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<\/a>John Chapman, a specialist in aquatic invasive species (left), and volunteer Russ Lewis sort through a dumpster full of beach debris in Surfside, Washington, searching for artifacts and species related to the 2011 Japanese tsunami. Photo by Larry Pynn<\/p><\/div>\n
There was a time when Godzilla represented the only unfamiliar Japanese creature to be released upon an unsuspecting North America. Today, all manner of real-life alien invaders may be floating just offshore.<\/p>\n
The Japanese Ministry of Environment estimates that 4.8 million tonnes of tsunami debris washed into the North Pacific; 68 percent sank and 32 percent remained adrift. The last thing Chapman expected was that non-native species might hitchhike their way to the western shores of North America.<\/p>\n
For four decades, the specialist in aquatic invasive species at Oregon State University had maintained that species do not drift across the ocean on floating debris to establish themselves\u2014if they did, both coasts would look the same, and they do not. \u201cWe looked at stuff that washed up on the beaches for years and never saw Asian species, so we said if it was going to happen we would have found it. There were no records of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then, in June 2012, a 188-tonne, 20-meter-long, floating concrete dock traced to the Japanese port city of Misawa washed ashore at Agate Beach, draped in at least 165 living species. The site is only five kilometers from Chapman\u2019s Hatfield Marine Science Center office in Newport.<\/p>\n
The arrival of a Japanese Noah\u2019s ark\u2014a thriving ecosystem up to 20 centimeters thick\u2014triggered a sea change in scientific understanding of aquatic invasive species. \u201cI was not just wrong, I was spectacularly wrong,\u201d Chapman says. \u201cI was in shock, so convinced that couldn\u2019t happen.\u201d He confronts his fallacy every day\u2014a portion of the dock sits outside the marine science center as a monument to the 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that officially killed 15,893 persons, injured 6,152, and left 2,567 missing.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Workers from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife scrape and torch a Japanese dock that floated across the Pacific following the March 2011 tsunami to rid it of sea life. The dock hosted at least 165 living species. Photo by Robin Loznak\/ZUMA Press\/Corbis<\/p><\/div>\n
As the five-year anniversary of the tsunami nears, an international network of scientists is busy identifying species that have arrived aboard the debris and hunting the North American coastline, from Alaska to California and Hawaii, for others that may colonize and wreak havoc. The researchers have already found about 70 species of seaweeds and 240 species of invertebrates and microorganisms living on debris, primarily along Washington and Oregon where most of the work is concentrated. Some of the species are known only from Asia, especially Japan; some naturally occur on both sides of the Pacific; some were previously introduced to North America; some are non-native to Japan; others require more study. Scientists appreciate that even one invader has the potential to cause serious environmental and economic harm. Yet history also shows that most exotics coexist with native species without becoming pests, at least in the short term. Identifying potential insurgents is the daunting challenge, given the continent\u2019s vast, corrugated coastline and the certainty of more debris yet to come.<\/p>\n
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Gathered within a chain-link compound on the Long Beach Peninsula, our small but dedicated crew this morning includes Chapman, his lab technician Marie Barton, and local volunteer Russ Lewis. The moment I cross the line from objective journalist taking notes and photographs to helping out with moving some of the heavier piles of rope, there is no going back.<\/p>\n
\u201cI locked the gate,\u201d Lewis deadpans.<\/p>\n
He is a retired federal worker with the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management who spends up to three hours a day combing the shoreline for debris. During his forays, Lewis found a sign and a tote with identifying marks traced to companies in heavily hit Otsuchi. He was reimbursed US $72 in postage for returning the items to the city, where they became part of a tsunami memorial. One of his more unsettling finds was a female mannequin head carrying the inscription Tokyo Charm. \u201cShe looked a little bedraggled after 15 months at sea\u2014gooseneck barnacles and fuzzy hydroids attached.\u201d Lewis also found a grammar-school toothbrush kit and three slippers\u2014the sort of items that personalize the human horror of the tsunami.<\/p>\n
This particular dumpster includes beach debris found by Lewis and a handful of other volunteers along an 11-kilometer stretch of beach from May through September. \u201cWe\u2019re gonna be digging deep today,\u201d says Lewis, sizing up the task.<\/p>\n
Much of the investigative digging actually takes place on the continent\u2019s Atlantic coast, in the lab of Jim Carlton, professor emeritus of marine sciences with Williams College in Mystic, Connecticut. With the help of two part-time assistants\u2014and participation from individuals, groups, researchers, and Canadian and US government agencies\u2014Carlton has so far recorded about 400 tsunami-debris items bearing Japanese species.<\/p>\n
Carlton and his team sort the specimens by general scientific name\u2014polychaetes, amphipods, bivalve mollusks, sponges, bryozoans, and so on. Then they begin the often-arduous process of species identification. Almost everything goes under the microscope, even mussels several centimeters in length as well as the creepy stuff growing on them. Carlton picks through a large library of scientific literature, enlists the help of an international network of taxonomists in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Australia, and sometimes requests genetic tests. The results give researchers and ocean managers all along the coast an idea of what they\u2019re up against.<\/p>\n
The Japanese government in 2012 contributed $5-million toward cleanup in the United States and $1-million in Canada. In 2014, Japan made a further commitment of more than $1-million annually for three years to the North Pacific Marine Science Organization. The international group parcels out the money, in part, based on research proposals addressing invasive species.<\/p>\n
The cash is paying for Carlton\u2019s research and for the collection of 3,397 \u201csuper sacks\u201d full of debris\u2014oversized plastic bags retrieved mostly from remote Alaskan coastlines by helicopters and from Ucluelet, British Columbia. In November, over 600 volunteers are expected to assemble in Seattle to sort the debris, which was gathered over the past two years and shipped south aboard a barge the size of a football field. The items, already pre-tested for invasives, will get sorted into piles of recyclables and non-recyclables, and personal items will be returned to owners as possible.<\/p>\n
<\/a>Marie Barton, a lab technician at Oregon State University, records potential debris from the 2011 Japanese tsunami in Surfside, Washington. Photo by Larry Pynn<\/p><\/div>\n
Although researchers don\u2019t agree on how much debris has arrived and where, each has a theory. Tom Therriault, a scientist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, senses that most landed south of the Canadian border and draws a bullseye around Oregon and southern Washington. Yet some of the more dramatic pieces of tsunami debris have fetched up along British Columbia\u2019s coastline, which stretches 37,000 kilometers and is largely accessible only by boat. Perhaps most remarkable was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle that came ashore inside a storage container on northern Haida Gwaii in April 2012. The owner proved to be a 29-year-old resident of Yamamoto who\u2019d lost three family members to the tsunami. British Columbians have stumbled over boats, refrigerators, toys, tires, construction wood, and other miscellanea.<\/p>\n
Spotting wave-beaten ghost vessels drifting offshore is one thing, searching for the ocean\u2019s minutia is another. The Canadian government has expanded an existing program that anchors floating square settling plates, made of polyvinyl chloride, at near-shore sites such as docks and marinas. The planktonic life-stage of tunicates, bryozoans, worms, mollusks, and other fouling invertebrates collect on the plates and are later analyzed for their potential to grow into bigger and scarier invasive critters. American states have followed suit.<\/p>\n
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As I find out working with the dumpster crew, filtering out JTMD, or \u201cJapanese tsunami marine debris,\u201d from other ordinary debris washed ashore can be a crude process based in part on hunches. Some items carry obvious Japanese script or identifying marks, while others reveal themselves only after the clingy marine life is scraped away. We place aside smaller, heavily encrusted tires with rims suggestive of Japanese vehicles and reams of shattered plastic, a hint of the violence wrought by the event. I feel almost qualified to do the work after half an hour under Lewis\u2019s tutelage. His experience walking these beaches since 2003 gives him a good sense of what debris looked like before the tsunami. \u201cSo many small-sized floating objects that are different than the usual,\u201d he concludes. \u201cBut you\u2019ll never really know for sure.\u201d Long-range debris tends to come ashore with stormier weather in winter and spring, he\u2019s discovered. Generally, debris with more surface area exposed to the winds also crossed the North Pacific faster.<\/p>\n
Chapman examines a large fishing float with Asian oysters and a calcareous worm, a plastic jerry can with mussels almost certainly from Asia, and a piece of polystyrene displaying multiple peck marks from seabirds. \u201cThey\u2019re eating it,\u201d he observes. All are put aside as tsunami debris.<\/p>\n
Not all non-native species are troublemakers. The Pacific oyster was deliberately introduced to British Columbia from Japan around 1912, eventually becoming a major source of commercial aquaculture and recreational harvesting, and almost no one minds that it doesn\u2019t belong here. Last summer, marine biologist Sandra Lindstrom found a small patch of Pyropia<\/em> seaweed while working out of the Hakai Institute on Calvert Island. It had never been documented in British Columbia before and may be linked to JTMD. The Pyropia<\/em> group is not a fierce competitor in the ecosystem, though, and sushi lovers actually might like to eat it if it does become established.<\/p>\n A foreign species is only deemed \u201cinvasive\u201d if it poses a serious threat to the environment, economy, or human and animal health. The chances of that happening depend on the sheer number of individuals released into the environment\u2014propagule pressure\u2014and the suitability of habitat, including ocean temperature. Because the modern shoreline of Japan was densely populated and highly developed, the tsunami released a far greater amount and diversity of debris\u2014some of it extremely sturdy and capable of surviving the worst oceanic storms\u2014than would have occurred during past centuries. All the large, floating infrastructure, such as docks, have the potential to transport multitudes of those undesirable \u201cpropagules\u201d to North American waters.<\/p>\n The study of tsunami debris and the timing of its arrival has revealed other surprising complexities: scientists now realize that North Pacific currents are far more complex than many thought. The dock found at Agate Beach was one of four unleashed simultaneously by the tsunami. A second one turned up off the Hawaiian island of Molokai in September 2012, but US agencies reportedly lost the dock while bickering over who had responsibility for it. A third dock washed ashore on Washington\u2019s Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary in December 2012, and no one knows the whereabouts of the last one. Chapman now views currents as a series of circulation cells that may catch debris for a period of time until a weather pattern moves it along to another cell\u2014\u201clike marbles going through a maze\u201d\u2014until the debris finally washes ashore.<\/p>\n Researchers also originally thought that debris from the water\u2014boats, docks, buoys, and the like\u2014posed more of a risk for transporting alien species than debris originating on land because it was already covered with organisms. Now they doubt that theory. Three months after the tsunami, Japanese scientists released their first batch of floating transponders to better understand how winds and currents influence the dispersal of debris across the Pacific. The 12 transponders emulated \u201cclean\u201d land-based debris and hugged the Japanese shoreline for several months\u2014which enabled marine life to become attached\u2014before they floated across the North Pacific.<\/p>\n Samuel Chan, another specialist in aquatic invasive species at Oregon State University, in Corvallis, shares his second-floor office with a 75-liter aquarium containing a comet goldfish capable of becoming invasive. Hanging nearby is a painting of a storm on the Oregon coast near Cape Perpetua reminiscent of Hokusai\u2019s famous 1830s woodblock print, Under the Wave off Kanagawa<\/em>\u2014not a tsunami, the researcher is quick to point out.<\/p>\n
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