News

12/22/16

Humboldt Bay’s clean yet productive waters are one of the main reasons it is home to both extensive eelgrass beds and an expanding shellfish aquaculture industry that generates more than $10 million in sales per year.

Yet the aquaculture industry must now contend with a new threat that is altering the chemistry of seawater: ocean acidification. The impact of intensifying ocean acidification on aquaculture in Humboldt Bay, and the extent to which eelgrass may reduce these impacts, is the focus of a new project by California Sea Grant Extension Specialist Dr. Joe Tyburczy and collaborators at Humboldt State University, with funding awarded by the Ocean Protection Council.

The team, which includes industry partner Terry Sawyer of Hog Island Oyster Company, will install a state-of-the-art monitoring instrument called a Burkolator to track Humboldt Bay’s carbonate chemistry at the company’s new oyster hatchery. The researchers will place additional sensors in coastal waters outside the bay and establish the first bay-wide monitoring program for eelgrass.

“Our goal is to provide the aquaculture industry and environmental permitting agencies with data and information that will help them develop win-win scenarios – ones that allow the aquaculture industry to expand, while at the same time minimizing impacts on eelgrass and the services it provides,” said Tyburczy.

12/31/16

The year 2016, which marked the 40^th anniversary of the Coastal Act, was not a proud one for the powerful agency charged with regulating coastal development and ensuring maximum preservation and public access.

The problem, in my humble opinion, was not with the professional staff but with the appointed commissioners — some of whom were so feckless, arrogant, unprofessional and cozy with the development lobby that lawsuits were filed and legislative reforms introduced.

And yet Gov. Jerry Brown's Finance Department decided, in what whiffed of politics from Day One, to conduct an expensive, months-long review of staff operations based on the trumped-up argument that an emergency loan to the agency (standard procedure in state government) was cause for alarm.

It seemed, then and now, that the real reason for the review was retaliation for the public backlash that followed the February firing of beloved staff leader and Executive Director Charles Lester — a blow that marked a battle for control of the agency.

On Friday, we got the results of the witch hunt, and there wasn’t much there. As with any government bureaucracy, there appears to be room for some tighter management and better bean-counting. But greater efficiency is hard to come by when the state has plenty of money for audits but no money to hire more employees at the long-understaffed agency.

To repeat, it was the commissioners who needed the scrub, not the staff.

So here’s my suggested agenda for 2017:

Brown and state leaders need to appoint a higher class of commissioners, whose first duty is to the Coastal Act and the public. The media need to vet every one of those appointments. Commissioners who don’t report full accounts of private meetings must be publicly flogged. And the next executive director has to uphold a tradition of independence and protect the agency, and the coast, from political pressure.

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10/20/16

A project to create a dog park in Arcata is still pending ahead of a survey of the land to determine whether it will be built on a site with toxic pollutants.

Inspectors will need to test the property at the old Little Lake Industries lumber mill site on South I Street for dioxins — a pollutant that if consumed, can cause cancer and reproductive defects — before plans for the park can move forward, city staff told council members Wednesday.

9/11/16

Much about the elusive beaked whale remains a mystery to marine biologists, but that may soon change thanks to a West Coast research expedition by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Along the North Coast, only four to five beaked whales have been observed within the past few years according to Humboldt State University zoology professor and Director of the Marine Mammal Education and Research Program, Dawn Goley.

“Marine mammal population size has historically been measured by counting whales from boats during systematic surveys,” Goley said. “Beaked whales can be challenging to count because they are deep divers who spend long periods of time underwater far off shore. It’s not like seeing gray whales off the coast.”