San Francisco Bay is home to hundreds of invasive species. Many arrived in the ballast water of large ships.

Hundreds of invasive species have been found in San Francisco Bay, according to biologists. That makes the bay one of the most invaded estuaries in the world.

Hoping to restore native fish and wildlife, California has passed the strictest rules in the country to prevent ocean freighters from introducing more foreign species to the bay. But the standards are so tough, officials may not be able to enforce them.

"Let's see we've got one, two, three exotic organisms, four exotic organisms…"

On a muddy beach in Alameda, Biologist Andrew Cohen of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions scoops up a clump of seaweed that’s home to clams, snails, and strange globs.

"Those yellow dots are the eggs, the egg mass of a Japanese sea slug which show up here a few years ago." Almost all of the animals in Cohen's hands are invasive species – originally from places like China, Australia, and the Atlantic.

Listen to the QUEST radio story Combating Bay Invaders

"Anytime I go out in the bay, there's a reasonable chance I'm gonna find something I've never seen in the bay before – something no one has seen on the Pacific coast before. That's just astonishing," says Cohen.

Most of these marine invaders arrived as international hitchhikers. Ships that carry cargo on the open ocean have to be balanced, so they don't tip over. To do that, they fill massive onboard ballast tanks by pumping water in at one port and pumping it out at the next.

"For a long time, people didn't think too much about this, cause it was just water. But eventually, we found that we were moving virtually everything that lived in the sea," Cohen says.

Marine organisms like crabs and snails have tiny free-floating larvae. So, a tank full of ballast water is like a soup of marine life. "They're so effective at dispersing because a single individual might produce a million young."

Some invaders have brought parasites that cause swimmer's itch at local beaches. Other foreign species, like the Asian clam, have altered the entire food web in San Francisco Bay. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to eradicate the worst invasive species. But Cohen says those efforts rarely work. So, the strategy has turned to prevention.

Testing New Treatment Technology

Inside the Golden Bear, a 500-foot ship at the California Maritime Academy in Vallejo, Engineer Bill Davidson switches on the ballast pumps. "The ballast tanks we use are right above us, which are our treatment and control tanks," says Davidson.

Davidson is testing new ballast water treatment technology. The idea is pretty simple – kill the organisms in the water, so they don't spread when the ballast is released. The system has two steps. First the ballast water is filtered. Then, chlorine is added. "And you take this chlorine and you feed it back into the ballast stream and so that will ideally oxidize or kill any live organisms," says Davidson.

The chlorine is neutralized before it’s released by the ship. But getting this system to work is trickier than it seems, because the organisms are very, very small.

In a lab on the ship, Julie Kuo of Moss Landing Marine Labs looks through a microscope at a tiny, cone-shaped plankton. "So right in your center field of view… That's a tintinnid and those guys pretty much get to as large as that."

"As large as that" is about half the width of a human hair. As part of the tests, Kuo counts the organisms in water samples from the treatment process – and, most importantly, sees if they're dead. "If they’re kind of sitting there and you don’t know if they’re alive or dead, you poke them with a probe," says Kuo.

The Frontlines of Regulation

This treatment system is designed to meet international standards that limit the number of living organisms in ballast water. Right now those standards are voluntary.

But California has adopted a goal that’s a thousand times tougher. It applies to all newly-constructed ships starting next January. The only problem is – the technology to meet California’s higher standard isn’t quite ready for prime time.

"We aren’t going to be able to go out there right now and say well, 100% you met the standard no matter what," says Nicole Dobroski with the California State Lands Commission, the agency overseeing the regulation.

She says none of the treatment systems being developed consistently meet California’s standards yet. Still, the state is moving ahead with the regulation.

"We recognize that that’s a challenge, but there's a good reason we wanted it to be a challenge. We wanted them to be innovative. We wanted them to think out of the box."

But ship operators may not have much to worry about if past enforcement policies are any indication. Ships are currently required to exchange their ballast water at least 230 miles from shore if they plan on discharging it in port. But even though hundreds of ships a year are not complying with these requirements, the State Lands Commission has only fined two ships in the past ten years.

"Our goal isn't just to come in and slap a fine on these vessels because we find that isn't necessarily the best approach. We try to work with them as much as possible, make sure they’re educated about all the necessary regulations," says Dobroski.

California's progress is likely to have a big impact on federal efforts as both the US Coast Guard and the EPA develop new national ballast water standards.

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There is no question that sea levels have been steadily rising, and will continue to rise at an increased rate in the future.  So the real question is not, “Will it rise?” but, "How MUCH will it rise, and what can we do about it?”

The sea is rising.  This, in itself, is not news.  The oceans of Earth have been slowly, steadily rising for hundreds of years.  But it’s about to get a lot higher a lot faster, and millions of people – and billions of dollars of infrastructure – are suddenly finding themselves at risk for flooding, storm surge damage, and possible relocation.  How could something that has been a known factor surprise us, unprepared?

Meet Sea Level Rise, the new poster child for climate change.  There is no question that sea levels have been steadily rising, and will continue to rise at an increased rate in the future.  So the real question is not, “Will it rise?” but, "How MUCH will it rise, and what can we do about it?”

As we were just starting research for this story, I attended the SF Bay Decision Maker’s Conference on Sea Level Change.  There was one idea that permeated the entire day’s discussions:

-         You can’t engineer for an unknown amount.

-         Developers are aware of sea level rise, but do not know how to approach the issue. “Tell how much it will rise, and by when, and we can plan for it.”

Of course, it’s just not that straightforward.  The science behind the estimates seems to be uncertain, providing ranges from as little as 12 inches by 2050, to as much as 80 inches by 2100. There is a consensus that the rate of sea level rise has increased in conjunction with the rise of global surface temperatures. The point of uncertainty is what the rate of sea level rise will be in the future. In 2007, German scientist Stefan Rahmstorf developed an empirical method for predicting future sea level rise using the relationship between sea level rise and global mean surface temperature. His estimates of global sea level rise by 2100 range from 10 inches (50 cm) to 55 inches (140 cm) respectively.  Research estimates done for the Governor of California state that sea level will increase between 12 and 17 inches (30 and 45 cm) by 2050 and between 20 and 55 inches (50 and 140 cm) by 2099.

Most estimates show a wide range, depending on how much glaciers and ice caps melt over the next 90 years. The truth is that scientists don’t know how much other environmental factors will contribute to, or slow down, the rate of sea level rise.  In addition, these are global estimates, which are averages and will not represent the exact numbers for specific locations. How much the sea level rises here in San Francisco Bay will not look the same as it will in Bangladesh.

The one thing scientists do agree on, however, is that sea level rise up to 2 meters (78 inches) is not out of the question, but certainly a high estimate. "Although increases of up to two metres this century can't be ruled out, this does not mean that they are inevitable or even likely."

And so we return to the question, “What should we do about it?”  The truth is, we just aren’t sure yet. What we do know are the factors that contribute to the acceleration of sea level rise.  Most scientists will tell you that, before we can fix the problem, we first need to stop the cause.  Otherwise, we’ll never get ahead our heads (and our buildings!) above the water line.

Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, tells us “the good news is that there’s a lot that we could if we’re smart enough to do it in advance. There are a lot of things that we could do to reduce the risks of climate change and sea level rise around the Bay. The first thing we need to do is reduce the severity of climate change. And that’s an issue of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, that’s got to be done at the national level. We’re doing a little bit of it at the California level. It needs to be done at the global level. But whether or not the politicians get their act together and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we’re still going to have to deal with some sea level rise. That’s built into the gases we’ve already put into the atmosphere…But where we get to at the end of the century is going to depend on actions that California or the United States or ultimately the whole globe takes to reduce the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, to reduce the rate of climate change.  If we don’t get our act together, if we don’t do things to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we’re gonna reach a meter of sea level rise or more by the end of the century. And it’s gonna be growing even faster than it is now. But if for some reason we’re able to get a handle on emissions and the world is able to come together, we could slow that rate enormously, and limit the rate of sea level rise to hopefully only a few tens of centimeters. I don't think we’ll be that lucky, but that’s a possibility.”

Watch Going UP:Sea Level Rise in San Francisco Bay television story online.

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Pacific Madrone

Marin will look Baja. Berkeley like Bakersfield.

That's the projection of climatologists for the end of this century, if global warming continues on its current path.

But in trying to determine what California's plant life will look like based on those projections, studies and computer models only go so far. Despite the dire warning raised by this recent plant-loss study, biologists say the reality probably will be a lot worse.

In trying to get your mind around the idea that two-thirds of California's endemic plant species will lose 80 percent of their range by the end of the century, there are two ways to look at it.

The first is that, well, plants will just be different. It's not as if we're going to have barren soil where plants are now. As climate changes and warms, plants will most likely shift to the north. If we're talking an 8.3 degree Celsius shift in the summers, that means a rise of about 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer. Desert plants would move into Bakersfield and the Central Valley, for example. And in the Bay Area, the climate would be more similar to Southern California.

So, one way to think about it is: Plants will migrate or shift to cooler climates, so our endemic plants wouldn't necessarily disappear – they would just shift north.

But there were many factors that were NOT included in the plant-loss projection. And, as study author David Ackerly says, they are sobering.

If plants migrate, where will they go, and how will they get there? They need a certain type of soil, a certain amount of water. Many times, they interact with and need the plants or animals around them to survive; for instance, the gooseberry might need an animal that likes its berries so that its seed can be spread. And they don't just get up and walk north. It's a long, laborious process that can easily be derailed.

During the last Ice Age, plants migrated a thousand miles, Ackerly says, over about a thousand years. So why can't plants here move a hundred miles in a hundred years? Let us count the ways.

So IF the soils are compatible, IF the entire ecosystem of plants and animals can successfully travel north, IF such sites as vernal pools can somehow be created in the north, IF those ecosystems can somehow leapfrog over cities, farms, reservoirs, roads, ranches and other developments and find a compatible area that doesn't already have a robust ecosystem, IF the slow-growing plants can somehow travel a mile a year for the next hundred years, then yes, you'll successfully have a new habitat in a different place farther north.

Biologists suspect that most endemic plant species in California will die, if climate change continues at the same pace. For instance, redwood trees could still be growing in California by the end of the century, because the adults are hardy – but scientists say it will be a forest of the "living dead," meaning that, if no seedlings can make it, those adults will be the last redwoods on earth.

And the plants that come in to replace California plants, they say, will be invasive species – more commonly known as weeds – the fast-growing Mediterranean-climate plants with light, airborne seeds that will take over a barren area.

That's different plant life, true. But it's unlikely, they say, that our madrone or bay ecosystems will actually be re-created a hundred miles away, unless we move them up there ourselves.


View a slideshow of the"Disappearing Plants" Radio Report online, as well as find additional links and resources.

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