Did you know that a large percentage of oysters that are consumed on the entire West Coast has lived in Humboldt County at some point in its life?As an employee of the North Coast Growers’ Association, I have visited my fair share of farms; I’ve seen everything from cows getting milked by robots to an Albert Etter apple orchard, filled with trees of unique varieties that aren’t available anywhere else in the world. However, despite living in Eureka, I had never seen an oyster farm until earlier this month.I was lucky enough to get to tour Hog Island Oyster Company’s facility on the Samoa peninsula, and was blown away with how little I knew about farming oysters in Humboldt Bay, so I want to share some tidbits of that information with you.Apparently, oysters love Humboldt Bay. If happy cows come from California, happy oysters definitely come from Humboldt Bay. One reason is the expansive mud flats that get exposed during low tide help warm the water up, which in turns helps to produce more plankton for oysters to eat. Another reason is that the water that enters Humboldt Bay only stays in the Bay for a couple of days before getting pulled out to the ocean. This process keeps the water quality very high. If you compare this to other bays like San Diego Bay, water can stay in the bay for up to several months so it quickly circulates any disease that could affect the oyster population.The ideal growing conditions for oysters is what led Hog Island Oyster Co. to move their main breeding facility to Humboldt. “How do you breed an oyster?” I’m glad you asked!Read More
When I was a kid, my babysitter was a witch. She was a typical pointy-hatted, spell-casting witch. But she was also a marine biology major at Humboldt State University, so she’d take me on her broom to the beach after school to look for washed-up stuff.One day she said, “Look, my lovely, the beach is covered in Satan’s testicles!”Thousands of marble-sized clear blobs were washing in. She said, “Sorry, they are actually called ‘comb jellies.’ See, I used to date a guy named Satan, so I knew I couldn’t trust him. I cast a spell so that if he ever cheated on me, his testicles would turn into exploding glass marbles engineered to shred his scrotum. Um, this species of comb jelly looks like our common Pacific sea gooseberry (Pleurobrachia bachei).”Keep Reading
A mechanical failure during last week’s emergency repair work to a damaged Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District (HBMWD) transmission pipeline caused chlorinated water to spill into Janes Creek, resulting in the death of more than 250 fish, including trout, sculpin and Coho salmon, according to district staff.Contractors for the HBMWD had almost finished repairing a major water transmission line last Tuesday evening when the spill occurred, according to General Manager Michiko Mares. She explained that a temporary pipeline had been installed to drain chlorinated water from the pipe as part of the disinfection process that’s performed prior to bringing the transmission pipeline back into service. The temporary line ruptured, causing roughly 13,500 gallons of chlorinated water to flow into Janes Creek over a 15-minute period, Mares said.District employees promptly notified the appropriate regulatory agencies, Mares said, including the California Office of Emergency Services, the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board and the Humboldt County Division of Environmental Health, which serves as our region’s Certified Unified Program Agency (CUPA).Keep Reading
One morning a week, Stefan Kiesbye makes the drive from his home in Santa Rosa to one of the beaches around Bodega Bay, to pick up trash.After dropping his wife at an airport shuttle early Sunday morning, Kiesbye headed out to Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay. Arriving an hour before sunrise, he was greeted by a chorus of sea lions barking from the end of the jetty.At the westernmost tip of the beach, some 50 feet above the waterline, he spied a large creature out of the corner of his eye. In recent years, Kiesbye has encountered several deceased sea lions at Doran. But this was a different animal: a stranded fish, oval in shape, roughly six feet long and three feet across.Kiesbye, a novelist and English professor at Sonoma State University, wasn’t sure what he was seeing. This strange fish, its small mouth far out of proportion with the rest of its body, had neither a tail, so far as he could tell, nor “back fin.”He was looking at the body of a hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta – derived from the Latin word tectus, meaning hidden – a species whose very existence has only been known since 2017. That’s when it was first described by a group of researchers led by Dr. Marianne Nyegaard of New Zealand.Keep Reading
Humboldt Bay in Northern California is experiencing the fastest rate of relative sea-level rise on the entire West Coast of the United States. Already, the streets and yards in King Salmon, a former fishing village 100 miles south of the Oregon border, regularly flood during particularly high tides. It has made preparing for and adapting to sea-level rise (SLR) a matter of local urgency. And there’s no shortage of agencies and institutions working on it.In fact, when two California Sea Grant-funded researchers recently listed every entity involved in SLR planning in Humboldt Bay, they counted over 30, including two cities — Arcata and Eureka — a regional harbor district, a county, fifteen federal and state agencies, three Indigenous Tribes as well as various academic, conservation and business groups.This plethora, however, harbors a dilemma: With so many cooks stirring the sea-level rise pot, how can a strategy evolve that is cohesive and practical and serves all those affected? When Kristen Orth-Gordinier, then a California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellow, and Laurie Richmond, an extension specialist with California Sea Grant and co-chair of the Cal Poly Humboldt Sea Level Rise Institute, put this question to the area’s coastal professionals, most were stumped. “I don't think any of us know,” answered one.Yet, there was a “near universal agreement […] that some form of regional coordination on SLR was necessary,” Orth-Gordinier and Richmond write in a paper published this summer in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. And after formally interviewing close to four dozen coastal professionals and surveying more than a hundred, the two researchers zeroed in on what many respondents saw as some of the most promising strategies to achieve SLR-coordination around Humboldt Bay.Keep Reading
