The Forest That Fish Built:
Salmon, Timber, and People in Willapa Bay by Richard Manning (excerpted for use on the web)
Kathleen Sayce lives in a 19th century house near the peninsula village of Nahcotta, one built by Swedish pioneers and later renovated by her stepgrandfather and grandmother. Her book-lined living room's windows look onto Willapa Bay, which is to say her laboratory. Sayce is an unusual sort of biologist, one who picked a subject and a place before she picked a job. Her choice, however was biased in that she was raised in Nahcotta following her father's work in marine biology.
"I grew up thinking everybody had a saltwater lab in her background," she says.
Once she had finished her formal education, including a master's degree in botany, she came home, because "there was a lot of science that needed doing for the community." Her independent lab now does contract work for various groups and agencies.
In 1992, Sayce began performing an exercise called plankton tows, a simple way of sampling the amount of plankton present in the bay at any one time. Plankton are tiny plants and animals that are the foundation of all ocean life, the first and vast floor of the food chain. Phytoplankton are to the marine world what grass is to the prairie, the way the ocean harnesses the sun's power to support life. Oddly, no one had bothered to routinely census plankton before in Willapa Bay, which is a bit like a rancher who never inventoried his grass.
"Microbiology rules the world, but we know almost nothing about microbiology," says Sayce. Her five year's worth of data show that plankton levels are anything but stable. They fluctuate greatly both year to year and week to week during the summer peak of productivity. This is not an idle question for salmon production. Sayce began her work after being prodded by the example of Bruce Suzumoto, who studied plankton in Alaska's Prince William Sound. He found that by timing release of young pink salmon to coincide with zooplankton peaks, hatcheries greatly increased the survival of the pinks. | |
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