Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

    The Copper River snakes across the Alaskan wilderness, cuts through the glacier-clad Wrangell Mountains, tumbles down to tidewater just east of Cordova, and ultimately flows into the seafood department at your local supermarket.
    Or so the spring marketing blitz would have us believe. That, along with the idea that it makes sense to pay 50 bucks or more for a slab of sockeye, or “red” salmon — and twice that for a king. But I don’t believe that either.
    Still, lots of perfectly reasonable people do. Witness the folks lining up at the local supermarkets buy a Copper River red for the weekend barbecue.  My favorite fishmonger, down at the local QFC, can barely keep up with the demand for sockeyes, on sale at $10 a pound. “These are absolutely el primo,” she says breathlessly.
     They know their pitch: The Copper River reds and kings are the year’s first major wild salmon fishery, arriving weeks or months ahead of most. And these fish store up extra fat – good fat, loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, whatever those are – to fuel their long migrations upriver to their spawning grounds. Hence the annual feeding frenzy. 
    But not everybody buys in. Rick Ottman, the seasoned Port Townsend-based fisherman who sells his own Cape Cleare salmon, sighs when he’s asked what he thinks of the Copper Rivers. “It all depends,” he says. “It depends on what they’re eating. It depends where they are caught, and how they are caught and how they are handled. And you can’t see all that at the supermarket.”
    And so it goes every year in late May, when the ads hit the newspapers, trumpeting the arrival of the first Copper River kings and reds.
    All this for a fish that, not all that long ago, died in a gillnet and sloshed around in used crankcase oil for a few days before being stuffed into a tin can and shipped off to England to be processed into fish cakes and fried in batter.
    Whatever else you say about them, Copper River salmon are a case study of how far the Northwest salmon business has come in a couple of decades.
    The Copper is just one of Alaska’s long wilderness rivers that serve as perfect habitat for the fabled wild Pacific salmon. It emerges from the mountains just east of Cordova, the funky coastal fishing village which has been living off salmon for generations.
     It’s best known for its kings and sockeye, which live very different life cycles but which return each spring to the broad, intricate river delta known as the Copper River Flats.
     Fifteen years ago, I crewed with a grizzled fisherman named Tom Copeland, who had been fishing the flats since he was a teenager. On the night before the season opening, we climbed aboard his small fiberglass bowpicker and headed for the flats, bucking into an ugly rainstorm driven by 20-knot winds. Two miserable hours later, we anchored in the lee of one of the grassy sandbars that make up the river delta.
      We fished for several days, spreading that shallow gillnet across one of those braided channels, drifting downstream, retrieving the net, collecting those gorgeous, silvery sockeyes and the occasional king, stowing them on shaved ice, then repeating the process. My fingers ached from picking through nylon gillnet, and from yanking the gills so the fish would quickly bleed to death.
     As we drifted, Tom filled the time with stories of fishermen lost in the treacherous currents, of wild storms screaming off the Gulf of Alaska, of boats that sank from the weight of their sockeye catch, and of perennial price wars between fishermen and canneries.
     For most of a century, the canneries monopolized Alaska salmon. Remote fishing grounds, poor transportation and a red-meat-eating American public left few choices for Alaska fishermen. Whatever they caught, from humpies to kings, went into cans – mostly for export to Europe.
    Down on the flats, those gourmet fish were gillnetted by the thousands, then tossed into the bilge along with the crankcase oil, and eventually sold to a Cordova cannery for a few cents a pound.
    In the 1980s, that began to change. The Japanese invested heavily in Alaska fisheries, and they had no desire to eat wild salmon from a tin can. So, from Ketchikan to the Bering Sea, fishermen learned to treat salmon the way it deserved to be treated. They installed chilled storage tanks, separate from the bilges. They cleaned and bled their fish on board. They learned how to air-freight fresh or frozen fish. These days, a Copper River red can be netted at 6 a.m. on the Flats, and served in Seattle the same evening.
    Seattle marketing guru Jon Rowley took it a step further. He figured out how to use advertising and good public relations to create demand for a good product.
   And the Copper Rivers were ripe for marketing. Alaska has other early salmon fisheries – such as False Pass in the Aleutians. But Rowley figured nobody’s going to shell out $20 a pound for a “False Pass fillet.”
    And thus was born the Copper River Mystique.    But are they the world’s best salmon?
     “The fish is fabulous, and the folklore is even more fabulous,” says Ken Davies at Key City Fish in Port Townsend. “You put a Copper River red alongside a Quinault red, or a Fraser River red, and you won’t know the difference.”
    The Copper River migration is no longer or more challenging than migrations up the Yukon, the Fraser, or our own Columbia River. 
     Some businesses say it's just too  spendy.   The seafood manager at my local Safeway is holding off a few weeks until the prices drop a little. “I’d have to sell the kings for $23 a pound, and that’s too much,” he says.
     That’s my strategy too. I’m ready for my first Alaska salmon, never mind which river. But I can wait a few weeks. Don’t give me a fish. And don’t teach me to fish. Just sell me one at a price that doesn’t require me to dip into the grandkids’ college fund.

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   Yes, there was a Chief Seattle. And, by all reports, he was a very fine fellow indeed. But, no,he did not say: "The earth is our mother."
    In fact, the earth-mother quote is just one of many ecological observations, widely attributed to Chief Seattle, that are pure, unadulterated myth - and relatively recent myth at that. Try these:
   * "We are a part of the earth and it is part of us." Chief Seattle might have believed this, but there is no evidence he ever said it.
   * "Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste." Yuk! No Way. 
   * "I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train." Get serious. Chief Seattle never left Puget Sound, so he never saw a railroad, nor a buffalo - dead or alive.
   For at least a generation, local historians and Native Americans have been trying to correct these and other myths surrounding the native patriarch who gave Seattle its name. But myth dies hard. Especially a myth that serves the ends of a vibrant environmental movement.
   Here, according to Seattle’s Museum of Science and Industry, is what is known: In 1854, an aging Chief Seattle attended a reception for territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens, who was trying to buy Puget Sound lands from the Indians. The chief, who spoke no English, delivered a speech, which supposedly was translated by pioneer Dr. Henry A. Smith. And in 1887, Smith published the speech in a Seattle newspaper.
    "There was a time when our people covered the whole land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea covers its shell-paved floor," Seattle was reported to have said in his native Duwamish language.     "But that time has long since passed away...I will not mourn over our untimely decay, nor reproach my paleface brothers for hastening it, for we too may have been somewhat to blame...
   "Our dead never forget the beautiful world that gave them being. They still love its winding rivers, its great mountains and its sequestered vales, and they ever yearn in tenderest affection over the lonely-hearted living, and often return to visit and comfort them...
   "Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory."
   And so forth. Nice speech. But even that translation is questionable, at best. Smith claimed to speak Duwamish, but it’s a difficult language and he had only been in the Northwest for a year. So his fluency was dubious.

   Still, Smith's has been the authorized version, accepted by local historians from Clarence Bagley to Roger Sale.
   Then, some 20 years ago, comes the "green" version, with Chief Seattle waxing eloquent, and at great length, about the earth mother and the buffalo and contaminating one's bed. Sometimes it is a letter from the Great White Father, who happened to be Franklin Pierce. Sometimes it is a poem.

    In 1974, the speech droned from the mouth of a Chief Seattle statue at the Spokane World's Fair. It has been reprinted hundreds, perhaps thousands of times in books, films posters and brochures, published by groups ranging from Friends of the Earth to the Southern Baptists.
   Skeptics cried foul. In 1975, Janice Krenmayr wrote an article for The Seattle Times, warning that "Chief Seattle must be turning over in his grave." Bill Holm, curator at the Burke Museum, pleaded for environmentalists to step forward and admit they had made it up.
    But myth is more resilient than history. It persists. Where did it come from? It took a West German historian named Rudolph Kaiser to figure that out. A student of the American Indian, Kaiser tracked it down to an environmental film documentary that was aired on national television in 1971. The script had been written by Ted Perry, an East Coast scriptwriter who composed the new version, composed that soupy prose about rotting buffalo, and attributed it all to Chief Seattle.
   So what's the difference? The unauthorized version is a passionate call to ecological responsibility, a plea to halt the slaughter of an animal Chief Seattle had never seen. It reads like it was written by a card-carrying member of the Sierra Club - which it was.
   The original speech was something else again. Chief Seattle was a strong and well-respected leader who helped smooth the transition in Puget Sound from native control to Western control. Unfortunately, he did that by accepting promises of compensation – promises made by people who didn't keep promises very well.
   Chief Seattle valued the land not because it was inherently sacred, but because it was the dwelling place of his ancestors, MOHAI says. His speech was essentially a surrender to the advance of Western civilization, an invasion his people could no longer resist.

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   In a dark corner deep in the bowels of the Seattle Aquarium, a mottled-red tentacle slithers out of a saltwater tank and over the rusty metal edge. Another follows, groping until both tentacles encounter human flesh and wrap themselves around it, clinging with hundreds of rubbery suckers.
   "I'm being slimed!" Roland Anderson chuckles as his hand disappears amid the tentacles. The seasoned biologist grins affectionately as he withdraws his hand, cephalopod suckers popping like bubble wrap as they disengage. The octopus retreats down the aquarium glass, eight tentacles moving with balletlike choreography.
   The feeling appears to be mutual. If this octopus could smile, she would. It looks like love. But rest assured, the relationship is strictly platonic.  Anderson and octopus share a mission: education. Soon this yet-unnamed creature will be moved upstairs to the 900-gallon octagonal tank that greets aquarium visitors just inside the main door. There she will replace longtime resident Ursula, who will be returned to Puget Sound, hopefully to spawn before living out her remaining months.
   With some luck, and perhaps a generous donation or two, The Octopus To Be Named Later will eventually move to even more spacious quarters, a 3,500-gallon megatank that tops Anderson's wish list.
   All this in the interest of acquainting Seattle with a remarkable creature that thrives on our watery doorstep.
   Part of the task is to repair a public image that has suffered immeasurably at the hands of Hollywood. Anderson counts at least 60 movies, ranging from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" to "It Came from Beneath the Sea," which portray monster octopuses or squids devouring people, submarines, even the Golden Gate Bridge.
   This is unfair, Anderson says, but he maintains a healthy sense of humor. And if a monster cephalopod were to appear anywhere, it might as well be here on Puget Sound, which is home to the largest octopus in the world - O. dofleini, better known as the "giant Pacific octopus."
   At about 40 pounds, Ursula is no monster. In the wild, giant Pacifics have been known to exceed 100 pounds, measuring more than 12 feet from the tip of one tentacle to another. Their close cousins, O. rubescens or "red octopuses," are a scaled-down version. They grow to about a half pound and fit comfortably in a teacup. More likely it would be a discarded beer bottle, Anderson says. In fact, yesterday's litter may actually benefit Puget Sound's octopus population, providing habitat on sandy bottoms that might otherwise be unfriendly to homeless cephalopods.
   Large or small, the octopus is a physiological masterpiece - eight tentacles, each of which can operate independently or in graceful symphony with the others, all emerging from beneath a soft, hoodlike mantle topped by two eyes that seem to size up aquarium visitors with profound skepticism.
   They are jet-propelled, ingesting sea water and ejecting it at will through a flexible funnel. They are masters of disguise, instantly flashing from red to orange to brown to white and back again. Unburdened by a skeleton, they are expert contortionists, squeezing through impossibly small spaces. They are strong enough to lift more than their own weight. And they are very, very smart, Anderson emphasizes - at least by invertebrate standards.
   More to the point, his own research at the Seattle Aquarium suggests strongly that your neighborhood octopus has a personality.
   Octopuses are born, appropriately enough, under rocks. That's where mom deposits some 50,000 to 75,000 eggs, each the size of a grain of rice, and guards the nest four to six months until the eggs hatch. Feeding on microscopic-sized plankton, the newly hatched octopus feeds voraciously and grows, gaining as much as 2 percent of its body weight per day. Most will be gobbled up by larger creatures, but the fortunate few who reach maturity will live three to five years.
As adults, they live in rocky dens and crevices, in shipwrecks or discarded tires - any place they can squeeze themselves for protection from predators.
   Their strictly carnivorous diet soon graduates to crabs, clams and fish. "Their feeding strategy is fascinating," Anderson says. "Octopus have a rasping tongue, much like a small file. They use the tongue to drill a pinhole in the shell, and then inject a venomous saliva that paralyzes and kills the organism within seconds. The clam opens automatically, and the saliva loosens the crab meat so the octopus can extract it."
   That venom, in tandem with a parrotlike beak, gives the octopus a nasty bite, he says. In some 20 years working with octopuses, Anderson has not been bitten, but others at the aquarium have. The toxin causes pain and swelling somewhat worse than a bee sting, he says, and may leave a scar. Ironically, the smaller red octopus is more likely to bite than the giants, whom Anderson describes as "pussycats."
   Fortunately, the respectable octopus would much rather bite a crab. And in pursuit of same, the octopus will move from den to den, staying a month or so until it has depleted the local food supply.
   Both species range from Alaska to Northern California, but they are biggest and most plentiful in Puget Sound. "Probably because the Sound is so rich," Anderson says. "Good water quality, lots of crabs, clams, fish."
   In some cases, octopuses will stay in their dens, wait for something tasty to swim by and snag it. But they also hunt, gallumphing along the bottom on all eights until they find a crab and surround it. As adults, they use their jets only in emergencies - to chase meals or avoid becoming one.
   While there is no survey data, Anderson dives frequently and is confident octopus populations are increasing. "We had a couple of divers out there on a dark, cloudy day a few weeks ago, and they were seeing octopus everywhere."
   Researchers believe octopuses spawn only once, Anderson says, but they do it very well. The male uses a specialized tentacle to deliver a "spermatophore," or packet of sperm, to the female, who tucks it away for future reference. When she's ready, she uses the sperm to fertilize her thousands of eggs and deposits them under a rock.
   "For an octopus, there is no such thing as safe sex," Anderson explains. After mating, the male "goes a little crazy," stops eating, abandons its den - an apparent act of chivalry that frees up space for spawning females - and dies. The female guards her brood for several months, manipulating the eggs, using her funnel to keep them clean. She, too, stops eating, her body shrinking until the eggs hatch. . . .
   And then she dies.
   Octopuses have many predators, ranging from large fish to people. The ancient Greeks simply lowered clay pots to known octopus habitat and left them there a day or so; when they hauled them back to the surface, the newly resident octopus became tomorrow's calamari. The strategy still works. Octopuses can be caught with a rubber tire tied to a rope. The aquarium once inherited a healthy 25-pounder caught by a guest from his window at the nearby Edgewater Hotel.
   In the early 1960s, Northwest scuba divers competed in the "World Octopus Wrestling Championships" at Tacoma Narrows, luring giant Pacifics out of their dens and hauling them back to shore for weighing and judging. By the mid-60s, the event fizzled.
    Anderson, however, still prefers to catch them by hand, scuba-diving into known "octopus holes" such as Neah Bay, Hood Canal, Tacoma Narrows. A single shipwreck in Discovery Bay proved to be home to at least eight giant octopuses. Even Elliott Bay is good octopus country, with one specimen residing beneath the aquarium pier.
   Collectors entice them out of their dens, grab a tentacle or two and stuff them into a plastic bag. "You avoid handling them too much, but the fact is they can take a fair amount of handling without doing any harm."
   But be careful; they are escape artists. A 35-pounder at the Seattle Aquarium once lifted the 60-pound lid off its tank and crawled out.
    Anderson has tried keeping an octopus in the main tank. Alas, it rejected frozen herring and other handouts in favor of its live neighbors. Visitors reacted poorly to watching their favorite salmon snatched and devoured by resident O. dofleini. In most respects, however, the octopus adapts readily to living in captivity, Anderson says. Being solitary creatures, they seem perfectly happy in small spaces.
    Happy? Yes, octopuses have emotions. They wear them on all eight sleeves. "Color changes seem to be linked to behavior," he says. "We're investigating how and why, but they seem to have a range of messages: `I'm ready to mate now,' or `Predator coming!' or `Stay away from that female or else!' "
    And then there's: "Leave me alone, I'm taking a nap." With mammallike eyes and brains, the octopus exhibits un-invertebrate behaviors such as sleep. Visit the aquarium on a quiet morning and you're liable to find Ursula or cousin "Biff" (who lives in a smaller tank nearby) snoozing - eyes closed, tentacles limp, body color a murky white. Tap on the glass and the eyes open, tentacles come to life and body color flashes to red.
   "Their intelligence is probably comparable with a white rat," Anderson says. "They can be taught to open jars or to go through a maze."
   The journal Science recently reported Anderson's research on octopus "play." Each of eight octopuses was provided with a white pill bottle. Some ignored it. Some used their funnels to blow it away. Still others shot it around the tank, retrieved it, and shot it again, and again. "Some did this for periods of more than five minutes," Anderson reports. "We see this as repetitive, long-term behavior with no apparent function - except that it feels good, which is the definition of `play.' "
The fact that some played and others didn't suggests octopuses have personalities - social, aggressive, shy and more.
   As a relatively social octopus, Ursula should fare well in the wild, Anderson says, a little wistfully. She will find a willing male and a rock suitable for spawning - very possibly in the murky depths of Elliott Bay. And perhaps it's not completely unscientific to speculate that, when the parting occurs, the sweet sorrow just might be mutual.

---------------------- Octopuses of Puget Sound ------------------------
Puget Sound is home to two species of octopus - O. dofleini (giants), the world's largest, and O. rebescens (reds). Their main difference is size.

Vital statistics:
Giants: as long as 12 feet, from tip to tip. Reds: as long as 12 inches, from tip to tip.
Weight: Giants weight 40-60 pounds, reds about 1/2 pound.
Range: Northern California to Alaska.
Habitat: Rocky bottoms to 500 feet.
Food: Crabs, clams, small fish.
Major predators: Large fish, seals, sharks.
Status: Populations are unknown but believed to be healthy and growing.

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 IN THE BEGINNING, there was a desk and an office somewhere in the WaMu building in downtown Seattle, where sat Bruce Chapman, wracking his fertile brain for good ideas for a better world, not the least of which would be an idea for how to finance his newborn think tank.
   Discovery Institute, he called it. But Chapman knew this would matter only if he discovered that elusive source of funding—not easy in an intellectual outpost like Seattle. But one thing begat another. And behold, 15 years later—approximately seven days in think-tank time—Discovery Institute is well-begotten. Chapman and his colleagues have conjured up many good ideas on issues ranging from speedier border crossings and international trade to underground highways with digital tolls.
   But they are best-known as the headquarters of one especially contentious idea called intelligent design, or simply ID, which says that Charles Darwin blew it and that human life is too darned complex to have evolved, so it must have been designed by somebody smarter than we are.
   To Chapman’s delight, that idea has "taken on a life of its own," he says. Somewhat to his chagrin, it has been embraced with particular zeal by religious fundamentalists, so that godfearing creationists ironically find themselves seeking intellectual guidance from godless Seattle, Land of the Liberal Democrats, home of the unchurched.
   In the past year or two, intelligent design has burst into school boardrooms, courtrooms, the halls of Congress and the White House. Most recently, ID was the issue in a major trial that ended with a federal judge scolding its proponents. It has been the topic of cover stories in journals ranging from the Seattle Weekly to The New York Times. Each seems to ask: How in the world did Seattle and the notoriously and unholy Pacific Northwest become the focal point of a great debate over evolution and creationism?
   The answer: Bruce Chapman.
   And, to a lesser extent, a mild-mannered philosophy professor from an obscure Presbyterian college just across the mountains in Spokane.
   But there is much more to this story. I can bear witness to this. My name is Ross, and I am a recovering Discovery fellow. For a few weeks back in 2001, I worked with Chapman and Co.—not on Darwinism, but on transportation. I also am a preacher’s kid who graduated many years ago from that little Presbyterian college.
In Seattle, merely acknowledging my past association with the institute is like confessing to pedophylia or, worse, to failing to recycle my beer bottles. Bring it up in your favorite smoke-free brewpub and your friend is liable to back off for fear of contracting intellectual bird flu.
   But more of that later. Here’s what I’ve learned about Bruce Chapman and the Origins of Species:
   When I first met Chapman, he was not Chapman. He was PC Circleman, the pseudonym under which he wrote an engaging urban affairs column for the staid editorial pages of the Seattle Times. This was the late ’60s, when I was a cub reporter in the Times newsroom, and Chapman was an articulate, slightly geeky Harvard guy with short hair and black-framed glasses who wrote the kinds of things I yearned to write. We were newcomers to Seattle, each in his own way trying to figure out the chemistry of our adopted home town.
   Seattle in the ’60s and early ’70s was a nice, family-friendly city run by a benevolent clique of aging white businessmen who deliberated in the private confines of the Rainier Club, just up the street from City Hall. The city had well-paying Boeing jobs, good schools, a fine university, an outdoorsy ethic and a housing market where a 20-something could buy a three-bedroom fixer-upper for $15,000.
   "Seattle was a real city, but it was not finished," Chapman recalls today. "It didn’t have the ethnic divisions that plagued Eastern cities. It was open and honest and genuinely bipartisan."
   It was also teetering. Boeing lost its supersonic jetliner deal, went into a tailspin and laid off thousands. There were riots around the university and the Central Area over Vietnam and civil rights. And local government was shaken by police payoff scandals that reached into City Hall.
   The climate was ripe for reform. And Chapman, who had moved here in 1966, was eager to help. While at Harvard, the Illinois native had spent summers at the Eastside home of his college roommate. Meanwhile, he had teamed up with fellow Harvardite George Gilder to found a magazine and a progressive Republican club called the Ripon Society. Later they cowrote a book critical of the GOP’s rightwing shift. "We were pro-civil rights and opposed to the John Birch Society and the radical right," Chapman recalls
Eager to put his ideas into action, Chapman became active in CHECC (Choose and Effective City Council), a group of young upstarts, mostly newcomers, bent on reforming city government. In 1971, barely five years after he moved to Seattle, he won a seat on its City Council.
   So we meet again, Chapman as the young whiz kid at City Hall and yours truly as a Times reporter on the city beat. A radical he was not, but he certainly was a radical departure from Seattle’s established order. While his older colleagues focused on budgets and barking dogs, Chapman and fellow reformer (and Yale grad) John Miller pumped out a steady stream of ideas, small and not-so-small, for arts and parks, for open meetings and political term limits, for preserving Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square. Some of those ideas raised hackles, particularly the proposal to tear down the ugly but functional Alaska Way Viaduct.
   Chapman was never a populist nor charismatic pol. There was always an unspoken air of I-know-something-you-don’t. He didn’t suffer fools well; and Seattle, in turn, had little use for Ivy League intellectuals.
   But something worked. By the mid-’70s, Seattle was America’s hottest city. The ingredients had been here all along, but the turnaround was based in part on progressive leaders with good ideas and plenty of federal dollars to spend on them.
   When the opportunity arose in 1975, Chapman moved on to become secretary of state in Olympia. Ever the contrarian, he focused on eliminating his own job, one of several state offices he thought should not be elective.
   In 1980, we met again. I was covering elections and Chapman was running for governor, this time on a very different platform. The progressive Republicanism was gone replaced by a Reaganesque agenda: Crack down on crime, beef up the military and pass a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution. That campaign never took off, and he lost badly in the primary.
His consolation prize was to move back East, where he joined the new Reagan Administration as director of the $250 million-a-year Census Bureau. "The finest bureaucracy I’ve ever seen," he recalls. "Dedicated, accessible people who are eager to serve."
   The next time we met was in 1983, when I was in D.C., covering Congress, and Chapman had been picked as a domestic policy advisor in the Reagan White House. At a chicken barbeque in his back yard, Chapman allowed that his politics had changed. But so had the nation’s. "I have grown more conservative on social issues," he said then, "as I have become more disillusioned with any aspect of the Great Society, the welfare state, or the endless parade of liberation movements as solutions to any problems."
   The White House provided a heady opportunity to stretch his intellectual muscles. But his ultimate ambition, he said, was to go home, live in the Pike Place Market, and start a think tank.

   It would be nearly a decade before our paths crossed again. I stopped off at the Washington Mutual Building for an interview, and ran into Chapman in the hallway. He was back, realizing his old ambition—sort of. He had become a one-man outpost of the conservative Hudson Institute, a one-man think tank housed in an office on loan from a downtown law firm.
   And there he sat, exploring new ideas and searching for deep pockets to make them pay. In 1991, he landed a few small, private grants that allowed him to split off from Hudson, and reorganize as Discovery—named for the ship George Vancouver sailed into Puget Sound 200 years earlier in 1792.
   It was never easy, Chapman says. Running a think tank is "a hardscrabble existence, even for a liberal, and harder still for conservatives. It seems that people in Washington state imagine that they are not meant to play in the big leagues of public policy development."
   Grant by grant, fellow by fellow, Discovery grew. Former Times writer John Hamer came on board to work on International Seattle, which asked why Seattle hadn’t taken a more global approach to economics. Military expert Philip Gold arrived to write about defense and international terrorism. Paul Schell, a longtime Chapman friend, pushed the Cascadia concept, which promoted regional, cross-boundary solutions to problems.
   The Cascadia idea, in turn, attracted Bruce Agnew, another progressive Republican who contributed his extraordinary ability to assemble diverse groups and consensus solutions—not to mention the occasional federal grant. It was a good partnership, Agnew recalls, but hardly lucrative. "We were dirt poor. I was drawing a salary of $12,000, and taking consulting jobs on the side."
But it was real think tank. Discovery hosted lunchtime debates over topics such as charter schools and international trade—"conservative ideas with a progressive bent," Agnew calls them.
   But Chapman was still looking for that breakout issue. In 1993, he read an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal written by a young Whitworth College professor named Stephen Meyer. Meyer was defending a California biology professor whose job was threatened because he had questioned evolution theory.
   "I saw the issue at first as an example of political correctness run amok," Chapman recalls. "Only later did I see it as an issue in science, and sense the implications."
   Once again, Chapman teamed up with his Harvard soulmate, George Gilder, who had become a neo-conservative superstar. They sat down with Meyer and decided that "Discovery should become the home to the scientific critique of Darwinism, and home as well to intelligent design as an alternative theory."
   Thus was born what they now call the Center for Science and Culture. In the years to come, that work attracted millions of dollars in support from conservative foundations, starting with the Ahmanson family in Southern California.
   Critics argue that intelligent design was a a crass marketing strategy to get the money Chapman needed to support his other habits. But those closest to Chapman credit him with far more integrity.
   "I don’t agree with him on ID," says Bill Ruckelshaus, the widely respected former Reagan Cabinet member who previously served on Discovery’s board. "But Bruce feels very strongly about it, and it didn’t make sense to try to talk him out of it."
   Chapman embraced the meat along with its rich sauce, the idea and the dollars that followed. In addition to helping pay the rent and light bills, ID helped explain his deep disillusionment with the entitlement programs and liberation movements which had divided and "demoralized" American politics—all in the name of social sciences that are rooted in evolution theory, he says.
   "Darwinism is crucial not only to materialism in science, but in our culture, which is why all this is so incendiary," he says. "People care about their world-view. For most real Darwinists, evolution is their religion."
   Whatever the motives, Chapman and Co. were off and running with the idea. They hired staff, bought computers, and rented bigger offices to accommodate them. Intelligent design was on its way to becoming an intellectual jihad in the nation’s culture war. Armed with a growing array of new books, issue papers, videos and DVDs, the Science and Culture campaign openly aspired to drive a "wedge" into the heart of Darwinism, to "defeat materialism" and replace it with intelligent design.
   Seattle barely noticed. To this day, neither daily newspaper has attempted a thorough look at Chapman and his crusade against evolution.
   Neither had I.
   It was the summer of 2001 before I again encountered Chapman. This time he offered me a job. The Cascadia Project had a Gates Foundation grant to come up with ideas for unraveling Seattle’s transportation gridlock. After 30-plus years of newspapers, I was ready to move on.
   Some of my friends were appalled. Hadn’t I heard about, as one put it, the "Flat Earth Society?" Even Chapman felt he should warn me that his Science and Culture efforts might run against Seattle’s sensibilities.
   I wasn’t disturbed. Journalists, like think tanks, should be willing to rethink conventional wisdoms. I’d ruffled feathers with articles that questioned the economics of recycling, the mortgage tax deduction, or of making our kids pay for our Social Security. My work had been attacked by ideologues ranging from Lyndon LaRouche to Rush Limbaugh. Discovery should take on big and unpopular issues, and they don’t get much bigger than the fundamental questions of human origins.
   So, in the summer of 2001, I became a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, which worked out of an odd, corridor-shaped office on the third floor of an older office building overlooking the main post office. Chapman had a private office at one end, Agnew at the other. The rest of us peons sat between them, at metal desks cluttered with paper and PCs. Mine was a few feet from the copy machine, which seemed to run ’round the clock spewing out paper dealing with technology or transportation or, yes, evolution.
  At the other end of the hall were the Science and Culture folks—about six enthusiastic 20-somethings, some of them recent graduates of Whitworth College. They appeared to be very busy at whatever they were doing, and I didn’t ask.
   I did, however, enjoy chatting with Philip Gold, the curmudgeonly and dry-witted military writer who sat nearby. We were entertained by the ID kids’ grumblings toward the dreaded "Darwinists" – a term that seemed to have replace "reds" in the conservative lexicon. Gold offered an ID motto: "God does not play dice with the Universe; He plays Scrabble."
   My amusement was arrested one day in September, when Discovery launched its attack on public television. My first clue was a new banner headline on the website home page: "PBS Evolution: Last Gasp of a Dying Theory."
   Public TV, I learned, was about to air a seven-part documentary series on Darwin and evolution theory, and Discovery didn’t like it. The series failed to report the gaps in Darwin’s theory. Worse still, it failed to mention intelligent design. The Science and Culture folks had counterattacked with a book-length response, educational curricula, canned op-eds and press releases that helped explain why that office copier had been running nonstop. The kids down the hall were most pleased with themselves at having one-upped the misguided Darwinists.
   I probably over-reacted. Go ahead and take on PBS, I argued. Take it on for the interminable fundraising or for those mindless folk music retrospectives. But for a program about evolution?
   And if evolution is a "dying theory," how come it got a seven-part series on TV and intelligent design didn’t? The reality: like it or not, evolution is alive and well, accepted by virtually every legitimate scientist on Earth.
   As it happens, nobody noticed the TV series, let alone Discovery’s critique, because that very week jetliners were crashing into tall buildings and changing everything. A few weeks later, I resigned. If the world is going to hell, I would go out as a journalist, not a think tank fellow.
   Discovery has done just fine without me. Agnew and the Cascadia Project attracted a $9 million Gates grant, so that regionalism is no longer the poor stepsister to anti-Darwinism. Agnew and Chapman are providing a much-needed, independent forum where regional solutions can be promoted without political consequences. There have been conferences on freight rail and how to separate it from passenger rail, on how to use electronic tolls to pay for new highways. And Cascadia gets credit for pushing a variation on Chapman’s 30-year-old idea to tear down the Alaska Way viaduct.
   ID, however, gets most of the attention. The last time I saw Chapman was in December, when he was anxiously awaiting word from Pennsylvania. In the previous few weeks, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones had presided over a lawsuit challenging a small-town school board that had decided to include intelligent design in its science curriculum. The board members were old-school creationists, guided not by Discovery but by the Book of Genesis, he said. Chapman and others had pleaded with the school board to back off.
   However, during the two-week trial, two Discovery fellows testified on behalf of intelligent design.
   On December 20, the churchgoing judge, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a scalding decision, declaring that ID "is a religious view, a mere re-labeling of creationism, and not a scientific theory." So the school board’s edict violated the required separation of church and state.
   Discovery has responded with a lengthy critique of the ruling.
But Judge Jones reflected the opinion of most scientists, says Dr. Keith Benson, who taught history of science at the University of Washington for some 20 years. Chapman’s critique of materialism—the view that every phenomenon in the natural world can be explained by natural forces— is fair grounds for a philosophical discussion, Benson says,. "But it was not Darwin who started the movement toward materialism." he says. "That began with Isaac Newton. It happened first in astronomy and physics, and Darwin applied it to biology."
   Yes, there are gaps in evolution theory, he adds. In Origin of Species, Darwin wrote about the problems with his own theory. "There are gaps in every scientific theory. Physicists can’t fully explain gravity, and they aren’t sitting around smoking cigars because it’s all wrapped up."
   As a PhD science historian, Benson is persuasive. He learned his science well as an undergraduate biology student at Whitworth, the same little college that sprung Stephen Meyer and much of the ID staff. And Benson’s biology professors taught evolution.
Four decades later, it still does.
   "We teach the best biology we know," says Dr. Lee Anne Chaney, a PhD biologist who has taught there for 25 years. "And that is why intelligent design is not in our curriculum. That’s not because we don’t think God created the universe. My personal belief is that God is wise enough to make a world that changes over time, and that is infinitely more complex than we can ever grasp completely. But we don’t teach Creation as science, and ID is not science because it does not lend itself to rigid experimentation."

   I am not a scientist, nor a philosopher; I’m not particularly religious, nor am I hostile to religion. For these and other reasons, nobody has asked my advice on all this. But here it is anyhow:
   To Chapman and friends: Go for it. Question authority, including scientists. Keep looking for flaws in evolution theory. That’s what think tanks are supposed to do.
   But dump the wedge strategy, and spare the public schools. They have plenty to worry about without outsiders telling them how to teach biology. Besides, the Dover trial proves that it’s dubious strategy to generate an important discussion and hand it over to small-town school boards and lawyers.
   And give up the argument that ID is not a religious undertaking. That argument may pass the smirk test, because Chapman and friends can say it without smirking. But it flunks the duck test: Intelligent design walks and quacks like religion. And every ID adherent I’ve encountered turns out to be a sincere, thoughtful Christian, which requires no apology—even in Seattle.
   To the rest of the world: Cool it. Wedge strategy or no, intelligent design is not a threat to science as we know it. The movement consists of a small cadre of smart, sincere people like Chapman; and a few nice, dedicated kids armed with a website, some slick videos and a very busy photocopy machine. This also might describe Greenpeace, except Greenpeace it has more members and more money.
   ID should not be foisted on our schools. But, if my kids’ biology teacher had decided to take a few minutes to teach the controversy, I would hope they would have stayed awake, taken notes, and brought it home to the dinner table: Why is it that scientists subscribe to Darwin, but the majority of Americans don’t? Discuss.
   We live in a big, open country accustomed to grappling with big, open questions. There is plenty of room for Darwin and Creationism and intelligent design. Most of us are too busy living our lives to spend much time and energy on it. And, when we do, it all swirls into an intellectual mud....
   Which, according to Christianity and most religions in the world, is what we were made of in the beginning.

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JAWS, PUGET SOUND STYLE. SIXGILL SHARK
 
 
   Light and color wane rapidly in the depths of Puget Sound. At 30 feet beneath the surface, the reds and yellows disappear, followed by the greens and blues. At 90 feet, roughly the width of Water Street, the world dims to murky shades of gray and black.
   This is where one enters the realm of the sixgill shark.
   Don Zahn, a nuclear operator from Richland, has been diving for many years, so he knew what to expect last fall when he and a friend stepped off a charter dive boat in Hood Canal, near Brinnon, and descended slowly down a steep, submarine ridge. They planned a deep, "technical dive," using a special mix of compressed air, waterproof cameras and lights.
   At 70 feet, they were looking for octopus, wolf eel and giant lingcod that prefer those depths. At 90 feet, they spotted a dark figure moving slowly through the murk. An enormous lingcod?
   The fish turned, and Zahn switched on his camera lights, transforming the grayness into a mini football stadium. And he nearly swallowed his regulator. He was face-to-face, or jaw-to-Jaws, with a seven-foot shark.
    He acknowledges he was shocked. But he had the presence of mind to keep his camera running -- even when the creature swam between the two divers.
  "He never did anything threatening," Zahn says. "He was moving pretty slowly, almost casual. I think he was oblivious to us."
    "I’d heard they were around," he adds. "But I never expected to see one."
   Nobody does. The waters around here are notoriously cold, but they’re supposed to be home to familiar, even romantic critters -- silvery salmon and crowd-pleasing orcas. The only sharks we see are those pesky dogfish, the miniature great whites that show up on hooks intended for prized kings and cohos.
   But in recent years, divers and scientists have been probing deeper into the sound. And they’re learning that Puget Sound is also home to hundreds and probably thousands of sixgill sharks, a 200-million-year-old species that resembles its more notorious cousins.
   Based on the experience of Zahn and other divers, sixgills have no appetite for people. But they certainly have the equipment to do some damage -- big spooky eyes, gaping jaws with jagged teeth and a streamlined torso reputed to reach the lengths of automobiles.
   Don Coleman, who runs a dive charter boat out of Pleasant Harbor, near Brinnon, counted at least eight different sixgill sightings by divers from his boat last year. Local dive shop operator Mark Peil and a buddy encountered one on a night dive in Discovery Bay. Yet another seven-footer washed up on a Port Townsend beach and was turned over to the Seattle Aquarium, which still keeps the carcass in its freezer.
   Sixgills are rarely seen because they are deepwater sharks accustomed to darkness. Divers find them -- or are found -- in deep water such as Hood Canal and Discovery Bay, or in shallower depths on night dives, when the sharks come up to feed.
F   or years, sixgill sharks were the stuff of local legends -- Puget Sound’s answer to the Loch Ness Monster. A generation ago, an eccentric Seattle reporter named John O’Ryan talked the Post-Intelligencer into sending him out to catch one. For days, he floated around the sound in a small boat equipped with fishing gear, sending back reports on his quest. But nary a nibble.
   In the summer of 2000, however, an amateur fisherman hooked a big sixgill while night-fishing from a West Seattle pier. A few days later, he caught another one.
   Biologists were alarmed. Shark populations around the world have been depleted by over-fishing, and nobody wanted to see it happen here. So the state acted quickly to prohibit fishing for them. And that ban continues.
   But some biologists reasoned that, if two sixgills were hooked in the same place within a week, there could be a heck of a lot of them out there.
   So the Seattle Aquarium teamed up with state and federal agencies to find out. Using rebar and cable, scientists assembled a crude, four-by- two-foot shark-feeding station on the seabottom beneath the aquarium, and hooked up a time-lapse video system.   For bait, they used frozen clumps of fresh and decayed salmon, dogfish and bits of octopus. Then they waited.
   But not for long. The station was an immediate success, with nightly visits from sixgill sharks. They kept coming even when researchers went down to greet them.
   "Mostly we see six and seven-footers," says aquarium biologist Jeff Christiansen. "But we see the occasional big guy -- 10 to 12 feet."
   Meanwhile, researchers chartered a fishing boat and began catching sharks on longline gear -- miles of line with baited hooks strewn along the bottom of the sound. One by one, they caught more than 200 sixgills, keeping a few for analysis, while the others were measured, equipped with numbered tags attached to their dorsal fins, and released back to the sea.
   Gradually, the research is adding to our limited knowledge of an amazingly resilient creature which has been swimming the world’s oceans for some 200 million years.
   Shawn Larson, a curator at the Seattle aquarium, describes the bluntnose sixgill shark, Hexanchus griseus, as a slow-growing, long-lived species which is found in both warm and temperate oceans around the globe. They’re big -- up to 16 feet, with undocumented reports of specimens well over 20 feet. Males mature at about nine feet and females at about 13 feet.
   But most of the sharks encountered here are somewhat smaller, about seven to 11 feet, and there are few mature males. This, Larson says, suggests that Puget Sound may be a nursery area for young sixgills, which migrate out to the ocean as they mature.
So it’s safe to assume that we have some mighty big critters swimming past Port Townsend beaches on their way to who-knows-where.
   While they seem to be more docile than great whites, they actually have bigger jaws, Larson reports. Appetite-wise, they appear to be "opportunists," eating fish, octopus, dead or injured seals, whatever is available. "Just about everything has been found in their stomachs," she adds.
  Except people, that is. "They certainly could attack a human, but we’re probably outside their prey range," Larson says.
   They also have a different feeding strategy. While great whites "strike fast," sixgills use more stealth, biting and sawing their prey with serrated teeth.
   Based on analysis of tissue samples, scientists believe the sharks in Puget Sound are related -- an extended family estimated at about 8,000 adult sharks. That could be the adult population for Puget Sound, or for a larger area. It is also a very tentative estimate, and probably a conservative one, she adds.
   So the research continues. But we can be assured of one thing: Every time we leave the docks of our fair port, we are passing within a few feet of some king-sized toothy critters who are far less impressed with us than we are with them.

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April Weather: All of the Above

These days, your typical five-day weather forecast is about as much help as consulting your daily horoscope, which is to say none whatsoever.
Take this week: Rain. Partly cloudy. Chance rain. Mostly cloudy. Rain likely. Sun breaks. Showers.... Each daily forecast has that little picture of a shower and a cloud with the sun peaking out from behind. Translation: Expect any or all the above. Each should be followed by a question mark.
For serious sailors, this works fine. Go ahead and raise sails; if you don’t have some wind and sun, just wait a few minutes.
But the rest of us are left to wonder why we pay all those smart people down in Seattle to offer the same forecast, day after variable day.
Mike McFarland understands. He’s one of those smart people who works at the National Weather Service in the city. He lives in the infamous Snohomish County “convergence zone,” and frequently spends time at his parents’ home in Cape George, gazing across Discovery Bay and trying to unravel the meteorological mysteries in this fickle corner of the atmosphere.
And these days, he confesses it’s mostly guesswork. December forecasts are pretty reliable – think wind and rain, he says. Summer forecasting is even easier.
But April? “Not so good,” he says, a little apologetically. “”We do pretty well forecasting major floods, and a fair job of gale warnings. But everything else is, well, not very skillful.”
McFarland was the guest speaker recently at the Port Townsend Yacht Club, where more than 100 of us mariner types showed up for an inside look at how the weather guys do what they do.
The challenge around here, he explains, is too much geography – mountains and bays and a very large ocean, he says. If he were doing the weather in, say, Kansas City, life would be much simpler.
Look for yourself. Go to www.weather.gov, the National Weather Service site; or www.atmos.washington.edu, the University of Washington’s. You’ll find data from weather satellites, from weather balloons and ocean buoys, computer models and radar data. Some of it is useful, some isn’t. Radar, for example, is almost useless, McFarland says – too many mountains in the way.
“Everything we use is now on the Internet,” he says. The TV guys use the same data as he does, except it’s prepackaged with those whizbang graphics.
In the Northwest, the most useful tool is that familiar weather map, with its contoured lines, or “gradients,” showing relative changes in atmospheric pressure. When those gradients are widely separated across the map, things stay stable; when they’re close together, watch out. And in April, they’re usually bunched up “like spagetti,” he says.
Then there’s the jet stream across the Pacific. “What matters is the strength of jet stream, where it curves and how sharply,” he says. “A slight change may divert a storm we thought was headed for Forks, and push it up to the Queen Charlottes.”
Those are the times that NOAA predicts 10-knot northerlies in Admiralty Inlet, and they turn out to be 15-knot southerlies, or vice versa.
It’s all so variable and inconclusive that, “after any official forecast, you can look out your window and improve on it,” McFarland says.
Take fog, for example, which can’t be predicted or even detected by technology. “Our fog forecasts are terrible.”
That’s why the weather guys supplement all their data with live information from volunteer spotters, amateurs who read their own gauges, then look out their windows and call the Weather Service to report what they’re seeing – like fog.
The service also makes good use of the state ferries, each of which carries automated weather equipment. “At first, the Port Townsend-Keystone run was giving us terrible data,” he says. “Turns out the equipment wasn’t allowing for the speed of the boat.”
So it all comes down to data, computer models and experience, he says. Human beings can improve somewhat on the computer models – but not much.
Here in Port Townsend, there is some consolation in the famous rain shadow, he says. Less rain, more sun. “You picked the right place to live.”

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The Pigeon (Guillemot) Lady of Discovery Bay

OK, pigeon guillemots ain’t sexy. No elegant plumage, no exotic mating ritual, no operatic song. They’re middling-sized and unobtrusive, dressed in basic black, except for a patch of white on the wings and bright red feet that they rarely show off.
But what they lack in charisma, guillemots make up for in hometown loyalty and character. In the winter, while many of their feathered cousins wing off to greener pastures, our trusty guillemots stay right here, returning faithfully year after year to the same mates and the same nests, making their livings in local waters.
We see them patrolling in small groups near the shore, especially in Discovery Bay, around Admiralty Inlet or out along the strait. They’ll drift with seeming nonchalance until, as if alerted by sonar, each bird tips backward, lifts its wings slightly, then darts beneath the surface, leaving barely a ripple behind.
I’ve watched them for years, but most of what I know I learned just last month from Lee Robinson, who was featured speaker at a meeting of the local Admiralty Audubon Society. A trained wildlife biologist who now lives on Bainbridge Island, Robinson has been studying guillemots since her childhood on the beach at Diamond Point.
“They’re abundant and easy to study,” she explained. “And once you start working with them, you learn they have personality – those doe-brown eyes and marvelous red feet.”
Robinson grew up gazing across Discovery Bay at the seabirds and the hazy, dream-like profile of Protection Island, the federal wildlife refuge which is a strictly-protected nesting site for exotic puffins and rhinoceros auklets, as well as the more prosaic gulls and guillemots. Later, she adopted the Discovery Bay guillemots as a subject for her masters thesis, then worked as a federal biologist for some years before coming home to build her own nest.
Finally, in the early 1990s, Robinson gained access to Protection Island to begin her volunteer mission, gathering data from the region’s largest guillemot population for the state’s Puget Sound Ambient Monitoring Program.
Each summer, she resumes her work, driving up most weekends to her parents’ home at Diamond Point, launching a tiny fiberglass fishing boat from the beach for the quick run out to the island. Sometimes, she’s accompanied by her daughters, both of whom have “caught the birding bug,” she says. But often it’s just Robinson and her guillemots.
Over 13 summers of work, Robinson says she has captured, banded and released some 560 birds and recaptured about 25 percent of them – a very successful rate of recovery, she says. Along the way, she’s become, well, the pigeon guillemot lady of Discovery Bay.
Guillemots live and nest all around the sound and straits, but they’re especially abundant along the steep shores and driftwood beaches of Jefferson County. Usually, they nest in bluffs, but out at Protection Island they lay their eggs amid the driftwood on the long sand spit that extends eastward from the island cliffs.
That’s where Robinson works. Some time in April, she distributes 40 wooden boxes, custom-made for guillemots. In June, the birds take up residence and lay their eggs – usually two of the black-on-white speckled eggs slightly larger than chicken eggs.
Mostly, the birds nest directly on the ground, just above the high tideline, she says. But they’re very happy to get the boxes, which are built to discourage otters and other predators.
“One year, all but one of the boxes was occupied,” Robinson says. “A few years ago, I showed up late and the birds were waddling around, waiting for me.”
Males and females share egg-care duties, which provides Robinson opportunities to capture and mark birds – two bands per leg – for later data gathering.
The adults don’t like all that handling, she says. They use their long, narrow beaks to peck at her hands. She’s tried work gloves and bicycle gloves, but what works best is her grandmother’s old, white cotton “church gloves,” which hold up well to the pecking and pooping alike.
Most of her work goes on in daylight. But once in a while, Robinson comes out for an overnight, checking the boxes in darkness, sleeping in the crude research cabin at the foot of the bluff.
The first chicks hatch around July 1, hacking their way out of the shells and spilling out as tiny balls of black fluff weighing about an ounce “and way too cute,” Robinson says.
At this stage, the young can be held, weighed and studied – a task favored by Robinson’s daughters.
The parent birds immediately go to work, diving for small fish and bringing them back to the young. The chicks grow quickly, tripling their weight in a week, growing primary feathers and losing their down. In the fourth week, they set off from the nest, caked in their own excrement and tumbling down the beach to the water to begin swimming and fishing.
By September 1, most are gone – on their own. But many return year after year as adults to nest in Robinson’s boxes, testimony to good design.
Robinson’s mission is to track wildlife populations, and generally the guillemots seem to be doing well, she says. This year, the state estimates more than 16,000 adults living around Puget Sound – more than 2,000 of them nesting on Protection Island.
But populations fluctuate. Productivity – the rate of successful reproduction – dropped in 1998, which was an El Nino year. And a number of chicks died in 2003.
The birds face any number of risks, she says. Hot spells, especially in July, can be hard on newborns. Otters and eagles may feed on the young. And thousands of glaucous-winged gulls nest there, some of them just inches from the guillemots. Robinson’s teen-aged daughter, Karen, has begun studying that problem as a school project.
But those hearty pigeon guillemots persist, patrolling our local shores year-round, entertaining beachcombers and boaters, and providing good data and good news for at least one growing family of bird-lovin’ biologists.

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Puget Sound in bloom: Invasion of the killer ‘corn flakes’

Down at the Marine Science Center at Point Wilson, Kristin Wilkinson’s normal job is to guide visitors into the silent, whimsical world of plankton.
Kids love to watch her dip an 18-inch plankton net into the bay alongside the dock, carry her jar of seawater back to the lab, then apply a couple of drops to a glass slide. From there, she leads her visitors down the rabbit hole into a microscopic Wonderland.
Magnified a hundred times or so, that drop of water reveals a strange and
marvelous micro-universe of tiny plants and animals in every imaginable shape and color. There are bug-like critters with spindly antennae, twisted chains of golden-brown diatoms, miniature shrimp-like crustaceans with wriggling tails, elegant necklaces of colorful dinoflagellates...
This microscopic zoo is a reminder that the waters off Puget Sound are some of the most productive on earth, teeming with life that we rarely see, but which serves as the basis for the marine food web.
These days, however, Kristin Wilkinson’s task is more sobering. An Americorps volunteer with a degree in marine biology, she finds herself doing sentry duty, on the lookout for a biological invasion of microscopic fish-killers.
Scientists around the region are tracking a massive bloom of a tiny, single-celled algae they call Heterosigma. In the past week, the infestations – scientists call them “harmful blooms” – have been detected at Port Angeles, where water samples showed concentrations of more than 2.5 million cells per liter of seawater. Similar blooms were found as far north as Cypress Island, where the algae is believed to have killed thousands of fish in net pens.
Anne Murphy, the science center director, says her staff is busy collecting and analyzing water samples from Port Townsend piers and from Mystery Bay. A volunteer is doing daily flyovers, looking for telltale bands of rust-brown water that signal something is amiss.
As of the weekend, the main blooms had not rounded the corner into Admiralty Inlet. But scientists fear that this week’s powerful tides could help wash the problem into Port Townsend’s lap.
“So far so good, but it’s not over until it’s over,” says Dr. Jack Rensel, a contract scientist and plankton expert who works with state and federal officials to monitor what they call “harmful blooms.”
“Everything hinges on the weather and the tides,” he said. “Some cloudy, windy weather certainly would help.”
Heterosigma is a single-celled organism, typically about 25 microns, or 1/1000 if an inch wide. Seen through Wilkinson’s microscope, it’s quite splendid, an ovoid of mottled shades of brown and gold, with two long, hair-like appendages that whip the water to provide propulsion. With no cell wall, each organism adopts a slightly different shape, giving it the rumpled texture that one prominent biologist compares to an elegant “corn flake.”
Like most plankton, Heterosigma winters in a state of semihibernation, then comes to life in the spring, when it whips those tiny flagella and swims toward the surface. There it lives a life not unlike a garden shrub, collecting nutrients and photosynthesizing them with chlorophyll.
In a normal year, Heterosigma poses no problem – not to humans, nor to sealife. Just another member of the planktonic family.
But under certain conditions, usually in the long warm days of late June and early July, these critters go downright nuts. Those cells multiply at a phenomenal rate, reaching concentrations that kill fish – especially salmon and other fish confined in net pens or wild fish in shallow water such as river mouths and long inlets such as Hood Canal.
This is nobody’s fault, Rensel says. . The outbreaks appear to be completely natural, not caused by pollution or any other human activity.
And scientists aren’t quite sure how it kills fish, he says. “It’s not the classic toxin, but it produces hydrogen peroxide that affects the fishes’ gills and shuts down their respiration.”
Rensel and other scientists were not completely surprised by this year’s Heterosigma bloom. Blame it on nice weather. Unusually warm, calm weather in late June, and a strong freshwater run-off from Northwest rivers, especially the Fraser River south of Vancouver, BC., created conditions just right for an algae bloom.
Those conditions lead to “stratification” – plenty of ocean nutrients for food, and a layer of less-salty water at the surface, which breeds microscopic plankton. Cloudy, windy weather help mix local waters and break up any harmful blooms.
Heterosigma blooms have been observed around Puget Sound for at least 40 years. There was a major outbreak around Lummi Island in the late 1960s, fish kills in Puget Sound in 1989, 1991 and 1997.
Fisheries research or commercial net pens are especially vulnerable, because they are confined near the surface along with the blooms. “Fish farmers are constantly watching the water,” Rensel says. “They learn how to spot these blooms from the air.”
As of last weekend, the blooms around Cypress Island had subsided, he says. But Puget Sound will remain at risk for a while – or until the area gets some clouds and wind to break up those trillions of tiny corn flakes.
Fortunately, Heterosigma’s many evolutionary cousins will remain. Puget Sound’s plankton explodes in the spring, clouding the water and fueling the complex food web that supports everything from herring and candlefish to Orca whales and sixgill sharks.
That bloom lingers through the summer and well into the fall. Later this month, the full moon will wane and local kayakers will take to the water at night, each paddle stroke triggering a fireworks show of luminescent critters.
And down at the Marine Science Center, Kristin Wilkinson and friends can resume their normal tours into Wonderland.

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Scientists and Scribes: Strange bedfellows

THAT faint gurgling sound you hear wafting across Seattle this weekend is the Sound of Science, generated in the grey matter of some 5,000 biologists, geologists and other-ologists who have convened downtown.
The giant sucking sound, on the other hand, can be attributed to some 600 journalists who have converged upon the same meeting place, there to roam about in desperate search of something new and startling to report.
This is a curious relationship. The scientists are here to exchange notes on what they've learned in the last year or so. The journalists are here to eavesdrop, glean something newsworthy and tell the rest of the world.
When science and journalism mix, the result is a volatile chemistry. Scientists are deeply suspicious of journalists; they believe we have little real understanding for what they do, and tend to fracture it in the reporting.
We reporters are equally wary of scientists, whom we suspect spend many years in graduate school learning how to obfuscate and torture the English language.
But we need each other, which is why everybody is trying to get along down at the convention center.
At bottom, we both seek Truth. Our mission is to increase humanity's understanding of the world. And we all feel vaguely underappreciated and not-so-vaguely underpaid for our efforts.
The similarities end there.
We ask different questions. Scientists ask: "What is this and how does it work?" Journalists ask: "So what and why does this matter?"
This gets us both in trouble - particularly when we deal with issues such as risk. Solid research on things like cancer becomes distorted when our reports stretch the results into Page One stories.
Scientists are specialists who know a lot about a few things. Journalists are generalists who know a little about a lot of things. I went to college in the '60s, studied literature and politics and the social sciences. I negotiated a "C" in college biology only by promising to never again darken the door of my professor's classroom.
Thirty years later, I've developed a belated respect for science, and even a few street smarts. In my next life, I plan to be a marine biologist. Meanwhile, I have to constantly remind myself of the difference between "induction" and "deduction."
To scientists, truth is determined only by data derived from repeated experiments. Their bible is the scientific method, an orderly process of inquiry that requires maximum precision and caution. Their findings are tentative and qualified; they don't believe there is a last word on anything.
The reporter's scripture is the democratic process and especially the First Amendment. We value freedom of speech and an open exchange of ideas that has little to do with precision. We mix science with politics and business. We try to track the flow of money, and speculate about why people do what.
We believe truth can emerge from conflict. If we depict both sides of an issue, truth will ultimately win out. This is a concept that baffles most scientists.
Most important, journalists are communicators. We believe knowledge and ideas are valuable only to the extent they are communicated. To do that, we resort to storytelling and anecdotal evidence that frequently fracture the scientific method. If something is lost in the retelling, too bad.
Most scientists are loners. They work alone, conduct their experiments, and eventually submit their findings to other scientists for review - usually in a jargon unintelligible to others.
This is a potentially fatal flaw. Most scientists still work for the government - at universities or research institutions such as the marine labs at Sand Point. These days, their jobs and their work are in real jeopardy. Congress already has slashed spending on science, and the pending crisis in Medicare and other programs creates budget pressures to cut even more.
"Science can only be funded if the electorate and their representatives remain convinced of its value and contribution," writes Dr. Neal Lane, director of the National Science Foundation, who is attending the Seattle convention.
Reporters are obligated to increase their understanding of the scientific method, of statistics and risk management. Ignorance is a weak defense, at best. We need to resist the impulse to turn tentative research findings into Page One blockbusters.
But scientists are equally ill-served by their instincts to hibernate, to operate behind closed doors, and to speak and write in terms understandable only to other scientists. That approach plays directly into the hands of the budget-cutters, who would rather not know what society is losing.
For all our ill-conceived "cure for cancer" stories, scientists are equally guilty of poor risk management when they use the risk of miscommunication as an excuse to not communicate at all.

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A Sardinian feast in Disco Bay

   Thanksgiving came early out on Discovery Bay, where hungry carnivores have been feasting for more than a month.
   It started in mid-October, when the sea began to stir and simmer in Discovery Bay just outside the Cape George Marina. A couple days later, it was frothing with swarms of squawking gulls and cormorants, harbor seals and sea lions. A school of porpoise showed up, dancing merrily as they gorged themselves. There were unconfirmed reports of a couple of orcas joining in on the fun.
   Obviously, something mighty tasty and nutritious had appeared on the biological menu. But exactly what?
   Jack Schirting, a retired history professor and Cape George’s angler extraordinaire, was intrigued. Over a few days, he watched the feeding frenzy move into the shallow marina itself, where untold thousands of silvery 8-to10-inch fish schooled under and around the docks, desperately trying to evade their predators..
   Herring, he thought. The herring are back.
   Discovery Bay was once the home to one of Puget Sound’s richest runs of spawning herring. But the run diminished and virtually disappeared in the 1990s.
But these fish had dark spots and a deeply-forked tail – very unherringlike. Puzzled, Schirting grabbed a light rod and some treble hooks, snagged a few fish, studied them and took them over the Port Townsend Marine Science Center for identification. Folks there seemed to agree: Those fish are Pacific sardines.
    Sardines! In Puget Sound?
   Biologically speaking, herring and sardines are closely related. But herring gravitate toward colder, northern waters from here to Alaska. Sardines, known to scientists as sardinops sagax, prefer warmer climes – the coastal waters of central and southern California and the Baja Peninsula. These are the fish that made Monterey’s Cannery Row famous – until the sardines all but disappeared some 60 years ago.
   Like herring, sardines are a schooling fish, six to 12 inches long, silvery with a blue or green tint to the scales. They spawn in warm waters, a female producing up to 200,000 eggs. And they are believed to live up to 12 years.
   Recently they’ve been making a comeback. Scientists estimate that more than 1 million tons – several billion fish – now swim up and down the West Coast.
And it turns out that some of them – perhaps 10 percent – migrate north to feed in the chilly, nutrient-rich waters off Vancouver Island. Canadians have noted their seasonal visits for some years – but always in coastal areas, not inland
   Their arrival in Discovery Bay came as a surprise to state biologists. Dan Penttila, a state fisheries biologist who monitors local waters, reports no sign of the species in annual surveys around sardinian biology was of little interest down on the docks at Cape George, where word spread and the local pensioners started showing up at the marina with their rods and plastic buckets, snagging sardines on unbaited hooks.
   Catching them was easy – like, well, shootin’ fish in a barrel. But then what? What does one do with a fresh sardine?
   One fisherman soaked them for a while, then fried them like trout. Not bad, he reported. Another was pickling them.
   And Schirting? He used them for crab bait.

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      A hard-won tugboat reported for winter duty this week at Neah Bay, where the vessel stands ready to keep wayward oil tankers from running aground on Washington's coast.  The Barbara Foss gets her name from the Seattle tugboat dynasty that owns it. But if boats were named on the basis of tenacity rather than sentiment, this tug would have to be the Fred Felleman.
    It may have been the power of argument, or political pressure. Maybe it had to do with getting Felleman off somebody's case. But the word along the Seattle waterfront is that this 119-foot tugboat is on duty today, at a cost to federal taxpayers of more than $350,000 a month, because of Felleman.
    The only voice that disagrees is that of Felleman himself, who shares credit with other environmental groups and particularly the Makah Tribe, which also campaigned for the tug.
And, even as the tugboat moors at Neah Bay in Clallam County, despite opposition from the local shipping industry and skepticism from the U.S. Coast Guard, the scientist-turned-advocate grumbles that this tug is not enough.
    "I suppose something is better than nothing," he says, his voice brittle with tension. "But we're testing what the shipping industry wants to prove, which is that a relatively small tug will suffice."
There is another tug, bigger and better, that should be at Neah Bay, he says. And anybody who disagrees "is a fool."
   The long voyage to Neah Bay is a glimpse at the power of Washington's environmental movement and how a single-minded and tireless individual can marshal that power.
The issue dates back at least to 1989, when the oil tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude into Alaska's Prince William Sound. That spill re-charged environmentalists across the country, including Felleman.
    A native New Yorker, Felleman describes himself as an "aquatic personality" who yearned to be a marine scientist. At the University of Michigan, he studied orcas long before he ever saw one. Then he moved to Seattle, where he began photographing whales while studying them, and eventually earned a master's degree in fisheries from the University of Washington.  "Those were the best years, when I was actually spending time on the water," he says, "instead of the last 10 years, when I've been in offices talking to bureaucrats."
    The more he learned about local waters, the more he worried about their future. Washington had an active environmental movement, he says, but it was focused largely on trees and forests. Nobody was going to bat for the marine ecosystem.
    "I'd look through my camera lens at a whale, and I'd see a tanker steaming past in the background, and I wondered, `What's that doing here?' "
    Felleman first took on the oil industry by lobbying full time for a marine sanctuary on the Olympic coastline. Five years later, in 1994, the sanctuary was a reality - because, in part, of Felleman's work. "I was a pretty good photographer, but I was predisposed to advocate," he says. "That was what was different about me."
   The Exxon Valdez provided something to advocate. Within weeks after the spill, two other Exxon tankers lost power near the Washington coast. Neither went aground and neither spilled any oil, but people were alarmed.
   Fueled by the Valdez spill, the state passed legislation that required escort tugs for oil tankers from Port Angeles to Puget Sound refineries. But tankers were still left unescorted along the outside coast and 70 miles up the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
    "Washington is the only U.S. port where environmental protection begins 70 miles inland," Felleman argues. "We have less protection, and more to protect."
     That includes Cape Flattery, where notoriously rough seas pound a coastline relatively unspoiled by development - an environmental catastrophe waiting to happen, he says. In 1994, a citizens committee set up under the state oil-spill law agreed. It called for a full-time rescue tug at Neah Bay, capable of keeping tankers and other ships off the rocks.
   The shipping industry opposed the full-time tug, arguing it would be too expensive. "It doesn't make sense to spend $4 million to $6 million per year on a tug at Neah Bay when we have an existing fleet of tugs that can be used to respond to a wide range of events," says Harry Hutchins, director of the Puget Sound Steamship Operators, a maritime-trade group based in Seattle.
   The industry responded with its own plan - the "Tug of Opportunity" system, which uses more than 100 tugs working Northwest waters. Each is tracked electronically from Seattle so that, in an emergency, the closest can be dispatched quickly to a potential accident.
     Felleman has no use for that system. The tugs are too small, he says, and most operate far from the area most at risk - the Pacific coastline.
    With the passion of a Northwest environmentalist and the temperament of a New York cab driver, Felleman took on the tug issue with a full-time, full-court press aimed at state and federal decision makers and the media. During the past five years, he has fired off countless letters and e-mails, critiqued government reports and delivered scathing testimony at public hearings.  He has become a human database on oil spills around the world, on tankers and their failures, on tugboats and on the government agencies that are supposed to regulate them.
    He hounds elected officials - all the way up to Vice President Al Gore - until they agree to meet with him. And then he hounds them some more until they do what he wants them to do.  His tactics are fiercely combative. When a recent Coast Guard report suggested that a rescue tug would not be cost-effective, Felleman accused the agency of "cooking the books" and of "falsifying their reports." He routinely accuses his critics of conspiring with the oil industry.
    "Fred is a bright individual who pursues his ideals in a dogged fashion, and I respect that," says Hutchins, the shipping-industry spokesman. "But you either agree 100 percent with Fred, or you have to be crooked, and he will treat you accordingly. I obviously don't agree 100 percent, so he believes I'm a crook. That's the way he deals with the world."
   David Ortman, a veteran Seattle environmental activist who has worked with Felleman for many years, says he admires Felleman's tenacity - even though it offends people. "His passion is refreshing, but it gets in the way when he deals with institutions like the Coast Guard."
    Felleman concedes only that he feels no obligation to be "nice."  "This whole thing about niceness in Seattle is ridiculous," he says. "Yes, people are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts."
   The Coast Guard, he says, is a law-enforcement agency that only reluctantly took on its environmental responsibilities after the Valdez spill. "They are incredibly bent on protecting the maritime industry," he says. "Somebody has to ride herd on both the industry and the agency that is supposed to regulate it."
   There are plenty of people, from environmental groups to members of Congress, who agree with Felleman's views.  The state Department of Ecology has applauded the rescue tug, pointing out that the risks of a spill have increased.
    The heart of the debate is not whether a full-time tug will diminish the risk of a spill; virtually everybody agrees it will. The argument is whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Critics argue that taxpayers are being asked to spend $4 million or more per year to slightly diminish the risk of a catastrophe that is not likely to occur in the first place.
    Pat Jones, spokesman for the state ports association, fears the next step will be full-time tug escorts for all vessels, including more than 10,000 freighters that traverse the Strait of Juan de Fuca each year. Today's tug escorts from Port Angeles are paid for by the oil companies. But shipping companies would have to pay the costs of escorts for freighters, taking Northwest ports out of competition for Pacific Rim shipping, he says.
    "It's a question of how much risk we are willing to live with," Jones says.
     The recent Coast Guard report concludes the rescue tug or escort tugs reduce the risk, but at a cost far greater than the Tug of Opportunity system.
    Which makes Felleman ballistic. "Yes, it's all relativistic," he says. "A major oil spill is a digital experience; it's a `one' or a `zero.' "
   But he can't sit by and ignore the risk of one catastrophic spill, especially with increasing numbers of tankers and freighters navigating through channels crisscrossed by state ferries, naval ships and thousands of pleasure boats.
    "I have one of the world's finest pieces of marine habitat on my doorstep, and that's all I care about," Felleman says. "I can't do everything, so I made a strategic decision to focus my efforts on River City, right here at home."

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