 By SUSAN GORDON Tacoma News Tribune March 24, 2008
That's where the aliens, sponge look-alikes with a record of smothering marine life, established a foothold in Quartermaster Harbor. The culprit is called Didemnum, a tunicate, or sea squirt, that hails from Japan. Tunicates -- named for their cloaks or tuniclike exteriors -- are filter feeders that grow in places where anemones, sea cucumbers and other bottom-feeding organisms live. Like terrestrial invaders -- think Scotch broom and Himalayan blackberries -- non-native tunicates can crowd out the competition for nutrients and space. The problem varieties are native to Asia. People first noticed them in the Sound in 1998, but no one knows exactly how or when they arrived. "People tend to ignore tunicates until they are so abundant they can't be ignored any longer," said Gretchen Lambert, a Seattle marine biologist who has studied invasive tunicates all over the world. Tunicates might have come to the Sound by way of international trade or the long-abandoned practice of importing shellfish seed from overseas. It's also possible that some varieties came from British Columbia, Lambert said. Several years ago, biologists and scuba divers began to worry about how disruptive the foreign species might become. Beginning in February 2006, state officials targeted non-native tunicates as an enemy of the Sound. Since then, they've allocated $750,000 to stop the spread. Some of that money pays the salary of Larry LeClair, a state Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist. It was his idea to experiment with the salad-dressing ingredient -- acetic acid, which gives vinegar its taste and smell -- at King County's Dockton Park. King County officials closed the docks on Quartermaster Harbor for nearly two weeks in mid-February so state Fish and Wildlife officials could eradicate the tunicates there. LeClair turned Dockton Park's 20 finger docks into a field laboratory with the backing of his boss, biologist Allen Pleus, aquatic-nuisance-species unit coordinator. "It's been a great testing ground for different methods of removal," said Pleus, who is putting together the state's tunicate-management plan. Didemnum, sometimes called colonial tunicate, is one of three alien sea squirts that pose a serious threat to the Sound, state officials said. The other two are Styela clava, or club tunicate, and Ciona savigni, or transparent tunicate. Karlista Rickerson, a scuba diver who lives on Maury Island, first noticed Didemnum at the docks last October. By December, she said, "they were everywhere." "They look like a yellow sponge, draped and growing over everything. If anything is hanging down, they just grow all over it," she said. Didemnum is likely the most widespread of the non-native sea squirts in the Sound. In 2003, a scuba diver who was also a marine biologist first noticed the species at the Edmonds Underwater Park, a diving hotspot, where it had carpeted a sunken boat. Later, volunteer divers removed it. Since then, hundreds of recreational divers have been trained to look for invasive tunicates. "There isn't a week that goes by that I don't get an e-mail from somebody who thinks they saw something," said Janna Nichols, a Vancouver, Wash., diver and conservationist who coordinated the program for the Reef Environmental Education Foundation. Winter is the best time to remove tunicates because they appear dormant and don't sexually reproduce, experts said. However, tunicates also spread by cloning. So divers bag up tunicates and remove them from the water. "If you let chunks go, they go off and form new colonies," Nichols said. Didemnum, in particular, has proved particularly difficult elsewhere. In 2003, scientists discovered it had colonized a 6.5-square-mile area of the Georges Bank, historically New England's primary fishing grounds.
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