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Tough Choices - Mudflat Invadors Threaten Birds and Oysters
One woman's Leonardo DiCaprio is another woman's pest. While this certainly applies to men, it also helps to understand the strange case of Spartina alterniflora in Willapa Bay, Washington. Willapa Bay is linked to San Francisco Bay through a delicate tracery of shorebird migrations along the Pacific coast and, like its California counterpart, is losing rich mudflats to this invading smooth cordgrass. Willapa also sustains oyster farmers who fear the loss of the mudflats where they grow their crop. Bay Area biologists and bureaucrats embarking on their own fight against invasive plant species are looking to Willapa Bay for possible solutions - and problems.
"The infestation is infinitely larger in Willapa Bay than it is in San Francisco Bay," says Janie Civille of the Washington Department of Natural Resources, one of several agencies battling the mudflat invader. Civille rattled off a litany of measures her department has taken to curb the grass, ranging from low-tech, non-herbicidal techniques in the beginning to the current use of airboats and aerial spraying. Her department spends about $80,000 annually to control Spartina alterniflora, and she says she needs three times the money to do the job right.
If Fritzie Cohen has her way, Civille won't get it. Cohen, who owns a hotel and small oyster farm with her husband Ed, is against the use of herbicides in general and vehemently against them in Willapa Bay in particular. As part of the Ad-Hoc Coalition for Willapa Bay, the Cohens have proved formidable opponents. Fritzie Cohen, who has a law degree, once worked for Ralph Nader; her husband was a Washington Post reporter and Congressional aide.
Despite their environmental sympathies, the Cohens are pitted against groups like The Nature Conservancy, who favor the eradication of alien species. Several years ago, Cohen says her group negotiated a settlement with the state, Friends of the Earth, and the Shoalwater Indian tribe that would have made the use of the herbicide Rodeo experimental. Soon after that, the legislature, with the urging of the Conservancy, declared a state of emergency in Willapa Bay. The settlement became moot.
Cohen believes Spartina alterniflora has beneficial uses, including erosion prevention, and may have medicinal qualities. She feels the threat of its continued spread is overblown and is unconcerned about the potential effects on migratory shorebirds or oyster farms. She's far more concerned about the surfactants added to Rodeo to make it usable aquatically, which she says have been shown to clog the gills of imperiled fish species such as sturgeon and salmon.
Civille disagrees that the threat to shorebirds and oyster farms is overblown - what with 6,000 acres of open mudflats lost to smooth cordgrass colonies to date. She's also worried that the cordgrass provides increased habitat for exotic green crabs, a particularly voracious predator that has appeared in her bay. Civille, a plant taxonomist who specializes in endangered species of grasses, says that reasonable efforts to control invaders in Willapa Bay have been hamstrung by "non-stop legal appeals" from the Ad-Hoc Committee.
"We are the last huge open mudflats after Gray's Harbor," says Civille. "We are losing our shorebird habitat rapidly; the mudflat level is moving from three and four foot tidal elevations to eight and nine foot elevations..."
Mudflats are the distinguishing factor of Willapa Bay, which makes it quite different from San Francisco Bay. With 47,000 acres of mudflats out of its total 80,000 acres, "the majority of the bay is exposed twice a day," says Civille. "It reminds me of being out on a desert playa (dry lake) an hour after a rain. Everything is glistening and wet."
Although oyster farmers have used herbicides extensively in Willapa Bay, the emphasis by environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Ecotrust, an Oregon-based group, has been on keeping a resource-extraction economy alive, partly as a means to control real estate development. That means tolerating a certain amount of pollution, both from herbicides and logging. It also means keeping the bay's mudflats intact.
If the mudflats decline enough to impact the bay's migratory shorebirds - which include grebes, geese, peeps and pintails - the greatest fear around Willapa Bay is that the finger-pointing will increase, but the action won't.
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