Washington State Magazine

Once Karen Lippy's students have finished counting benthic invertebrates as water-quality indicators, they pretty well understand how things work in the Hood Canal ecosystem.

Karen Lippy ’81 watches, bemused, as a couple of students swish nets around in the small stream we’re standing next to. They’re just starting to hone their technique for gathering benthic (bottom-living) invertebrates. Lippy gives them some brief instruction. “And tomorrow grab the bigger nets.”

Regardless, invertebrates are showing up in the inadequate nets. “I got bunches of bugs,” says one boy.

“Here” is the Theler Wetlands Education Center in Belfair, at the head of Hood Canal. Sam Theler had left his land to the North Mason School District. Originally this spot was to be a ball field. But that was nixed by the Corps of Engineers, because it would have involved filling in a wetland. So it became instead the current 155-acre education site with what is now a salmon-bearing stream which, due to the efforts of Lippy’s aquatic biology students, has 10 years of data affixed to it.

The stream is only a mile or so long. But now there’s a hatchery upstream run by the Belfair Elementary School, which annually sends over 100,000 chum downstream into Hood Canal. Lippy and her students started putting salmon carcasses in the stream, as nutrient sources, and now the Coho have come back naturally.

It wasn’t long ago in geologic time that this area of Puget Sound was scoured by glaciers. Twelve or fifteen thousand years is scant time to build soil from rock. “We're actually standing on material from Canada,” says Lippy, referring to the nutrient-poor glacial soil of the area.

What little soil nutrients that had built up over the last few thousand years were generally depleted in early logging of the area. Clearcutting was traditionally followed by burning.

The only nutrient sources for the local ecosystem are the alder tree, which is nitrogen-fixing, and salmon. The salmon carcass as a nutrient source moves through the whole system through animals, says Lippy. Analyses have shown evidence of marine-derived nutrients in 137 species. So the health of the system, she says, is directly related to the health of the salmon runs that come back up the streams to spawn. Salmon don't do well swimming up a foodless stream. When the salmon nutrients were returned to this stream, so followed the live salmon.

Herein lies the irony of Hood Canal. Whereas the land surrounding Hood Canal is nutrient deficient, the canal itself appears to be too nutrient rich, causing the algal blooms that plague it in the summer. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and rot, consuming oxygen in the process, leading, with other factors, to the dearth of dissolved oxygen that suffocates fish.

Likely culprits such as septic system contamination and agricultural runoff aside, assessing the absolute cause of the problems of Hood Canal is difficult because of its peculiar nature. It is actually not a canal at all, but a glacier-carved fjord, a long, narrow inlet of Puget Sound.

What keeps the main Sound as clean as it is, in spite of its 3.8 million residents, is the continuous exchange of water between the Sound and the Pacific, the twice-a-day tidal flush. Most inlets benefit from this flush also. But the flush of tides in Hood Canal is partially blocked by a massive sill near its mouth. Although the canal is deep, because of that sill only so much water can flow in and out with the tides. So deeper portions of the canal, particularly below the sharp elbow where it turns back east, suffer from low dissolved oxygen.

Belfair Estuary. What keeps the main Sound as clean as it is . . . is the twice-a-day tidal flush. But the flush of tides in Hood Canal is partially blocked by a massive sill near its mouth.

There arises then the major question of whether this low dissolved oxygen would be a problem, even if the canal were not lined with thousands of homes and their septic tanks and lawn fertilizers. Or if storm runoff weren’t flushing automobile-deposited hydrocarbons off the roads and parking lots around it. In spite of those thousands of homes, there is no sewage treatment plant anywhere on Hood Canal—except at Alderbrook, the luxury resort owned by Jeff and Tricia ’78 Raikes.

A well-functioning septic tank with a well-functioning drainfield in suitable soil works pretty well at containing the more directly pathogenic parts of human sewage. What a conventional septic system does not do, says Bob Simmons, is stop most of the nitrogen in the waste from filtering downstream and percolating through the groundwater. Simmons is chair of Mason County Extension and a water-quality educator. Nitrogen, which makes up 78 percent of the atmosphere, is good stuff in appropriate forms and amounts. But where it accumulates in too great a quantity in plant-accessible forms, it causes major problems, such as eutrophication and the resulting low dissolved oxygen.

About half of the students in the North Mason School District will go through the classes taught at the Theler wetlands.

“This class depends on the weather,” says Lippy. “In the winter we do things like build nitrogen-cycle models. We’ll go from this unit into water-quality studies for about three weeks. They’ll learn how to analyze data, how to take data, and become certified in the lab.”

Even though Lippy pointedly keeps politics out of the classroom, still, once her students have finished counting benthic invertebrates as water-quality indicators, they pretty well understand how things work in such an ecosystem. She runs through the phases of environmental education. First thing, she says, you have to have this basic awareness that it’s there. Understanding leads to valuing. And finally, stewardship.

Does that understanding make its way into the community, where knowledge can be converted to action and prevention?

"It's difficult to measure what students do once they leave school and the effects they have on their families' practices," she says. "We suspect it is positive, even if it cannot be measured."

Regardless, she is undaunted. And a remarkable number of her students have gone on to be scientists.

We’ve left the creek and have moved to the edge of the wetlands near the head of the canal. One of the students has brought Lippy a dragonfly nymph, which she identifies.

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