as much video as possible.
We're conducting what's called benthic surveys.
So we're looking to gather information about what species are present
and where they are and what types of substrate they associate with.
So conducting about 100 meter transects,
Gain is thirty percent.
You see all sorts of cobble hard substrate.
We are 39.2 feet beneath the surface.
What we see out there is these these really
rich and vibrant kelp beds.
There is a lot of understory algal species as well.
Oh, and a nice lingcod right down there.
Oh, yeah. Good eye.
We can go take a peek.
We're able to see that.
And we're also able to see this bull kelp canopy.
We've seen large bull kelp declines in parts of Puget Sound.
And our overarching objective is to better understand
what types of substrate bull kelp attach to and grow on.
So what we're doing for this project is training
A.I. algorithms to know what species are.
So this is a sea star. This is a sea urchin. This is a fish.
Like acrobats.
Yeah.
Yep.
So one of the hypotheses
for why bull kelp doesn't do well in certain areas, there's there's
some preliminary observational evidence that kelp crabs
may be contributing to bull
kelp failure to thrive, essentially.
So that has led to another initiative
that we're hoping to implement in 2023.
And that's to place octopus
pots, octopus homes to attract octopus to Smith Cove.
And they eat the kelp crab.
And we're hoping that that might help the population of kelp.
And this is all part of what the Port sees as part of its responsibility
to be a steward of the environment that we do business in.
And I think this is good for the habitat, but also those of us
that depend on a healthy Puget Sound.
Getting myself into a hot mess of kelp.
And so what we're hoping to get out of this partnership
is just really understanding why kelp are living where they are
and what conditions they're thriving under.
And so potentially we can replicate those in future restoration projects.
That's the most tangled we've been.
We're just getting a clue at the beginning of how important
this species is to the recovery of the Salish Sea at large.
It's clear the health of fish and a wide variety of other
wildlife in Puget Sound are dependent on kelp forests.
Vital research aimed at protecting and encouraging
the growth of these forests will continue far into the future.
In the short term, the Port and the Washington State Department
of Natural Resources plan to start the Octopus Den
project this spring.
Just ahead,
one local company is spending millions to create a rest stop for salmon.
We'll explain as CityStream continues.
The CityStream returns from Elliott Bay Park
with a special program devoted to environmental concerns.
One of the most persistent is a recurring topic summed up with the question:
How can we improve the vitality of the region’s
salmon runs?
Along one of the most industrialized parts of Seattle's Duwamish River,
work is nearing completion on a project years in the making.
As Michael Crowe explains,
one company is taking the lead to create a so-called salmon
rest stop.
In a cascade of noise,
a landscape is reborn.
The setting of Vigor’s Shipyard
on Seattle's Harbor Island is far from untouched wilderness.
Here they work on everything from Navy vessels to the Washington State
Ferries fleet.
But this effort
is not about constructions of steel.
This is about softening a section of riverbank
for some of its oldest residents:
migrating salmon.
So we're dredging here to generate the clean fill
that we're going to place up here and build up the shallow water habitat.
That'll be about two and a half acres in size when it's done.
Alan Sprott is VP of Environmental Services at Vigor
and says when the company bought the site in 2011,
it inherited a legacy of contamination issues dating back to World War One.
Remnants of times when the environment was not always prioritized
in the quest for progress.
But much like in nearby Longfellow Creek,
salmon still returned to the Duwamish River every year to spawn and their young face
new hurdles returning to the sea like destroyed salt marshes
that provide a gradual transition from fresh water to the salty ocean
and food to grow. Vigor agreed to improve that journey as a condition
of a consent decree with federal and state governments and tribes
to settle historic environmental damage to the lower Duwamish.
And so our our solution to that problem was to take a really an underutilized
portion of the shipyard and create the shallow water habitat
that is at the mouth of the Duwamish river.
To that end, they removed an old wooden build way for ship construction
and with it, more than 5000 pilings coated with toxic creosote.
They took out two other piers and have removed silt laden with PCBs
and heavy metals.
With that contamination gone, the clean material
they take from the bottom now will be used to build up the shallow fish habitat.
They've partnered with Salmon nonprofit
Long Live The Kings and University of Washington
researchers for the project.
Salmon are incredibly resilient.
They will figure out a way to try to make a go of it.
And so what we're trying to do, again, is give them
give them a little bit of a boost.
Emily McCartan of Long Live The Kings describes this as a rest stop;
a relatively sheltered section of healthy, functioning estuary
that will let young salmon gather themselves on the way out to sea.
Shallow water will support vegetation, which attracts
insects for salmon to feed on.
So as their migrating out of the river and starting to hit the saltwater
for the first time,
they have a place where they can find food sources, they can gather energy,
and hopefully we'll see that eventually translate
into better survival.
Before work began, researchers sampled water and the diet of salmon
passing through here and across the river at Jack Block Park.
They will continue to monitor after completion to gauge success
and hope this can be the first step in a chain of industrial projects
to assist fish.
When you imagine healthy habitat for salmon, you would imagine
a really pristine flowing river with trees on either side
and, you know, really clean, clear water.
They need all of those things.
What we also know is that Seattle is not going anywhere
and we need to be able to figure out ways that the systems that work for humans
are also working for the environment and for the fish and wildlife
that also depend on them.
We're all interconnected.
Certainly salmon need all the help they can get.
Chinook spawning in the rivers of Puget Sound are listed as threatened
under the Endangered Species Act, and runs have been declining for decades.
You know, the expression goes, you know, the victim died of a thousand small cuts.
You look at Puget Sound as a whole.
You've hardened the shoreline.
We've reduced the grass beds and so forth.
No, we're not going to put Harbor Island back into
mudflats anytime soon.
But the small benefits that we can achieve
will pay off.
Back at Vigor, in-water
work is slated to wrap up in February and they'll also improve stormwater
controls to reduce runoff.
Then researchers will return over time to study how the fish are doing.
Hopefully, there will be more of them to follow.
For me personally, it's a really rewarding project to have been involved with it
from start to finish.
And like I said, it's something that's going to be on the landscape forever.
Long past
anybody that's involved in it is on the planet that will still be here.
Fish returning to a more natural setting in the heart of a forest of steel.
It’ll be exciting. That's what we're looking forward to.
More like what they knew for the many years before humans changed this place.
Hope is not lost when we have the opportunity to say there are salmon here,
we know that if we give them a chance, they will figure out how to survive.
We owe it to them and to ourselves to give them that chance.
Vigor says the
habitat project cost about $28 million dollars
and the accompanying stormwater improvements about $5 million.
Now, as Michael explained, work on the project is slated to wrap up in February
and they hope this will provide a model for integrating natural landscapes
into industrial spaces.
Ahead on CityStream, student divers take the plunge to help purge pollution.
We'll show you next.
Each year, tons of trash wind up in local waterways.
Most of it sits on the bottom,
eventually breaking apart and spreading debris across a wide area.
A dedicated group from the Divers Institute of Technology wanted to help.
So they took the plunge in the battle against pollution.
We scoured the Seattle Channel archives for this story
reported by Brian Callanan.
Can you guys get in the water first?
Doing a trash cleanup today.
We’ll put two
teams of scuba divers alongside the pier.
Take a deep breath
and strap on a helmet.
Class is now in session
for the Divers Institute of Technology.
We know who the first four divers are?
Mike Hemion teaches this crew of students
wrapping up a seven month course on the ins
and outs of scuba and surface air supplied diving.
Well, it's exciting for them to get away from the school.
They get to see different locations, different water.
I think I'm going to take a dip.
And besides having a good time...
Squeeze up on it.
These young divers are getting the real world experience they need
to get ahead.
Obviously, we're all students.
But it does give you a sense of what it's like actually
to be out possibly in the workforce.
When they're out looking for
a job, especially if they're looking at going inland.
They're going to do this every day when they're diving.
But every day doesn't begin to describe what these students are picking up on.
Literally.
Trash!
Tons of it lies at the bottom
of Lake Washington.
Roger. Okay.
We'll bring it over the blue bucket.
Some of it was perhaps just an oversight when it went overboard.
A lot of iPhones, a lot of phones, a lot of cameras.
But Mike's crew can pull almost three tons of trash out of the water
in one session here at the marina near Leschi Park.
You could say they find everything but the kitchen sink.
But they found that, too.
The amount of trash every year.
It's really disgusting. Store.
Still works...
I don't know what other word to use.
It didn't accidentally get there.
This little tiny spot that we're working today.
You saw how much trash you pulled out.
I mean, it speaks for itself.
What's corroding at the bottom of our waterways isn't
just disgusting for divers, but for all of us.
Mike can see the pollution every time he pulls an old tire from the lake.
And when we take it out of the water,
when we're handing it up, we get a sheen on our hands.
And that's obviously not good for the lake or for the animals.
Sad to say,
there's not even a good estimate on how much trash is in Seattle's waterways.
But the silver lining here is
the Divers Institute has volunteered
garbage pickers ready to go year round, eager to get in the water.
I look forward to coming to work when we're doing jobs like this.
We're not just sending them out, you know, having them walk around the bottom.
We're actually doing something productive
and doing something helpful in the environment and to the community.
The Seattle Parks Department is happy to let these volunteers use city docks.
A parks crew will haul this trash away.
Just put one scuba team in at a time.
And Mike is just grateful for the opportunity.
I can't think they're not getting
in the water and cleaning up and I'm happy that the city allows us to.
It does feel really good.
And it's it's nice to be able to help out.
Call it a valuable experience in more ways than one.
For Mckenzie Lowsley,
she found three unique figurines at the bottom of the lake.
They feel pretty heavy, like it might be gold, or at least plated in gold.
But before you go looking for treasure at your local swimming hole,
consider this.
The water here at the end of Leschi Park pier is about 30 feet deep,
which doesn't sound like a lot until you lose something.
Yes, that's me trying to be an intrepid reporter
with a snorkel, mask and an underwater camera on my head.
And that's the camera falling
off my head and going straight to the bottom of the lake.
But, have no fear.
The Divers Institute of Technology is here.
Thank you.
These students give a helping hand that a lot of people on this lake
say is an inspiration.
I appreciate that. It's great.
It makes me want to learn to scuba dive so I can help.
It's an environmental problem that needs plenty of help.
Help that the Divers Institute is glad to provide.
That's right. I just think it's something we should do.
And there's something that you can do to: be careful
around the waters of Seattle, because what you drop in
accidentally or not
makes an impact.
If you'd like to help in the effort to clean up local waterways
or you just want more information about diving courses,
check out this website,
DiversInstitute.edu.
We'll be right back.
Action.
We put together a new episode of ArtZone with Nancy Guppy every week
to tell you about the incredible art that surrounds us all the time.
That's art.
That's art too.
Yeah, sure.
Our zone with Nancy Guppy Fridays at eight on the Seattle Channel or streaming.
Any time online.
I did ask for a butterfly, but, you know,
weiner dog, close enough.
That wraps up the special episode of CityStream from Elliott Bay Park.
If you'd like to watch more of our impressive programing, visit our web site:
Seattlechannel.org and click on feature shows.
I'm Jeff Renner.
Thank you for watching.