The bow section of a boat found last week off the Oregon Coast acted as a rudimentary fish tank for at least 21 species of plant and fish life from the boat’s home across the Pacific Ocean.
“They’ve been in there for years,” said John Chapman, a marine invasion ecologist and adjunct professor at Oregon State University. “It’s amazing to think they survived.”
The boat’s remains are believed to be the most-recent debris to reach the Oregon Coast from the massive Japanese tsunami on March 11, 2011, Chapman said.
Chapman and other scientists have spent the past week collecting samples from the boat for genetic and other research. Among their discoveries were several yellowtail jack fish and an Asian striped knifejaw. The fish survived in the boat’s bow. The yellowtail jack fish “are about 2 feet long,” he said. “That’s about 40 pounds of fish.”
The fish are under quarantine at the Oregon Coast Aquarium, where they are acclimating to slightly warmer temperatures and a captive diet.
Chapman was alerted to the discovery on Thursday after a recreational fisherman spotted it about 3 miles off the Oregon Coast near Ona Beach. It was later towed to a boat yard in Newport. On Monday afternoon, it was relocated to a landfill.
“This is the only object we ever sampled at sea,” Chapman said. “All the other objects were on the shore when we discovered them.”
We would never have had the opportunity (to discover the fish) if this thing had hit the shore,” he said. “All those fish would have been gone. We wouldn’t have known they were in there.”
For some of the fish, it’s not the first time their species have been found in Oregon waters.
“The fact that we found the knifejaws four different times on this coast means they’re really are a lot of them very likely out there. And we never saw them before the tsunami. So they’re very likely to be tsunami debris.”
The yellowtail jackfish have the markings of the Western Pacific, or non-native variety, according to Chapman.
“These waters are probably too cold for the semitropical knifejaw and yellowtail jacks,” he said. Chapman doesn’t think either fish could breed here or “pose a significant risk.”
The boat’s bow is one of approximately 300 objects that have floated onto the Oregon shore in the four years since the tsunami, Chapman said. The species that have attached to the objects and rafted their way to the Oregon Coast raise questions scientists from Oregon and around the country are working to answer.
“We expected no organisms to drift across with this debris. And we were wrong about that,” Chapman said. “If you’re a scientist and you find out you’re really wrong, that’s what you steer straight at.”
Scientists have also encountered other species that aren’t native to the tsunami zone. “How did that happen?” Chapman said he wants to know.
According to Caren Braby, marine resources program manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, researchers are “looking at a variety of species and questions ranging from the esoteric to the ordinary.”
“It’s really about the kinds of species that are able to move long distances across ocean basins,” Braby said. “Why do we have one species of mussel on one side of the ocean and one species of mussel on the other side of the ocean?”
She said questions remain as to how the differing species could be related and the role evolution played in their development.
Braby says the questions are relevant not just to species biology but also climate change biology.
“The species that live there are going to have to deal with that change,” she said. “Understanding invasive species gives us insight into the types of species that have more flexibility and more plasticity in the environments they can live in.”
Chapman, who is working with Japanese and Canadian scientists, sees the tsunami as both a “tragic event” and “spectacular experiment.”
“We see that it is this very rich story,” he said. “We’re working with them to try and unravel it.”
2015 Oregon Live LLC