Toby McLeod grew up on a fishing boat. Before he could walk, he said, he swears he remembers dozing off in bed and waking up among fishing gear, his father having carried him aboard in the early morning darkness.
McLeod’s father and grandfather were both tribal fishermen; his father started at the age of 11, in 1957. On fishing trips, he and his dad would take their boat up to Cattle Point, a lookout on the southeastern tip of San Juan Island, the second-largest island in the San Juan Archipelago in Washington’s Puget Sound. There, in the heart of Samish traditional territory, grassy dunes rose from the calm sea water, ringed with jagged glacier-carved rocks. Just offshore, thick kelp stalks reached up from under the surface, connected to bulb-shaped heads and slick, hairlike fronds that swayed in the current, like kite tails.
“As a tribal fisherman, the existence of kelp has always been important. It’s where you go fishing,” McLeod said. His father would tell him stories about elders parking canoes on huge floating kelp islands, above a wealth of forage fish.
Puget Sound boasts 17 species of kelp, but despite its historical ubiquity — McLeod said that kelp and eelgrass used to be almost annoyingly plentiful — kelp beds are becoming increasingly rare. Across the South and Central Sound, bull kelp populations have decreased by two-thirds since the 1870s, according to a 2021 study published in PLOS ONE.
McLeod wants to know why. After working as a crab fisherman as a teenager, he studied oceanography at the University of Washington, then became a technician at the Samish Department of Natural Resources. Early in his tenure, kelp became a source of concern for the tribe. Samish elders reported difficulties finding fronds, which are traditionally used to envelop salmon before cooking. The department started documenting the places where kelp once flourished, and eventually, McLeod helped assemble a dive team to study it. The Samish Department of Natural Resources wants to understand why kelp is disappearing in parts of the San Juan Islands, hoping to bring it back. “Trying to understand what’s going on is the first step in the process,” McLeod said.
ON A LATE October day, a Samish Department of Natural Resources boat streaked across the cobalt-blue waters of Puget Sound, kicking up briny seawater. On a narrow channel between Lopez Island and a small grassy islet, bull kelp peered over the ocean surface, their spherical, golden heads bobbing in the boat’s wake.
Perched on the edge of the boat in a dry suit and hot pink flippers, Jennie De La Cruz, a technician and dive lead at the Samish Department of Natural Resources, waited for the current to settle. The engines quieted as the boat came to a standstill atop a kelp bed a few hundred feet from the exposed volcanic bedrock of Watmough Head, a lookout on the southeastern tip of Lopez. Compared to elsewhere in the Sound, the kelp in this bed appeared healthy.
“As a tribal fisherman, the existence of kelp has always been important. It’s where you go fishing.”
As they prepared to enter the frigid waters, De La Cruz and fellow researcher Charlie Donahue donned masks and checked their air hoses and regulators. Their goal was to anchor a sensor to the sea floor, where bull kelp clung to the rocky bed. The sensor, a rusty tube as thick as a forearm, would measure the water’s pH and temperature; in a month, De La Cruz and Donahue would retrieve it and download its data. The Samish Department of Natural Resources also does Reef Check surveys, employing the nonprofit Reef Check Foundation’s standard protocol to monitor kelp beds. Citizen divers across the world conduct these surveys documenting the extent and density of reefs and kelp beds, as well as the sediment, fish and invertebrates.
De La Cruz called the time: 2:45. Splash time. “Pool’s open,” she said. “Dive, dive, dive.” She and Donahue rolled backward off the side of the boat into the water.
The sensor is one of six the Samish Department of Natural Resources maintains in Puget Sound in locations like this, both in places with robust kelp beds, as well as in areas where it’s no longer thriving. Kelp’s importance in the ecosystem is hard to overstate. A recent study in Aquatic Conservation confirmed that endangered and threatened species like young salmon depend on kelp, while rockfish, sea stars, urchins and shellfish rely on it for shelter.
Kelp is a staple of Samish cuisine and culture. Traditionally, it has been used in medicines, and its hollow, gas-filled bulbs have been used to hold eulachon, or candlefish, oil, which was burned for heating and light, and also have been used to make rattles for children. The Samish tell the story of the Maiden of Deception Pass, who married a man of the sea to ensure that her people retained access to the seafood bounty of Puget Sound. Her hair, the kelp, trails the water as she watches over her people.
HISTORICAL DATA on kelp in Puget Sound is scant, explained Helen Berry, a coastal ecologist with the Washington Department of Natural Resources, and that makes conservation decisions difficult. “To understand our environment, we need to be able to move our baseline back in time and to be able to talk about what’s happened in the last century,” she said.
So, the Samish turned to their elders. In 2017, McLeod handed his father and uncle a map and asked them to trace the places where they’d seen bull kelp thrive in the past. The team merged McLeod’s map with aerial imagery and concluded that bull kelp had declined by about 36% overall across Samish traditional territory from 2006 to 2016.
Some places saw no decline, or even an increase, however, while others saw a 70% to 80% loss, said Todd Woodard, the tribe’s infrastructure and resources executive director. The Samish Department of Natural Resources team is still analyzing the data collected in 2022, hoping to understand whether rising temperatures and changing pH levels can help explain why some kelp beds are shrinking.
Rising temperatures are thought to be one of the biggest stressors. Puget Sound is warming rapidly, and recent research suggests that kelp are unlikely to grow or survive when temperatures consistently reach about 60 degrees Fahrenheit, as some sites already have.
The department has added its data to the Kelp Vital Signs Indicator, a state-run tool that officials use to monitor the extent and health of kelp beds and to make conservation decisions, including whether and where to designate marine protected areas.
IN THEORY, kelp could recover quickly, given the right conditions. The Samish Department of Natural Resources is partnering with an environmental nonprofit called Puget Sound Restoration Fund, which has successfully planted kelp on long lines of string anchored to the ocean floor. In partnership with the Suquamish Tribe, Puget Sound Restoration Fund started replanting kelp in 2018 at Doe-Kag-Wats, an estuary in central Puget Sound where the now-vanished seaweed once grew in thick rafts, and, in 2020, kelp reached the surface for the first time in almost three decades. More recently, the group has had tentative success in the South Sound. In 2022, researchers found that a kelp bed near Squaxin Island had declined by 97% over the previous 10 years. The Squaxin Island Tribe worked with Puget Sound Restoration Fund to attempt restoring it in March 2023, and that summer, the kelp on their lines sprang to life. But whether this technique can reseed kelp beds on the ocean floor remains unknown.
Bull kelp declined by about 36% overall across Samish traditional territory from 2006 to 2016.
For now, the Samish Department of Natural Resources is still working to understand where and why kelp are disappearing. Later, it can decide where to focus restoration efforts. The department hopes to start a pilot restoration in the San Juan Islands within the next few years, and the temperature data may help. If sites are consistently reaching temperatures above 60 degrees, kelp might have to be planted elsewhere. But there are many other factors involved in choosing a site, including water quality and the invasive seaweed sargassum, which competes with kelp for light and nutrients.
To McLeod, the Samish Department of Natural Resources’ kelp work is part of its larger mission to preserve, enhance and protect the natural environment in traditional Samish territory. “The big picture idea is we’re trying to create a positive impact in our community,” McLeod said. But there’s still a lot to learn. “The only thing we can do is take things one step at a time.”
Natalia Mesa is an editorial fellow for High Country News based in Seattle, Washington, covering the Northwest. Email her at natalia.mesa@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Reviving the Samish Tribe’s kelp.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
