February 23, 2018 | Cannon Beach Gazette | cannonbeachgazette.com • 7A
Findings concern researchers
Stars from Page 1A
“What we’re seeing is essentially a population
still struggling to persist through this epidemic
and only just beginning to recover,” said Eric
Owen, the citizen science coordinator at the Hay-
stack Rock Awareness Program.
How and where the wasting disease strikes
has always been patchy, said Sarah Gravem, a
postdoctoral student at Oregon State University
who has studied the disease since the first out-
break. Part of what makes the disease so hard to
research is its untraditional way of spreading.
“The reason it is so hard to understand is be-
cause the virus is in the water, and it can move so
easily,” Gravem said. “It can survive in sea water
for awhile, move with currents. We don’t have a
smoking gun of why it pops up here or there, or
why it went to California and Washington first.”
Over the past two years, Gravem said the per-
centage of sea stars affected by the disease at sur-
vey sites along the Oregon Coast have settled at
closer to 10 percent.
The figures reported in Cannon Beach in Jan-
uary are some of the earliest for the year, Gravem
said, but could possibly be a worrisome indicator.
“Some populations are recovering, but
they aren’t out of the woods,” she said. “If
another outbreak occurred, it’d be con-
cerning
for the survival of
the whole species.”
Many questions
still remain about
what aggravates the
disease and why some
areas are affected more
than others. Historically,
die-offs have been asso-
ciated with warm ocean
temperatures,
but
Melissa Miner of
Left: Erick Owen,
Melissa Keyser and
Bonnie Neugebauer
look for sea stars that
have been decimated
in recent years by a
mysterious dis-
ease. Bottom: Lisa
Habecker uses a
flashlight to locate
sea stars during
a survey by the
Haystack Rock
Awareness Pro-
gram in Cannon
Beach.
MARINe — the Multi-Agency Rocky
Intertidal Network — said the organiza-
tion has not seen a correlation between
higher water temperatures and sea star
wasting.
“Other localized groups who conduct
surveys felt they saw relationship, but
we don’t see that as the case on the broad
scale,” Miner said.
Haystack Rock, like many places along
the coast, had a significant resurgence of sea
stars in 2015.
The drop in wasting in early 2015
could be a result of a massive reproduc-
tion effort in response to the disease,
Owen said.
“Most of the sea stars surveyed during
this time were very young recruits,” he
said. “The subsequent spike in percent
wasting may correlate with a resurgence
of the disease as many of these juveniles
then became infected as well.”
While many Oregon sites have made
a substantial recovery, Gravem said, the
sea stars are smaller. The role sea stars
play in the ecosystem is a “big mean
predator,” she said, and their job is to eat
prey like snails and limpets. If smaller
sea stars are eating less, that could lead to
an overabundance of snails and limpets,
threatening the intertidal balance.
“Their ability to eat stuff is their eco-
logical importance. A big star can eat
more than a little sea star,” she said.
Overall, a higher population of juve-
niles point the fate of sea stars in a pos-
itive direction. But anomalies like Hay-
stack Rock remind researchers there are
still many unanswered questions.
“We don’t know what 2018 will hold,”
Gravem said.
Oregon uplists marbled murrelet to ‘endangered’ status
By Mateusz Perkowski
Capital Press
PORTLAND — Ore-
gon’s wildlife regulators have
“uplisted” the marbled mur-
relet from a threatened to an
endangered species, which
will likely result in stricter log-
ging limits on state forestland.
The Oregon Fish and Wild-
life Commission voted 4-2 to
upgrade protections for the
coastal bird at its Feb. 9 meet-
ing in Portland.
The change to endangered
status means that scientists
at the Oregon Department
of Fish and Wildlife, which
is overseen by the commis-
sion, must complete “survival
guidelines” for the marbled
murrelet by June.
Those guidelines are ex-
pected to further restrict log-
ging in the bird’s suitable hab-
itat, if existing protocols for
state forestland are found to be
insufficient.
Though Oregon’s version
of the Endangered Species Act
only applies to property owned
by the state government, some
private forestland owners wor-
ry the uplisting will effective-
ly move Oregon toward more
stringent regulations for all
forests.
Bruce Buckmaster, a com-
mission member who voted
against the change, said he
shared their concerns.
“They’re old enough to
know it’s an ironclad law they
will undoubtedly be affected,”
said Buckmaster, a retired
business owner.
COURTESY U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE
The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission voted to put the
marbled murrelet on the state’s endangered species list.
Commission
members
originally considered ordering
the agency to develop those
survival guidelines without
uplisting the species.
This proposal, set forth
by commissioner Bob Web-
ber, would have had the ef-
fect of creating a roadmap for
the murrelet’s recovery that
wouldn’t be legally enforce-
able.
However, the motion re-
sulted in 3-3 deadlock vote,
after which Webber changed
his mind and supported the
uplisting.
“I stated my preference but
my least favorite option would
be to do nothing,” said Web-
ber, an attorney.
The federal government
listed marbled murrelets as
threatened in 1992 and Oregon
extended the same status to the
birds three years later.
Washington and California
consider the species endan-
gered.
Marbled murrelets are
known as the “enigma of the
Pacific” because so little is still
known about their life cycle,
said Christina Donehower,
strategy species coordinator
for ODFW.
“Actual nests for marbled
murrelets are extremely hard
to find,” she said.
The birds forage for fish
and invertebrates in the Pa-
cific Ocean but lay their eggs
in depressions formed on
the branches of large conifer
trees, typically found in “old
growth” forests, she said.
Nests are found as far as 50
miles inland along the coast,
meaning the species must trav-
el up to 100 miles round trip to
feed its young.
Large conifer habitat for
the species in Oregon’s coast-
al forests declined by 58 per-
cent between 1936 and 1996,
she said.
Populations of the bird
sharply fell in 1996 but the
trend was stable to slightly
positive between 2000 and
2015, when 11,000 marbled
murrelets were estimated to
inhabit Oregon, Donehower
said.
However,
demographic
models for the species project
it has an 80 percent chance of
extinction in Oregon within
the current century, she said.
The species is doubly chal-
lenged because, apart from
specialized forest nesting hab-
itat, it’s vulnerable to fluctuat-
ing ocean conditions.
The bird’s reproductive po-
tential is low to begin with, as
it reaches sexual maturity rel-
atively late and typically only
lays one egg per year.
If food sources in the ocean
are inadequate for fledging
murrelets, the adults won’t at-
tempt to breed, as occurred in
2017.
“They might not be as resil-
ient as other species to chang-
ing conditions,” Donehower
said.
Oregon State University
is conducting a 10-year study
of marbled murrelets that in-
volves capturing the birds at
sea, outfitting them with track-
ing tags and monitoring their
forest nests.
Multiple woodland owners
and timber industry represen-
tatives urged the commission
against uplisting the species
until the OSU research sheds
more light on its life cycle.
Jim James, executive di-
rector of the Oregon Small
Woodlands Association, said
the uplisting would be prema-
ture before the science is better
understood.
“It’s not urgent that you
make a decision today,” he
said. “Murrelet populations
are stable.”
An uplisting will likely re-
quire private landowners to
submit plans for protecting the
bird to state regulators, despite
assurances the change will
only impact state forests, said
Rick Barnes, OSWA’s presi-
dent.
“We all know that’s not the
way things work,” he said.
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Whales remain a mystery
Whales from Page 1A
developed guidelines, which
are contained in a brochure.
Vessel operators are ad-
vised to stay 100 yards away
from adult whales and 150
yards from calves to let the an-
imals decide where they want
to go and avoid “corralling”
against the shore and not to
spend more than 30 minutes in
a whale’s vicinity.
Torres’ research also found
a “very strong statistical link
between where the whales for-
age and kelp.”
“If you’ve ever seen gray
whales here, they’re often
tucked right into the kelp,
feeding around the kelp beds,”
Torres said.
But, by lowering a GoPro
camera on a stick and a plank-
ton net into the ocean, the re-
searchers discovered another
popular Oregon coast habitat:
The local gray whales enjoy
areas where there are more
amphipods, small shrimp-like
crustaceans.
“This was really surprising
to us,” Torres said. “We aren’t
able to prove they were eating
the amphipods, but it certainly
seems like they prefer the hab-
itat where that amphipod was
more abundant.”
By understanding where
whales congregate during cer-
tain times of the year, scientists
will know which habitats need
to be protected, Torres noted.
In the past four years on
the west coast, occurrences
of whales getting
entangled in fish-
ing gear – especially
Dungeness crab gear -- have
been increasing. Torres said.
The entanglements endanger
both the whales and the sta-
bility of the Dungeness crab
industry, which brings in $63
million a year to Oregon, she
added. Several groups affected
by the problem have organized
the Oregon whale entangle-
ment working group to devel-
op ways to reduce the risk.
Torres’ team also is exam-
ining the long-term impact of
ocean noise on whales. Pre-
liminary data gathered by tak-
ing fecal samples and analyz-
ing cortisol, progesterone and
testosterone hormones from
healthy whales feeding in low
noise levels and other whales
living in high noise levels
should be available in another
year or two, Torres said.
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