Bill Dewey has worked as a shellfish farmer in Washington State for over 40 years. He is the Director of Public Affairs for Taylor Shellfish Farms, the largest producer of farmed oysters, clams, and mussels in the United States, and he has owned and operated his own shellfish farm in Salmish Bay for 25 years. In 2011, he served on Washington State s Ocean Acidification Blue Ribbon Panel, and it currently serves on the Washington Marine Resource Advisory Council, advising the Governor and State's legislature on the state's response to ocean acidification. Bill talks about his background in the shellfish industry, how he got into the business, and how he and his business partner, Bill Taylor, have benefited from the efforts of other shellfish growers all around the country, particularly here in the Northwest. He also talks about the impact of carbonic acid on the oysters they grow, and the impact it has on the other marine life in the area. And, of course, there's a little bit of politics in this episode. Thanks to Bill for his time and for being willing to talk to us about this issue. We hope you enjoy this episode, and we hope you take something away from it to think about it and talk about it with someone you know who is also interested in learning more about this topic. Thank you so much for listening, Bill! Your continued support is so appreciated, and so is our continued support for this podcast and our efforts to make a difference in the lives of other people's day to day lives. Thank you for listening to this podcast, and for supporting this podcast. Your support is helping us to keep this podcast going forward. -Your continued support will help us make a bigger, bigger, better, and bigger, and better listening, and more of this podcasting out there - we all have a bigger listening experience, and you get a better chance to hear us out there, everywhere we hear us listening, more of it, everywhere they hear us, and they're not hearing us, it's better than it's more of that, we hear it, they're more of us, we're better than that, thank you, thank them, we get it, we see it, etc., etc., it's not better, etc. -- Thank you, bye, bye bye, good morning, good day, good luck, good night, good love, good and good night out, good chance, good n it, etc., good day out, love you, good sea, good, good land, good & good night love, etc, good hear, good bit, good bye, love, and all good night < -- etc., - MAGA AND FOTTER AND G CHEETHER, MAGIC AND CHEEREYE AND GEDEY AND FALLYIE AND FIE CHEEDED, MAGIE AND GOTTER CHEETA AND FEDERECKED, MALAYTERED AND FETHER AND CHOTTEREYE CHEEAH AND KEDED OUT, AND KELLY AND A CHEALLY AND FOWIE AND A FIE AND NECKETHEETTER AND A THANKED CHEOTHEET AND A LOT CHEAHER AND G AND A PEDCAST AND A MAGIC CHEAHEED AND A NECK AND A LOT OF CHELLY AND APOTHE AND A QOTHE CHE OUTED AND APETHE AND APHER CHE CHEA CHEA AND A COURTERY AND AND AND SO AND SO MUCH AND A MALLY AND A NOTCH AND A NA CHOT AND A MEETING AND A MAKE AND A DEED AND CHET AND APEA AND APED AND NA CHE AND A AND AND A THOT AND MA AND A BUTTER AND AND NOT AND AND F AND A CORALLY AND AND ALL AND A S AND A PLOT AND APOLOGY AND AND EALLY AND CHED AND AND CH AND AND NA AND AND S AND AND THE FALLY AND ALL F AND AND ME AND A MOVIE AND APELL AND A BALLY AND APIE AND AND ... AND AND THEY AND AND TO AND AND L AND AND OTHER AND AND R AND AND AR AND AND Q AND A ...) )
00:00:00.000Hey everybody, today we're going to talk about ocean acidification.
00:00:03.000Bill Dewey has worked as a shellfish farmer in Washington State for over 40 years.
00:00:08.000He is the Director of Public Affairs for Taylor Shellfish Farms, the largest producer of farmed oysters, clams, and mussels in the United States, and he has owned and operated his own shellfish farm in Washington's Salmish Bay for 25 years.
00:00:23.000He served on Washington State's ocean acidification blue ribbon panel in 2011.
00:00:29.000And it currently serves on the Washington Marine Resource Advisory Council, advising Washington's governor and legislature on the state's response to ocean acidification.
00:00:41.000Bill, thank you so much for joining us.
00:00:43.000I've wanted to talk to people about this issue for a long time.
00:00:47.000When I was at Waterkeeper, we had a lot of our water keepers were also in the Commercial fishing industry, including shellfish industry, and I started hearing about ocean acidification almost 20 years ago.
00:01:02.000It's a subject that most Americans probably know very little about.
00:01:16.000That's called Long Line Culture, where you're clustered oysters up on line, suspended up off the bottom, and it adds up near the town of City of Bellingham, northern Puget Sound.
00:01:26.000Yeah, and I had a lawsuit that kept me in Bellingham for a long time against the Navy, against the shipyard there.
00:01:33.000I was representing some of the tribes whose salmon fisheries were being degraded and impacted by toxic discharges from the naval shipyard.
00:01:44.000Well, I'm very grateful to you, sir, for all of your environmental work.
00:01:48.000We've definitely, as a company and as an industry, benefited from the keepers.
00:01:53.000All around the country, particularly here in the Northwest.
00:01:56.000I think we share a common acquaintance from the industry there in Long Island, a good friend of ours from years ago, Terry Backer.
00:02:04.000A very, very, very close friend of mine.
00:02:08.000Unfortunately, he died about, I think, about seven years ago.
00:02:46.000I came out here to go to the School of Fisheries at the University of Washington back in the 70s, but I grew up, spent my summers out in Chatham and Hartwich and That's where I got my passion for marine life and wanting to get into fisheries.
00:02:59.000But Terry was a good friend of myself and Bill Taylor.
00:03:02.000We worked with him on national public health issues through the Interstate Shellfish Sanitation Conference and he often referenced the work that he did with you.
00:03:10.000Yeah, and we started a bunch of river keepers and coast keepers down in Mexico, and he actually brought a lot of the shellfish technology down to the Baja.
00:04:19.000And things started to come into focus.
00:04:21.000We had a seed crisis here on the West Coast because the production in our hatchery was collapsing and another major West Coast hatchery on the Oregon coast, their oyster larvae production was collapsing at the same time.
00:04:36.000And then natural recruitment, there's areas where the oystermen would collect seed in the wild from natural reproduction, and those were failing as well.
00:04:45.000So we had an oyster seed crisis here on the West Coast where farmers didn't have any seed.
00:04:50.000And with the help of NOAA scientists and university scientists, the story started to come into focus for us as to what exactly was causing the larvae to die.
00:05:04.000Just to summarize that, the larvae to build the shell need to mobilize calcium out of the water column.
00:05:14.000So they take calcium molecules out of the water column, and when it's acidic, the calcium, they can't retrieve it from the water column.
00:05:27.000So the oyster larvae, After that, the sperm penetrates the egg.
00:05:33.000In the first 24 hours of life, they've got to do two things.
00:05:36.000They've got to build a shell to protect themselves and a little swimming and feeding organ that's called a vellum.
00:05:42.000And they do that with energy that's stored within the egg.
00:05:45.000And if there's not enough calcium carbonate in the water, they struggle to build that shell.
00:05:50.000And the shell comes out small and deformed, and they use up all that natal energy stored in the egg before they build the feeding organ, and then they die.
00:05:58.000So it's that early life stage, in particular with oysters, but also with other species, it's typically that very early life stage that's most vulnerable to ocean acidification.
00:06:14.000Because I can see there's a lot of oysters behind you, so clearly you've found a solution.
00:06:19.000Yeah, we've figured it out on the seed production side.
00:06:22.000So again, with the help of some very talented scientists, There's a scientist, Burke Hales, at Oregon State University that developed a sophisticated piece of equipment that we have in our hatcheries now that will monitor carbonate chemistry real time.
00:06:38.000And then in response to that monitoring equipment, we're able to inject sodium carbonate into the water, boost the carbonate ions up in the hatchery to where our babies can build their shells again.
00:06:49.000So we've got the workaround, the temporary workaround on the oyster seed production.
00:06:55.000The industry has baby oysters again for their farms.
00:06:58.000But we're really concerned because as the conditions get worse, which the scientists have assured us that's going to be the case, that's going to start to impact animals out on our farms and in our nurseries and so on.
00:07:15.000Richard Feely, who's one of the leading scientists in the world on ocean acidification, we're fortunate that he works for NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, is based here in Seattle.
00:07:27.000And he came to our conference and was actually the keynote speaker at our annual Shellfish Growers Conference and delivered this message that I think this is maybe what's killing your baby oysters, which led to the research that I was just describing.
00:07:41.000But the most sobering part of his message, frankly, was He said, even if you can convince the rest of the world to stop burning fossil fuels today, the conditions for you are going to get worse for the next 30 to 50 years because of the carbon dioxide that's in the pipeline coming your way.
00:07:58.000The water that's upwelling on our coast now that's causing this problem for our oysters, the last time it was at the surface of the ocean absorbed Off the spigot, the CO2 spigot, what's in that pipeline in those deep ocean currents is going to continue to make conditions worse for us the next 30 to 50 years.
00:08:26.000So we've got to, you know, on our farms, we're trying to get focused on adaptation, ways that we can mitigate these conditions that are continuing to get worse.
00:08:35.000So we're looking for means such as the photograph you see behind me.
00:08:39.000You can see the oysters are growing in this lush eelgrass beds in between.
00:08:44.000This particular bay has abundant eelgrass.
00:08:47.000It's got some of the most eelgrass of any of the bays in Puget Sound.
00:08:51.000Well that eelgrass is naturally improving that carbonate chemistry as it photosynthesizes.
00:08:56.000It sucks up that CO2 and improves the water chemistry naturally.
00:09:00.000So there may be bays like Samish Bay or others that have abundant macroalgae or eelgrass that will naturally mitigate that carbonate chemistry to where our shellfish can grow.
00:09:12.000Or we're looking at, you know, the potential of co-culturing seaweed with our oysters.
00:09:17.000So there's a lot of interest in recent years in growing seaweed here in the United States.
00:09:22.000And there in the Northeast, in particular, there's farms that are doing that.
00:09:27.000They're growing seaweed with their oysters in hopes that maybe it can mitigate the impacts of the carbon dioxide pollution and ocean acidification down the road.
00:09:38.000And is the problem confined to the Pacific Northwest, or are we seeing it everywhere?
00:09:44.000Well, you know, we were the first area where it really impacted an industry, and we knew it.
00:09:50.000We are a natural upwelling system with the California current on the West Coast of the United States.
00:09:56.000And what the NOAA scientists tell us is that Even pre-industrial era, pre-CO2 pollution, from that natural upwelling, we would see conditions approximately 11% of the time that would be corrosive enough that it would have dissolved our oyster larvae.
00:10:12.000Now they're happening a third, 33% of the time, and those events are more severe when they happen.
00:10:19.000And so there's other regions of the world that have these similar upwelling conditions that are experiencing similar problems But then if you look, there's another means of causing localized ocean acidification, and that's from nutrient pollution.
00:10:35.000And that's more typically the case in the East Coast estuaries, Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, and so on, where you can get too much nitrogen, and that causes phytoplankton, the marine algae, to bloom.
00:10:49.000And then when that algae dies and crashes and decomposes, that releases CO2. And can cause a localized acidification problem.
00:10:59.000So it's a problem in more areas than just the West Coast of the United States.
00:11:05.000Yeah, I mean, ironically, we have a project on the Hudson River called the Million Oyster Project.
00:11:16.000We're actually using oysters to clean up on nutrient pollution.
00:11:21.000But I guess you hit a tipping point where it gets so bad that it kills us bad.
00:11:29.000Again, the scientists that have brought this to our attention, research that's been done around the world, says that we've already increased the acidity of the surface waters of the ocean by 30%.
00:11:42.000And decrease the availability of carbonate ions by 16%.
00:11:46.000And by the end of the century, they're predicting that we will increase the acidity by 100% to 150% and reduce the carbonate ions by 50%.
00:11:56.000And that's across the surface waters of all the world's oceans.
00:12:00.000The conditions we see now when we have upwelling on the West Coast here are similar to what's going to be experienced at the end of the century.
00:12:10.000So it's kind of a window, you know, that 50% carbonate ion reduction and that more intense acidification is what we experience now.
00:12:19.000What's happening to us is sort of a window to the rest of the world of what you can expect by the end of the century if we don't stop our dependence on the fossil fuels.
00:12:29.000And just so people know, there's a danger point for the oyster when they're in that larval stage before they form the shell.
00:12:37.000Once they form a shell of a certain size, then they're okay.
00:13:35.000It may be a species that we end up having to go back to because it seems to be better adapted.
00:13:41.000It's not as impacted as the Pacific oyster is.
00:13:44.000And it could be that since the oyster that we farm the most was imported here from Japan where they don't have those upwelling conditions, it maybe hasn't evolved like the native oyster has to deal with those changing You know, because we have that natural upwelling here, these species that live here have adapted to those increased levels of carbon dioxide in the water.
00:14:06.000You talked about the pH becoming more acidic now, 30%, and the future by 100%, 150%.
00:14:17.000That's not just going to affect oysters, right?
00:14:19.000There's an entire class of zooplankton upon which the entire global food chain relies.
00:14:27.000That also mobilizes calcium out of the water column and requires that for their survival.
00:14:33.000And do we have any information or projections what's happening to that zooplankton?
00:14:40.000Yeah, that's a really important point.
00:14:42.000You know, just here in Puget Sound in Washington State, they estimate A third of the species here are calcifiers that depend on that calcium carbonate to build their skeleton.
00:14:52.000And so part of the work of this Marine Resources Advisory Council that I serve on now that advises the governor and legislature on ocean acidification, part of that effort is focusing on trying to identify what other resources are being impacted.
00:15:09.000When the legislature formed this Marine Resources Advisory Council, they also appropriated funds to establish the Ocean Acidification Center at the University of Washington.
00:15:19.000So scientists there are doing the research to understand what other species are being impacted.
00:15:25.000And it turns out Dungeness crab, which is another really valuable commercial resource here on the West Coast, the larval stages of the Dungeness crab are also being impacted as well.
00:15:36.000And more significantly, perhaps, The impact to the oysters, one of the bellwether species that identified it was being impacted were what are called pteropods, which is a zooplankton, a planktonic snail that has a shell as well, but it's a swimming snail.
00:15:56.000It's a microscopic zooplankton that turns out to be the primary food source for pink salmon and other salmon species.
00:16:04.000So, again, at the base of the food web, you know, pteropods don't have a spokesman like the oyster industry to, you know, Raise the flag and say, help, help.
00:16:13.000The pteropods are out there providing a wonderful service that most people don't understand.
00:16:20.000Are we seeing that in the salmon populations?
00:16:24.000Well, our salmon populations are definitely struggling here in the Pacific Northwest for a whole host of reasons, not just the pteropods and the food source.
00:16:33.000So it's really hard to tease out exactly what any one year is causing a decline in a particular salmon population.
00:16:41.000Yeah, and are there any reasons for optimism or hope?
00:16:44.000Well, I mean, as a company and as an industry, we've faced a lot of adversity over the years.
00:16:50.000The Taylor family that I work for here, they've been growing shellfish in Puget Sound since 1890.
00:16:56.000And over the years, we've seen lots of struggles and issues.
00:17:01.000And, you know, you have to stay optimistic to work through them.
00:17:04.000And so we try to be the same here on this issue.
00:17:07.000But, you know, it's Definitely a challenge when you know the source of the problem is carbon dioxide pollution and that's an international worldwide issue.
00:17:16.000You know, it was interesting when Governor Gregoire, our governor at the time this seed crisis hit, she formed this ocean acidification blue ribbon panel of experts to try to figure out what was causing the problem and what we might do as a state and come up with a response and From that came a report with 42 recommendations, which are actively being implemented.
00:17:38.000But, you know, the governor was challenged, you know, what can little old Washington State possibly do to fix ocean acidification when carbon dioxide pollution is a worldwide issue?
00:18:40.000Well, there actually is a non-profit group, and so the Shellfish Growers Climate Coalition was formed with the help of the Nature Conservancy to try to help us share our stories about how the industry's Thank