...from Northwest Dive News magazine
"BC Science Students
Search for Seaweed"
Article by Bridgette Clarkston
Slimy" and "gross" are two words I often hear when I ask people what they think about seaweed, but for my labmates and me, seaweeds are fascinating and essential members of the marine community. In fact, as students in the research lab of Dr. Gary Saunders at the University of New Brunswick, we make it our business to travel all over coastal Canada in search of new seaweed species. Some of the places visited in the last year alone include Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, Quebec and Churchill, Manitoba. Each summer members of the Saunders lab travel to British Columbia to collect subtidal and intertidal seaweed, mostly from Barkley Sound on western Vancouver Island. This summer was the second in a more ambitious plan to collect from sites all over the island including Victoria, Sooke, Tahsis and Bamfield.
For my fellow students Dan, Hana, Sarah, Kat and me, this summer's adventure began in Vancouver when we picked up the 22-foot rental motor home that was to be our transport and accommodation for the next four weeks. Our next stop (after a bit of driving practice) was to B.C. Dive and Kayak Adventures in Kitsilano to pick up dive tanks, weights and rental gear for Kat. Our plan was to camp everywhere to cut down on travel costs, and to bring our own dive gear to allow the flexibility of shore diving wherever we wanted. Finally, fully geared-up, we headed for the Tsawwassen ferry terminal. All we lacked to make us a completely self-sufficient mobile diving unit was an air compressor.
We explored the southern end of Vancouver Island first with shore dives at the pier in Sidney, Otter Point and Spring Bay in Victoria. Sidney Pier is a sandy area dotted with several artificial reefs coated with invertebrates and seaweed. The site is popular spot with local divers-there is even a large wooden statue of a scuba diver on the pier. The shore dive at Otter Point is a little known site west of Sooke, with an abundance of large bull kelp that sway in the mild surge accompanied by silver-spotted sculpins that mimic the kelp's movement. Spring Bay is a popular site in Victoria, though the visibility was quite poor when we visited.
Our next major stop on the trip, and ultimately our favourite, was the small community of Tahsis on northwestern Vancouver Island. Tahsis was the highlight because it had everything we could have hoped for: a rich variety of seaweeds, incredible scenery both below and above the water, and friendly, knowledgeable locals. Upon our arrival we met up with Jude and Scott Schooner, owners of Tahtsa Dive Charters. Scott and Jude had arranged for us to stay at the campground immediately adjacent to their shop and directly on beautiful Tahsis Inlet, and had chartered their friend Ken Mehalcheon to take us diving since their own boat was being serviced.
During our four days in Tahsis, we saw a fantastic diversity of marine life and enjoyed more than 25 feet of visibility in the water. Scott and Ken were very accommodating and took us wherever we wanted to go along Tahsis and Esperenza inlets-basically anywhere we saw kelp floating on the surface we wanted to get in the water.
Except for our first dive, which was loaded with seaweed-grazing urchins, we found a large array of seaweeds, along with an abundance of animal life. We saw gigantic scallops rimmed with feathery red seaweeds, delicate sea pens, feather and brittle stars, decorator and umbrella crabs, ling cod, kelp greenlings and masses of rockfish. The abundance and diversity of nudibranchs was incredible-there were more varieties in the Tahsis region than we saw anywhere else in B.C., including Monterey sea lemons (Archidoris), white dendronotids (Dendronotus), giant dendronotids (Dendronotus), diamond back tritonias (Tritonia) and opalescent aeolids (Hermissenda). There was also no shortage of marine mammals in Tahsis. We spotted multiple sea otters-the only wild sea otters we saw the entire trip. On our last dive we were visited underwater by a group of harbour seals that seemed curious about our presence. They played in our bubbles and crept up close behind us, only to dash off when we turned around.
After Tahsis, we made our first of two calls to the small but charismatic community of Bamfield. Bamfield is situated at the southern end of Barkley Sound and is home to the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre, a research centre and field station for university courses. While in Bamfield we did three dives-one shore dive with Curt Smecher from Bamfield Dive Shed and two boat dives with John Moss from Broken Island Adventures. During our shore dive at Scott's Bay we encountered large orange sea pens, huge plumose anemones, black-eyed gobies, painted greenlings, plenty of copper rockfish and a Pacific octopus-a first for the trip. One decorator crab was so covered with red seaweed blades that we almost collected it by accident. Our most memorable dive in Barkley Sound was at the infamous Seapool Rocks. Seapool is an underwater rock pinnacle at the head of Trevor Channel and the beginning of some very big ocean. The unchecked swell of the open Pacific means Seapool can only be attempted on the calmest days, usually in the morning before the wind picks up, and is only for experienced divers. Multiple rock pinnacles rise from abyssal depths up to 30 feet, providing walls and channels teaming with life to explore. The swell underwater lessens with depth but is ever-present, even on the calmest days, and serves as a potent reminder of the ocean's power.
Seapool has a wealth of seaweed diversity and a plethora of animal life to accompany it. There are tall kelp pummeled by the surge near the surface, calcified pink corraline algae stuck fast to the rocks and large, delicate red blades swaying gently at greater depths. Large black rockfish congregate by the dozens just above the pinnacles, while enormous cabezon expertly blend in with the substrate and china rockfish hide in crevices.
After Bamfield, our time in B.C. drew quickly to a close. We said good-bye to Vancouver Island and headed back to Vancouver to return the motor home. With more than 1,300 new seaweed samples collected during our trip, we now had a lot of lab work awaiting us back home in New Brunswick.
Seaweeds are a beautiful and vitally important component of coastal environments. As researchers and admirers of seaweed, we in the Saunders lab love extolling the virtues of this under-appreciated marine flora wherever we travel. Though seaweeds are generally over-looked by the average recreational diver searching for invertebrates and fish, one thing seems true no matter where we dive in Canada: Wherever you find a good diversity of seaweeds, you find a rich variety of animal life as well.
Bridgette Clarkston is a diver and student at University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, N.B. Tahtsa Dive Charters described the group as "tremendous and over-the-top enthusiastic." In fact, the group was so diligent in immediately pressing and taking DNA samples from seaweeds they collected, they turned down an invitation to dive and seek sixgill sharks.