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Bulletin Board
A NEW BALLAST WATER BILL
A new Ballast Water Bill, championed by Assemblyman Ted Lempert, would prohibit the discharge of ships' ballast water into California waters without a permit issued by the State Water Resources Control Board, starting April 1, 2000. AB 703 creates a new state-run program to minimize and control the flow of live exotic organisms into California waters. Exotics are increasingly undermining everything from water exports to ecosystem restoration, lending the new bill support from diverse camps, including the Farm Bureau and the Center for Marine Conservation. The bill would also require more formal ballast water reporting on the part of shippers and compliance monitoring on the part of the State Board. Contact: (916)319-2021
A CONSENSUS-BUILDING HANDBOOK
A consensus-building handbook (to be released later this year by Sage Publications) will feature a chapter on the San Francisco Estuary Project and its consensus-based Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) for the Bay and Delta. The chapter draws on a research paper done by U.C. Berkeley's Judith Innes and Sarah Connick, who concluded that the CCMP may be a less significant achievement than other results of the process, including agreements on technical descriptions of the Estuary and methods for measuring water quality, new networks of relationships among participants, education of participants about the Estuary and each other's responsibilities, and other consensus processes that built on the CCMP process. Although, when the CCMP was adopted 1993, there were complaints that the consensus was thin and the prospects for implementation uncertain, researchers concluded that "there's no doubt that the Estuary Project has changed the practices and politics of water management in California."
LAWSUITS OVER FISH AND FROGS
No sooner had the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service finally listed the Sacramento splittail as threatened than the State Water Contractors filed a notice of intent to sue the Service over the listing, claiming that the science underlying the listing was flawed and that abundance of the species is at or near record high levels. Meanwhile, a coalition of environmental groups, led by the Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund, is suing the Service for failing to designate critical habitat for California's celebrated red-legged frog when it listed the species as threatened in 1996. According to the Service's Patricia Foulk, the Service's position is that the Act provides sufficient protection of frog habitat, and that designating habitat would require detailed mapping of frog hold-outs that would actually put the frog in greater peril.
HIP INDICATOR SEARCH
The contest for a "hip" indicator of Estuary health (announced by ESTUARY in December) yielded only three entries. Terry McCrae of Hornblower Cruises suggested the lowering of a standard 10" white dinner plate into the water as an indicator of clarity, which Hornblower apparently does from its dining yachts in Lake Tahoe (in a clean lake, you can see the plate up to 100 feet below).
Judy Dumm of Santa Rosa suggested an annual health message from King Crab, a large crab model or puppet or person inside a crab suit. Dumm's suggestion traces back to her uncle, who as a child in the 1920s asked the question "Who pulls the plug so they can clean San Francisco Bay?"
Eventually, her grandfather began weaving tall tales about King Crab, king of sea life in the Bay; Captain Nimbo of a flying ferryboat; and Joe "Dobe"; a gigantic adobe mudman who is built by a child and comes to life to help pull the plug. Dumm wrote up these family tales in a book called The Flying Ferryboat and visits schools with a King Crab puppet to talk about keeping the Bay clean.
Dale Sweetnam of Cal Fish & Game, meanwhile, suggested putting leading estuarine scientist Wim Kimmerer at the head of pack of kayaks paddling from the Golden Gate to the location of X2 (water managers now manage fresh water outflows to try and keep X2 -the two parts per thousand isohaline of salt to water-within a certain range of positions in Suisun Bay associated with estuarine health and productivity). "The shorter the trip, the better the environment," suggested Sweetnam.
Kimmerer in turn gave his own two cents on all the "ranting and raving" these days about indicators. "The general consensus among scientists working in the system seems to be that there is no such magic index," wrote Kimmerer, pointing out that S.F. Bay's problems are much more diverse and complex than just clarity.
- For the moment, ESTUARY is not declaring a winner (WE NEED MORE ENTRIES!) and extends the deadline to July 1 - the winner gets a life subscription to ESTUARY newsletter. Fax entries to (415)989-9024
UNCONVENTIONAL CRABS
Prickles ran down the spines of the 100 attendees to the March mitten crab conference as they watched a shimmering mass of juvenile crabs - caught on video by German researchers - rise up and crawl out of a river to circumvent a small dam.
"It was unbelievable. It looked like a huge ant hill after it's been disturbed," says Kim Webb of U.S. Fish & Wildlife, one of several sponsors of the Sacramento conference including the S.F. Estuary Project, U.C. Davis and the Western Regional Panel on Aquatic Nuisance Species.
Topics ranged from biocontrols for the swelling population of the Chinese invader (controls viewed with caution because of their potential impacts on native crustaceans) to structural controls, details on the crab's spread and research on the crab's life cycle. Stephan Gollasch, with the Institut fur Meereskunde (marine science) in Germany, presented findings indicating that the crabs greatly increase in numbers every 15 years, after which they decline before their next cyclic increase. Ted Grosholz of U.C. Davis discussed possible parallels between European green and Chinese mitten crab invasions, noting findings that the green crab's impacts in California's Bodega Bay, the eastern U.S., and South Africa have been quite different. Thus, Grosholz speculated, mitten crab habitat use, body size distribution, timing of reproduction, and even diet, may prove different here than in their native Chinese waters.
"The bottom line," says Kim Webb, "is that we still need more information about the crabs before we can come up with a good management plan." Webb and other conference attendees were surprised to learn, after hearing about Denver BurRec's experiments with live crabs under various flows and conditions, that mitten crabs seem to primarily scurry along the bottoms of rivers. "We had no idea what they were doing before," says Webb. One potential control measure in certain situations might be to install angled barriers right along the bottom of intake valves, says Webb.
Now that the agencies have better identified what research and actions are still needed, and who is doing what, says Webb, they will draft a coordinated management plan to send to the National Aquatic Nuisance Species Task Force for adoption, which will hopefully trigger funding for more crab studies and control.
Contact: Kim Webb (209) 946-6400 ext. 311.
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