For about a month in the early summer, Stillwaters sponsored four three-hour boat cruises to allow participants to see our marine environment up close and personal.
The Suquamish Tribe allowed us to use their research vessel, a metal flat-bottomed boat with a landing craft front, to visit a series of stations in Appletree Cove and Puget Sound north and south of the Kingston.
Our first stop was in the Kingston marina where we could look at the many marine organisms which use the dock floats as their home. We found mussels, rock oysters, sea cucumbers, anemones, tube worms, algae and so much more. We also found juvenile coho, pink, chum and chinook salmon in the waters around the marina.
We dragged a small conical net with a bottle at the end through the top three feet of the water column to collect a sample what they were eating — the planktonic (floating) plants, animals and fish eggs drifting in the upper layer of the water column. These organisms are the base of the food chain. The samples included many some early life stages of barnacles, crabs, and other exotically shaped animals crustaceans like copepods and amphipods which we could see with magnifying hand lenses.
Then we motored out into Appletree Cove and looked at the variety of seaweed that grows either free floating or attached to the bottom or the hard substrate in the cove. There were multiple green, brown and red algae.
A perennial favorite is a red one called Turkish towel, named for its bumpy texture. These algae produce oxygen and provide shelter for aquatic organisms, food for some birds and other critters and surface areas for other organisms to colonize. They are ecosystems in themselves.
We also looked at eelgrass, a rooted flowering plant that lives on the bottom of the Cove in large patches. These eelgrass beds are important nursery areas for juvenile fish and crabs. Eelgrass is also a food for brant geese. We took water quality measurements in the cove and compared the temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity and turbidity with similar reading out in Puget Sound and in the marina. Just by comparing measurements in those different environments we could see the influence of depth, wind and current. Aquatic organism can experience very different environments depending on where they are.
One particularly interesting difference between the first two cruises and the last two was the clarity of the water. We found that the distance light penetrates in the water column (photic zone) — was no more than 1.5 to two meters in late May and the first week of June. However, later in June the distance was three meters or more. By making observations in the water column over that period we were able observe to tail end of a phytoplankton (microscopic plant) bloom in Puget Sound.
The latter cruises occurred after the bloom had crashed and the concentrations of the phytoplankton were so diminished that the clarity of the water was significantly changed.
We also were able to observe many herring eggs attached to a type of floating seaweed called sargassum. Some of these eggs will be food for birds. While some will survive and grow into a new generation of herring, feeding hungry salmon and other large fish and keeping the cycle going for us all.
We saw marvelous things just in a three-hour tour. We live in a magical place!
Betsy Cooper is a board member and stream monitor at Stillwaters Environmental Education Center. She also serves on the Kingston Citizen Advisory Council.
