Tunicate dive ... Saturday @ Pleasant Harbor

[MXGratefulDiver]

I just got this ... and I've got plans already for Saturday, but if anyone's interested ...

Pleasant Harbor Styela Clava Eradication:
Dive Plan and Logistics


Basic Event Information

Activity: Removal of Styela clava, “the club tunicate”, from marina floats and structures at Pleasant Harbor Marina in Brinnon, WA. This is a volunteer activity and chance to take action to address a new and potentially harmful invasive species in Puget Sound.

Date: 11/05/05

Time: 10:00 am until early afternoon (as a volunteer you may participate for any amount of time that you wish)

Location: Pleasant Harbor Marina, Brinnon, WA just off HW 101 on Hood Canal: http://www.pleasantharbormarina.com/

• Marina Contact: Ryan or Carolyn, info@pleasantharbormarina.com 1-800-547-3479
• Directions: http://www.pleasantharbormarina.com/directions.html
• Parking is available for free, follow signs to marina office and continue past the office and around the corner to the right. After a short climb, park in an available spot. Space is somewhat limited, so please carpool if possible.

Gear: If you are planning on diving, bring all the usual equipment and as much air as you want as far as time you feel like spending underwater. This will be a shallow dive, mostly just below the surface, so temperature might be more a limiting factor than air consumption. If you have dive shears, a dive knife, a dive flag, and a mesh goody bag, please bring them. Also, if you are an O2 provider and have an O2 setup, please bring that as well.

If you’re not planning on diving but would like to help with shore support, you should come dressed in clothing that you don’t mind getting wet. A pair of garden gloves will come in handy. We need volunteers on the docks to help the divers and record data.

Air fills: Will be provided at participating area dive shops. I’m still building the list of shops but will have it ready on dive day so you can fill your tanks on the way home. Just let the shop know that you volunteered for the dive and they will fill your tanks, with Washington Sea Grant Program reimbursing them afterwards. If you work at or know of a dive shop that would like to participate, please let me know.

Food: Pizza, coffee, tea, water, juice and other food will be provided. You may want to bring other food, beverages or snacks if you have strong or special dietary preferences.


Project Goals

1. Ensure the safety of volunteer divers and crew by working in buddy teams, enlisting shore support to keep divers and boats apart, having a dive plan and diving that plan, having an emergency contingency plan and dive incident first aid kit on site (including oxygen) as well as a diver(s) trained in rescue techniques.

2. Avoid any property damage to marina and boats by educating divers on proper removal techniques and instructing divers to stay away from boats.

3. Eradicate Styela clava from the marina floats and related structures at Pleasant Harbor Marina.

4. Document the process and photograph sample plots to be used in future monitoring and control exercises.

5. Make the day fun and educational and bring local divers together from around the Sound.


Background on Styela clava, or “the club tunicate”

A large invasive solitary tunicate, or “sea squirt”, called Styela clava has been found growing at three marinas in Washington State: Blaine, Neah Bay, and Pleasant Harbor on Hood Canal. Like all solitary tunicates, Styela clava is a sessile, filter-feeding animal. In its native habitat, the harbors and bays of Korea and Japan, it is highly valued and harvested as a delicacy. There, Styela clava has co-evolved with natural predators and competitors that balance and restrain its growth. When transported to areas that lack these balancing relationships, Styela clava can grow to extremely high densities. During the 20th century as transoceanic shipping increased in volume and speed, Styela clava made their way across the Pacific and also into the Atlantic, hitching rides on ocean-going vessels to the United States and Canada. Here, they find ideal habitat in marinas and shellfish farms, outcompeting native and desirable marine species for space and food. In this way, this highly invasive species threatens the shellfish growing industry in Washington State and is a nuisance to boaters and recreational divers.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Site Description: Styela clava at Pleasant Harbor

Pleasant harbor marina is situated 18 miles south of the Hood Canal Bridge in a protected bay just south of Brinnon, WA. The marina consists of 11 floating docks, each with 7 finger piers on a side, for a total of 285 slips. On the 10th of October 2005, Simon Geerlofs observed Styela clava growing on marina floats A-F (G-L were not surveyed, though it is likely there as well). Erin Grey, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, had previously reported Styela clava at this location. Gretchen Lambert, tunicate taxonomist, confirmed the identification. Densities are variable, between 1 and 100 animals per square meter. Marina floats are made of several different materials: Tires, wood, foam, cement, and plastic. On initial observation, it appeared that clava favored the tires and wood as substrate. They were not observed on plastic floats, though divers will be instructed to examine all submerged surfaces. Individuals were growing on the bottoms of several boats as well.

Protocol for Removal of S. clava

After a brief training on how to ID Styela clava, divers will enter the water in buddy teams of two. Each pair will pick one of the 11 floats at Pleasant Harbor and work along one side of the float. The team will work together to locate and remove Styela clava from dock floats and other structures. Using dive shears or a dive knife, divers will sever the tunicates at the base of the stalk (leaving the holdfast in place) and place the animals in a collection bag. As tunicates are placed in the bag, they will be counted (at least for a bag or two). When the bag is full it will be handed to a dockside helper to be emptied on to drying racks; the diver will tell the helper how many tunicates are in the bag and this number will be recorded. The empty collection bag will then be returned to the divers and they will continue on. When tunicates are observed growing on the bottom of boats, divers will inform dockside helpers who will flag the marina slip. Simon Geerlofs will remove tunicates growing on boat hulls at the end of the day.

Some floats are more densely packed with clava than others, but it is estimated that each float will take two buddy teams working 2 hours to clean. Given that there are 11 floats, an estimated 88 diver-hours will be required. It should be noted that these are just estimates and until divers are actually in the water, it will be difficult to know the exact level of effort required to complete the task.

For monitoring purposes, several sites will be selected for study under the guidance of Gretchen Lambert. An estimate of clava density in these sites will be determined and photographs taken before and after removal. These will be checked periodically for regrowth at an interval to be determined later.

Protocol for Dockside Helpers

At least one dockside helper will be required for every two marina floats. It will be this person’s job to watch the four buddy teams working on those two floats, making sure that they stay clear of boat traffic, emptying their collection bags onto drying racks, noting how many tunicates per bag and how many bags are removed, providing information to marina tenants on our activities, and checking divers in and out of the water. In addition to these activities, when divers observe tunicates on boat hulls, dockside helpers will flag the marina slip for later follow up and removal (flagging tape will be provided). Dockside helpers will also work to keep docks neat and clean of marine debris.


Summary of Activity and schedule of events

• 8:45-9:30—Sea Grant employees (Simon Geerlofs, others?) arrive at Pleasant Harbor Marina and begin set up for the day.

• 10:00-10:45—Training and dive briefing. Dockside helpers will also be trained. Equipment and materials will be distributed at this time. Equipment needs are as follows:
o For dockside helpers:
 Clipboard and write-in-the-rain paper with pencils
 Flagging tape
 Materials and flyers to hand to boaters
 Plastic garbage bags and drying racks
 Printout of instructions taped to clipboard
o For divers:
 Will bring their own gear, but will need:
 Shears or knife, shears preferred
 Mesh collection bag
 Laminated ID card

• 10:45-11:15—Divers will suit up, dockside helpers will familiarize themselves with their slips and stand ready to check divers in to water.

• 11:15—1:00—Divers in the water collecting clava. Dockside helpers keeping vigilant for boat traffic, noting the number of tunicates collected by each buddy team.

• 1:00-2:30—Out of the water, everyone eats. After, bagged tunicates are moved up the marina steps where they can be loaded into pick-up trucks for disposal

• 2:30-3:30—If divers want to dive more, then we make a second dive, if not, then Simon Geerlofs and Faith Haney will enter the water to check flagged boat hulls, photograph study plots and survey a sample of the floats.

• 3:30-5:00—Sea Grant employees and willing volunteers will clean up the marina and dispose of tunicates in the local landfill.

Important Considerations

• Divers should take care not to damage marina floats by scraping, gouging or ripping colonies forcefully off. If it is easier to remove tunicates by hand rather than with the shears (when abundant they tend to grow in clumps and it may be possible to remove the entire clump at once), please do so, but remove it by grabbing the animal’s stalk rather than squeezing its body. It is possible that forcefully squeezing the body could cause a release of sperm of eggs into the water (though it is not likely, these tunicates are not sexually active this time of year).

• The more dockhands we have, the easier it will be to keep the marina floats clean as we go, so that we don’t have a huge job at the end. Please encourage other non-divers to help!!

• I will likely coordinate from the shore and dive only at the end to survey boat hulls removing tunicates, take photos and clean up any last missed portions

• We may very well not complete the job on this day. If this is the case, a follow-up dive will be organized. I estimate that we’ll need at least 30 divers to do this in one day.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

What follows is Cheng's report from yesterday's tunicate removal ...

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I dove with the UW's Washington Sea Grant program "Club Tunicate Eradication" at Pleasant Harbor in Hood Cannel today. This is a five month old program and is led by Simon Greelofs. There were 30+ divers and 10+ shore support people who showed up on a cold, rainy day. I knew 4 of them from Moss Bay Dive Club and I was the only one from ESDC. It was fun to join the action, but it was a long drive alone from home.

Simon (a diver) and Gretchen (a marine biologist, I think) briefly introduced the Club Tunicate in the marina store’s sitting room, telling us that the tunicates were from Asian countries, reproduced by broadcast spawing in the water. The fertilized eggs take only 24 hours to hatch; 24 hours to be matured on the water surface, and then they find a hard surface to attach on and continue to grow. In 3 months it could reproduce every 24 hours till it dies. Before it attaches to a surface the baby tunicate is poisonous to fish, so the survival rate is almost 100%. In Korea the tunicate is harvested for food, to eat with hot sauces, so the more the better. In Washington waters and further north the tunicate is just sucking up all the nutrients in the water and suffocating the clams and oysters … besides clogging up docks and boats.

We went out to the boat dock to gear up and team up with dive buddies. My dive bubby was Mike Ulrich, from Olympia. Mike works for the Fish & Wildlife Department at Olympia. He has been diving since the early 80’ and does about 100 dives a year in work dives for the department on fish counting in WA waters. Mike was amazed that I could have done the “sports” dive 100 dives a year! No, Mike, my dives were recreational dives and I am only a tourist in the ocean. Mike came with his wife, Ann, and 4 year old daughter, Marina. They both did the shore support for our team in the pouring rain. In the afternoon when Marina was taking a nap on the floor inside the sitting room, Ann continued the support by herself in the even heavier rain for Mike and I. Thanks, Ann.

In the first hour our team cut and dragged 4 dive bags full of little tunicates (1” to 3" long - it could grow to 5” long) and the shore supporters (Ann and other shore supporters) counted them as 1500+/- in each of our bags. The area our team worked on was only a 4 foot square under the platform by the stairway that comes down from shore … and that area was not totally cleaned yet - the ones smaller than an inch was not able to cut/drag/pull them off their base with thick dive gloves. The smaller ones were not even able to be seen without looking straight on with a dive light … forget about trying to clean them off. The ones we had cut were so light that they floated right out of the dive bag while our hand was pulling out of the bag. It was such a pain to keep them inside the dive bag. So Mike had to scope them in every once a while with the dive bag wide open. There wasn’t any square inch of hard surface that wasn’t covered with the tunicates. It was fully covered under the dock between boats...Simon had said in the briefing that Edmonds marina has the same issue now.

At the beginning of our second dive bag dive, there was a spotted shrimp, about 4-5” long from its nose to tail, swam up to 2-3 inches from my nose looking up to my eyes while I had my both hands dragging the tunicates from the overhead board and my eyes were looking up. When I noticed it, I turned my eyes down to it and it backed up 2-3 inches further but still staring at my mask, so I lower down my arms to get my camera, it was still waving hard with all its legs but didn’t go anywhere. But at the moment my camera was in my hand half way up to my face, it was gone like a bullet. Oh, well … Since the camera was in my hand, I took a couple of pictures of the overhead board and Mike … but the water had already been stirred up so much by our team and another team about five feet away that the picture couldn’t tell much of what we saw down there. After that we were just dragging down the big ones like grapes dripping down … every bundle of it would have 10-30 or more of tunicates and it was quick to fill up a goodie bag.

After the first hour some divers were cold and wanted to get out, so we all got called out of water for a pizza break to discuss what to do from there. But after that most divers and supporters were gone. Only me, Mike and the group leader Simon Geerlofs and his wife (or girl friend) went back in just to check all the boat bottoms and had the shore support, Ann, to mark the boat with a orange tape on the ones that had tunicate growth on them.

Almost all the boats parked there had tunicates. It was only how thick the tunicates had grown on them that was the issue … only one boat we looked at did not have any tunicates on it, it may have been Don’s dive boat that is actually in use frequently. During the whole dive we saw only one Lion’s Mane jelly fish, 6-7” wide cap when fully extended, with its tenticals a little mixed up, not in a very good shape. But I was in for the work dive so I didn’t go out of our way for it … besides that jelly, I did not see any other fishes in the water the whole dive.

Anyway it seemed that it was a little too late for taking this 5 month old program to the road. But it is better late than never. I hope this road will be continuing for good. Thanks to people like Simon and his colleagues, who have the knowledge and the way to notice the eco balance and to raise the public awareness about this big change to the environment. Simon said that he will forward all divers there today his report on the facts we had found today at Pleasant Harbor.

Hope there will be a pleasant ending to this issue.