December 18 marked the end of a 90-day exposure study. During this time, we exposed the mussel Mytilus Californianus to regular doses of the drug, Fluoxetine which is the active ingredient in Prozac, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant. For this project, we wanted to determine if environmentally relevant levels of fluoxetine affect the mussels’ biological functions, namely their ability to grow and clear algae from the water column. We set up the experiment with different exposure levels to cover a spectrum of concentrations measured in water samples worldwide.  We wondered if the higher exposure levels would cause more disruption to the biological functions we were measuring. We were most interested in whether fluoxetine affects the mussels ability to clear algae from the water. The reason is because this important function, when magnified across an area of mussel bed, has been shown to be an important ecosystem service. While mussels are an important fishery on their own, some might argue that their role in the rocky intertidal community far exceeds their value as seafood. Since mussels are sessile filter-feeders they filter the water of algae, excess nutrients, and frankly anything in the water that passes by their gills. This makes them highly vulnerable to contamination from toxins in the environment. As other organisms consume mussels (e.g. sea stars and whelks) any contaminant stored in their tissues could accumulate in the tissues in higher trophic organisms. Run off that contain the chemical residues of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) could affect marine life dramatically, and warrants more intensive study.

While there are numerous studies that show negative effects of PPCPs on aquatic organisms, they are mostly acute toxicity studies lasting only 7-10 days. Very few have done chronic exposure trials lasting longer than 30 days, and even fewer have looked at marine organisms. We wanted our study to mimic how fluoxetine could be persistent in the rocky intertidal environment. Often contaminants enter the coast through ‘pulse’ events, where rain drives more run-off and the compounds are essentially ‘flushed’ into estuaries and neighboring nearshore communities. We housed our mussels in tanks and dosed the mussels with fluoxetine every 10 days, to mimic these pulse events rather than constant exposure at the same concentration. We coordinated our measurements around the days we dosed the tanks. We measured mussel clearance rates using a Coulter Cell Counter. This involved feeding the mussels and taking water samples just after feeding and another sample 3 hours after the first sample was taken. The cell counter allowed us to process each water sample in under 15 seconds, which was terrific given that each algal sample day yielded 60 samples that needed immediate processing! We also measured growth by taking the length and width of each mussels every 30 days. While not as exciting as algal clearance rates, we wanted this baseline data to see if this fluoxetine could affect mussel growth. On days 30, 60, and 90 we harvested mussels to save their tissues for additional biological and chemical analyses.  We were interested in how mussels body condition might be affected, so we compared the biomass of tissues necessary for the gonadosomatic index.

Currently, we are in the beginning stages of another experiment that will assess how mussels ability to induce defenses (e.g. thicker shells) in response to predator cues may be affected by the presence of fluoxetine in the water. This experiment should be finished in April or May. Also, our undergraduate student Dylan Dayrit who has been assisting with sample processing throughout the course of this experiment, is currently developing his Honors Thesis to determine the concentrations of fluoxetine in the mussel tissues. This is a big undertaking because we currently have 500 frozen mussels to process. We feel that this information could be very important in determining how much of the fluoxetine in water is taken into the mussels tissues.

I will be filling you in on the findings of this first experiment in the next post.

Have a good new year!

Joey

Climate change-driven shifts in ocean conditions and growing coastal populations are two of the many factors raising uncertainty in coastal and marine resource management. Fortunately, there is a growing understanding of the opportunity to improve policies and decisions on these issues by drawing on and infusing scientific data into policy and management decisions in order to promote healthy coastal economies and ecosystems. My graduate degree research focused on this intersection between science and policy and how to imbue scientific data into the policy process. In my past few months with the Governor’s Natural Resources Office I have seen two regionally focused efforts in the eastern Pacific Ocean that speak directly to this interface.

The first of these is the establishment of a West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia Science Panel (OAH Panel). The OAH Panel, consisting of 20 esteemed scientists representing California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, was tasked with advancing decision makers’ understanding of drivers and impacts of ocean acidification and hypoxia. Ocean acidification poses a particular threat to the west coastal waters of the United States and Canada, where naturally upwelling waters bring deep water with a low pH to the surface, where it mixes with low pH waters caused by atmospheric deposition of carbon dioxide. Successive upwelling events also increase the occurrence of seasonally hypoxic (low oxygen) areas of the ocean. Acknowledging the specific threat that ocean acidification and hypoxia bring to the west coast, the OAH Panel is intended to identify the research and monitoring needed to answer practical questions faced by policy makers and managers about ocean acidification and hypoxia. While biological impacts have been seen from ocean acidification and hypoxia, there are still many questions to answer for the purpose of decision making. On my very first day on the job, I was fortunate to attend a meeting between Oregon natural resource agency managers and Oregon-based OAH Panel scientists convened to set an agenda for ways to advance science-informed decision making in Oregon waters. They agreed to work collaboratively to develop accurate and accessible outreach materials to inform policy makers and the public, establish ongoing information sharing and coordination forums on OAH, and identify ways to ensure the science products being developed by the OAH Panel are used by decision makers.

The second effort endeavoring to infuse scientific data into policy and management practices in the eastern Pacific Ocean is the West Coast Ocean Data Portal (WCODP). The WCODP is a project of the West Coast Governors Alliance on Ocean Health that provides access to ocean and coastal data to inform regional resource management, policy development, and ocean planning. I was able to help at the WCODP’s annual Network meeting in early November to unveil a new feature of the Portal that creates a geographic visual of data, specifically data relating to marine debris. This new feature, the Data Viewer, provides coastal decision makers with a tool to track marine debris and help prioritize clean ups and advocate for policies to reduce the impact of trash on our beaches. As the WCODP charts its strategic plan moving forward, it seeks to continue to be a rich data resource and tool to visualize and map that information, so that ocean and coastal managers can make sound decisions to improve ocean health.

Both of these efforts have established a significant opportunity to sustain and continue to build cross-sector cooperation between decision making and scientific sectors in coastal Oregon. The state is thus poised to more efficiently and effectively protect and preserve the ocean’s critical natural resources. Both the scientific community and decision making community are working to improve ocean health. Combining forces is helping scientists ask the questions managers need to answer to understand how ecosystem services that people value will be affected, and what steps people might take to try to mitigate and adapt to those changes in coastal Oregon now and in the future.