Puget Sound is an estuary and it's one of the largest on the continent.
Estuaries are productive places.
Here in Puget Sound,
the carbon factories are the macro algal
and kelp communities that are taking all of these nutrients
and minerals that are coming off of the land in our watersheds
and turning it into something that can be used in the food web.
Whether you're talking about mussels or shrimp or crab
or salmon or whales,
they have kelp carbon in them.
And that functionality and that productivity
starts with kelp.
We don't know why,
all of the reasons why kelp has declined.
Kelps were being surveyed
initially because it was important for navigation.
And because of that, we're able to document losses in Puget Sound.
It's those historic areas that right now
we're looking at targeting for some kind of restoration.
We're at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Manchester Research Station.
This is where the Puget Sound Restoration Fund operates
the Ken Chew Center,
which is shellfish hatchery, shellfish research center.
But also it's where our kelp lab facilities are.
This one looks really good. Wow.
One of the things that the lab allows us to do
is to curate and manage a seed bank.
So we will go to a kelp forest and we will make a collection of material
there from the wild kelp, and we'll bring it into the laboratory.
And we can collect the spores that those kelps are producing.
Right now we have roughly 20
populations in Puget Sound of bull kelp that are in our seed bank currently,
and that's what we'll use for our field experiments on the enhancement trials.
We are headed to Point Jefferson.
We're going to go check on our experimental kelp bed.
Between these two bouys here and this is what the Suquamish tribe
calls the Doe Kag Wats estuary.
There is lots of species of kelp that live in Puget Sound.
We're concerned with the canopy species because of its
particular function as structured habitat.
Our historic kelp bed
was right along this stretch of shoreline.
That's the bull kelp.
So that's what we call Nereocystis.
And so we planted that here from seed
that we produced in our lab in February.
It grew from microscopic to what
we see here today in the adult sporophyte.
If it's healthy, we should see
abundant kelp where we planted it.
Generally, if it is doing what the adult should be doing,
which is producing spores
that's the best indicator of health.
Size and shape
and we monitor that over time to see how it grows.
We look at the condition of the blade and whether it's producing a lot of blades.
So we actually go through and enumerate the number of blades.
All right, 28 blades.
Also damage from grazers. There's all kinds of things that like to eat bull kelp.
Plants look good.
They're growing well.
They're right where they should be at the right time.
And they're doing what they're supposed to do, which is to produce the spores
for the natural substrate here.
This site is naturally occurring,
which means no one's planting kelp here.
A piece of cobble.
It's really exciting to see so much that's
creating all the habitat and the other functions of kelp
right along an area where there's hundreds of thousands of people living.
And each crop of bull kelp is an annual crop.
So the one that we see this summer has to sufficiently
seed the bottom with kelp for there to be kelp next year.
And so how do we cause that paradigm?
How do we facilitate that?
That's the work that we have to do right now.