5/11 Tatoosh Is, fish farms, suing oil, kokanee, BC pipe, Kitsap shores, marble butterfly, big fish baby fish

Tatoosh Island [Wikipedia]

Tatoosh Isand
An island and group of islands off the northwest tip of the Olympic Peninsula. While ta-toosh is a Chinook jargon word meaning "breast," derived from the eastern Chippeway, a similar word to-tooch, meaning "thunder bird" exists in the Wakashan language spoken by the Nootka Indians on Vancouver Island, of which the Makah are the southern branch. Though from the air the cape area is vaguely breast-shaped in outline, it is more logical that the Makah took the name from their own language rather than from trade jargon. (Washington State Place Names)

Pacific Salmon Foundation calls for contained fish farms, saying wild salmon need protection
The foundation created to conserve and rebuild Pacific salmon stocks is calling for a switch from open net-pen aquaculture to closed containment systems in order to protect wild salmon returning to B.C. waterways. The Pacific Salmon Foundation says in a news release that open-net salmon farming poses biological risks to the abundance and diversity of already depleted wild Pacific salmon. In rejecting open-net systems, the foundation says the federal and provincial governments should put wild Pacific salmon first and manage any risk of disease transfer from farmed salmon. The foundation says its conclusions stem from recent scientific reports, critically low returns of Fraser River sockeye and struggling populations of chinook, coho and steelhead. A full transition to land-based aquaculture will take time, so the foundation recommends that the first priority should be removal of open-net farms from the migratory routes of wild salmon, especially Fraser River sockeye. (CBC)

King County sues big oil companies for downplaying global warming
Five major oil companies for years deliberatively sought to downplay and discredit scientific warnings about the risks of global warming, alleges a lawsuit filed Wednesday by King County. The Superior Court lawsuit names BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell as defendants, and seeks financial compensation to help pay for the costs of coping with sea-level rise, extreme weather and other effects of climate change. The lawsuit faults the oil companies for intentionally producing and marketing massive quantities of fossil fuels that they know will exacerbate global warming, and alleges that this conduct amounts to “a continuing trespass onto county property.” Hal Bernton reports. (Seattle Times)

Extinction could be a hot summer away for the little red fish of Lake Sammamish
The lake's populations of kokanee, a variety of sockeye salmon that never leaves fresh water, often fluctuate. But they have plummeted drastically in the past four years. Just 19 of them headed upstream from Lake Sammamish to spawn last fall. Five years ago, that number exceeded 18,000.... City, county, tribal and nonprofit leaders announced a package of projects to restore kokanee habitat and revive the little red fishes' populations. John Ryan reports. (KUOW)

Judge in pipeline-protest case rejects 'defence of necessity' application http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/judge-in-pipeline-protest-case-rejects-defence-of-necessity-application
The judge hearing the case of protesters arrested at Kinder Morgan’s Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project on Thursday rejected the argument of a protester who claimed he was compelled to disobey a court injunction to prevent a greater crime. Tom Sandborn, who was arrested at the Burnaby work site March 19 and is accused of criminal contempt of court, applied to be able to use the so-called “defence of necessity” during his trial scheduled for June. He told the judge that committing a “smaller” crime by violating the injunction was necessary to prevent the “bigger” crime that the pipeline represented. Sandborn, a professional writer, argued that the pipeline expansion represented a crime to First Nations land claims, a crime against the environment and a crime against the local residents who are threatened by fire-safety risks associated with the work. But in a ruling released Thursday, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Kenneth Affleck rejected Sandborn’s arguments. Keith Fraser reports. (Vancouver Sun) See also: Al Gore condemns Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion on Twitter  (Canadian Press)

Sorry, Kitsap, we don't have the country's longest coastline 
Several counties, including Kitsap, claim to have the most shoreline in the country. Only one can be right. All of them are wrong.  For years, county boosters and others have peddled the misnomer that Kitsap County, which has roughly 250 miles of shoreline, possesses the longest coastline in the United States. But an analysis by the Kitsap Sun shows it's not even the longest in the state, let alone the entire country. The inaccuracy has been used to woo job applicants, in tourism campaigns and to make the case for a Kitsap Transit-operated fast ferry. Josh Farley and Tad Sooter report. (Kitsap Sun)

How Luck, Curiosity And Teamwork Led To The Rediscovery Of Washington’s Rare Island Marble Butterfly
It would be a bit of a stretch to call zoologist John Fleckenstein a beginner.  He recently retired from a long career as a kind of wildlife detective. He worked with Washington State’s Natural Heritage Program, looking for and studying the behaviors of all kinds of rare creatures. But he was relatively new to the Pacific Northwest in the late 1990s. He had just relocated from the mid-west and wanted to get out and explore. He needed to “learn the butterflies” here.  And he had to rely on the help of others who had deeper knowledge of that field when he and a colleague embarked on a project to establish baseline data for the inventory they were creating.... Fleckenstein was drawn to the rugged beauty of the San Juan Islands. He collected a bunch of butterflies on a beach near American Camp, a National Historical Park on the south end of San Juan Island, in the heart of the Salish Sea. As it turned out, that work brought in an extremely rare specimen. The Island Marble Butterfly was thought to be extinct until 1998, when Fleckenstein netted two of these small white butterflies, which get their name from the bright green camouflage pattern on the underside of their wings. Bellamy Pailthorp reports. (KNKX)

The Bigger The Mother Fish, The More Babies She Has
When it comes to motherhood, at least if you’re a fish, big is better. Bigger fish produce more far more offspring pound for pound than smaller fish. And that can mean more on your plate. The new research comes from a team in Australia and Panama and reinforces fishing practices that protect larger fish as well as marine protected areas, which are like fish “sanctuaries” in the ocean. The researchers set out to see how much of an advantage size was in having babies. “So we went and gathered every bit of data we could for every kind of fish that grew in the ocean,” says biologist Dustin Marshall of Monash University. (Well, not every kind, but 342 species.) It’s been known that for some fish species, being a bigger female means you’ll have more eggs — a lot more eggs. But the surprising thing that Marshall’s team found was that bigger fish produce “massively more offspring and larger offspring than smaller fish,” Marshall says. As fish grew larger, female fertility grew even faster. Christopher Joyce reports. (NPR)


Now, your weekend tug weather--
West Entrance U.S. Waters Strait Of Juan De Fuca-  547 AM PDT Fri May 11 2018   
TODAY  W wind 5 to 15 kt becoming NW 10 to 20 kt in the  afternoon. Wind waves 1 to 3 ft. W swell 8 ft at 14 seconds. 
TONIGHT  W wind 10 to 20 kt becoming SW to 10 kt after  midnight. Wind waves 1 to 3 ft subsiding to 1 ft or less after  midnight. W swell 7 ft at 13 seconds. 
SAT  E wind to 10 kt becoming NW in the afternoon. Wind waves  1 ft or less. W swell 8 ft at 13 seconds. 
SAT NIGHT  W wind 5 to 15 kt in the evening becoming light.  Wind waves 2 ft or less. W swell 8 ft at 13 seconds. 
SUN  E wind to 10 kt in the morning becoming light. Wind waves  1 ft or less. W swell 7 ft at 12 seconds.
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