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East Oregonian
EAT, DRINK & EXPLORE
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Submitted Photo
This image taken from a GoPro camera shows pyrosomes at a depth of 100 meters off the Oregon coast.
Unusual organisms show up in droves off the Oregon Coast
By KATIE FRANKOWICZ
EO Media Group
A strange organism has
taken over the ocean waters
off Oregon this spring,
clogging fishing and research
gear and confounding beach-
combers and biologists.
Fishermen compare them
to pickles, gummy bears
and sea cucumbers. They
are the Borg of the ocean,
one researcher suggested,
referencing characters from
the “Star Trek” TV show.
They look like “Star Wars”
creatures, a biologist said.
They are called pyrosomes,
and they are everywhere.
In all his decades doing
survey and research work off
the coast, Richard Brodeur,
research fishery biologist
with the National Oceanic
and Atmospheric Administra-
tion, has never encountered
pyrosomes in these kinds of
numbers, or really at all. He
knew about them, had seen
them down in California, but
never off the Oregon Coast.
Then, “starting in 2014, we
started seeing a few of them,”
he said. In 2015 and 2016, he
saw a few more. This spring,
on a survey cruise, they pulled
up 60,000 pyrosomes in a
five-minute tow.
“This year,” Brodeur said,
“we must be setting all sorts
of records.”
‘All you see’
Sam Zeman, an Oregon
State University research
associate, said as the survey
boats went farther away
from shore, they saw bigger
and bigger pyrosomes, some
roughly 2 feet long.
One researcher fixed a
GoPro camera to a net and
dropped it over the side. It
was a glimpse into a familiar
world that had become very
odd. They saw pyrosomes
down to a depth of 100
meters, as far as their equip-
ment could go.
“Watching that footage
was eerie,” said Jennifer
Fisher, a research assistant
with Oregon State’s Coop-
erative Institute for Marine
Resources Studies that work
closely with the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration, who was on a
survey cruise in May. There’s
blue water in all directions,
shaded turquoise to dark
cerulean, “and all you see
is pyrosomes.” They seem
to hang in the water, like an
army. At night, they drifted
near the water’s surface.
Fisher is pretty sure cock-
roaches will survive the apoc-
alypse. After this most recent
cruise, she added pyrosomes
to the list.
“It’s very eerie,” Zeman
said. “There’s nothing else.
It’s just them, and it kind of
never stops.”
“They could just keep
going,” Brodeur said. “We
have no idea where they end
offshore.”
Fire body
Though it looks like a
single creature, a pyrosome is
made up of individual clones.
Hence the Borg reference,
though in the case of the
pyrosome, the organism
is physically linked unlike
the TV characters who are
mentally connected. A single
Submitted Photo
Pyrosomes are made up of individual clones.
Submitted Photo
Pyrosomes can be massive. Some can glow.
Submitted Photo
The ocean critters are a pain for fishermen.
pyrosome might contain
hundreds if not thousands
of
individual
animals,
said Caren Braby, marine
resources program manager
with the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife. They
don’t sting and they can’t bite.
They are essentially hollow
tubes, filter feeders, and very
little is known about them.
They
are
chordates,
Braby said, lacking actual
vertebrae — bones that form
the backbone — but with the
beginning of a spinal chord,
Braby said. If you were to
compare an octopus or a
pyrosome to people, “we’d
be more closely related to a
pyrosome.”
Elsewhere, pyrosomes can
be massive and even display
bioluminescence. They glow.
This is likely how they got the
name “pyrosome,” a combi-
nation of the Greek words
“pyro” and “soma:” fire body.
The organisms off Oregon
aren’t quite so magical,
possibly because they aren’t
consuming the right bacteria,
one researcher theorized.
Salmon trollers from
Newport to Alaska reported
pyrosomes ending up on
the end of their hooks. In
fisheries, like the pink shrimp
fishery where the gear itself
is designed to exclude other
fish, pyrosomes are just the
right size and shape to jam up
the works.
Shrimper Steve Davis,
who runs several boats out
of Warrenton, said the pyro-
somes can be so thick on the
gear that nothing else can get
past them. At the very least,
they make it so he’s catching
less than he should be.
“There’s just so many of
them, it’s hard to pick them
out,” he said. They range from
the size of a pinkie finger to
almost a foot long, and they
seem to float in packs. If a
boat is unlucky enough to
hit a patch of them, “you go
somewhere else and hope that
they’re not that thick,” Davis
said.
It can be frustrating, he
said, “especially when you
know people are catching
shrimp around you.”
But the pyrosomes are
hard to avoid right now.
For trawlers like Warren-
ton-based Paul Kujala, the
organisms are more of a
nuisance than a hindrance to
fishing. They’ll clog nets a
bit, and when they’re pulled
up with the rest of the haul,
invariably some will end up
in the fish hold.
“And that’s one more thing
you don’t want,” Kujala said.
At night, he and his crew
have hit patches of water
where all they can see, in any
direction, are pyrosomes.
“You always see one or
two, but never in the numbers
that we’re seeing now,” Davis
said.
Why?
The question right now is,
“Why?” Why are they here?
What changed?” The ocean
has been unusually warm for
the past two years with weak
upwelling winds this year,
both factors that could have
brought pyrosomes, which
seem to favor warmer water
closer to shore. Researchers
noted that the change in
temperature coincided with
an apparent increase in
pyrosomes here. But now the
Oregon Coast is seeing strong
upwelling winds again, and
the water is cooling.
“Will they stick around?”
Fisher said. She thinks
it’s a window of time,
a sort of natural experi-
ment that will end soon.
The pyrosomes’ absence
could almost be more
revealing than their presence,
said Fisher. This makes the
data collected on the survey
cruises this spring even more
important. Combined with
data from previous years,
researchers might be able to
tell a story. “At least a short
story,” Fisher said.
Brodeur, Zeman and other
researchers don’t know if the
pyrosomes are affecting other
animals in the ecosystem.
These are organisms that
filter very small particles;
it’s hard to know if they are
competing with other animals
for food. But, having them
in such high numbers could
have important ecological
consequences.
“How important are these
to the ecosystem?” Brodeur
wondered. “How much food
are they eating and are they
a trophic dead end?” In other
words: Where are they on the
food chain? His lab is in the
middle of analyzing samples
collected on survey cruises,
looking at links between
current environmental condi-
tions and their population
boom here as well as their
role in the food chain.
“We’re learning on our
feet,” Brodeur said.
What is missing
At the same time
researchers are seeing masses
of pyrosomes, they are not
seeing other creatures.
“If there’s a positive side to
this, the normal jellies that we
get, that tend to be a nuisance,
we don’t know if they will be
here this year,” Brodeur said.
And there are no velella
velella, or by-the-wind-
sailors, drifting jellyfish-like
creatures that sail over the
surface of the water. They
often wash up in piles on
Oregon’s and Washington’s
beaches, crisping and turning
white in the sun. In recent
years, velella velella were so
dense out on the ocean that
passing boats several times
mistook them for sheens of
oil and radioed the U.S. Coast
Guard thinking a boat had
sunk nearby. This year, they
are nowhere. A wave of them
showed up in February, but
since then they haven’t really
been seen.
Velella velella is a species
that ebbs and flows. But in
hindsight, Fisher said their
absence is a little odd.
“Everything else seems
like it’s getting back to
normal,” she said. “We have
cold, nutrient-rich water,
we have upwelling, we’re
starting to see krill again. All
of these things that have been
absent over the last few years,
but now we have pyrosomes.”