Sea Star

From boat to plate

The newly revised Seafood Direct Marketing Manual helps seafood harvesters dive into direct-to-consumer sales

From the Summer 2025 Sea Star

By Alison Lorenz, WSG Communications Project Coordinator

Starting a business is no easy feat — especially when you throw in the unpredictable nature of boat maintenance, weather, catches and wholesale prices. For many fishermen, selling their product directly to seafood consumers can be a way to regain some control in a notoriously volatile industry. But where does a fisherman who is interested ...

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18
FEB
0

WSG News Blog

MaryAnn Wagner, WSG assistant director of communications, retires

January 28, 2025

Having led Washington Sea Grant communications since 2014, Wagner shares about her 40-year career 

If you heard news from or learned more about Washington Sea Grant (WSG) over the last ten years, chances are good that MaryAnn Wagner, assistant director for communications, had something to do with it. Communications plays a key role in the overall Sea Grant mission, keeping our audiences informed on current projects, research and coastal and marine issues. Wagner has led ...

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28
JAN
0

WSG News Blog

Flood planning goes local

WSG supports the rollout of the Coastal Storm Modeling System (CoSMoS) in Washington state

From the Summer 2024 Sea Star

By Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer

The first time Ian Miller, Washington Sea Grant (WSG) coastal hazards specialist, heard about CoSMoS, he was in graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This was around 2009, when the first iteration of CoSMoS was being used to model coastal storms in southern California. While Miller was interested at the time, he ...

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13
AUG
0

WSG News Blog

The other tsunamis

Carrie Garrison-Laney’s research paints a fuller picture of Washington’s tsunami risk

From the Summer 2024 Sea Star

By Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer

The Big One. It’s the threat looming over all who live in western Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest: a magnitude 9 earthquake from the Cascadia Subduction Zone. A quake from the fault line stretching from Vancouver Island to northern California could create the kind of devastating tsunami documented in Coast Salish Peoples’ stories 300 years ago. Now, ...

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13
AUG
0

WSG News Blog

In the hunt for invasive green crab, Molt Search seeks their shedded shells

WSG Crab Team’s new program makes it easy to get involved in invasive species response

From the Summer 2024 Sea Star

By Alison Lorenz, WSG Science Writer

When Lisa Watkins started at WSG as a community science specialist, WSG Crab Team was almost ten years old. The Crab Team monitoring network — a network of several hundred volunteers and partner staff spread all across the state — has spent that decade on the front lines of the European green crab (Carcinus ...

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13
AUG
0

WSG News Blog

How do our sea-meadows grow?

WSG-funded research informs the future of eelgrass restoration in Washington

From the Summer 2024 Sea Star

By Erick Dowell, WSG student assistant

 

Beneath the coastal waters of Washington state, if you look in the right spots you’ll find green, grassy meadows. They are not too different from meadows you may want to frolic through on land, but down here the blades of grass undulate with salt water eddies and waves of the sea instead of a gentle summer breeze. Eelgrass (Zostera ...

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13
AUG
0

WSG News Blog

Blue Futures: WSG funds collaborative research projects with the Makah Tribe

From the Summer 2023 Sea Star

By incorporating people, culture and Indigenous knowledge systems, these three projects model the use of interdisciplinary approaches to inform marine resource management

By Olivia Horwedel, WSG Science Communications Fellow

Deep blue ocean waters push against rocky shorelines and coastal forests. Eagles soar overhead. In the distance, whales surface, taking a moment to breathe as they navigate through the ocean’s waters. This incredibly unique landscape, situated at the Northwest tip of Washington state, is the ...

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27
JUN
0

WSG News Blog

Are moon jellies eating up all the zooplankton?

From the Summer 2023 Sea Star

As dense aggregations of moon jellyfish form in Puget Sound, researchers study the ecosystem-wide impacts

By Andrea Richter-Sanchez, WSG Science Communications Fellow

Have you ever seen a jellyfish floating in Puget Sound? Chances are, it was a moon jellyfish. Moon jellies, or Aurelia labiata have had large blooms — high numbers in certain areas — in the past several years.

Moon jelly aggregations normally form in the summer in Puget ...

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27
JUN
0

WSG News Blog

Restoring tradition, place and connection through a clam garden

From the Summer 2023 Sea Star

The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community’s clam garden reclaims an ancient Indigenous practice on ancestral land

By Samantha Larson, WSG Science Writer

From one set of hands to another, each rock was passed down the human chain from the beach to the sea. Some of the rocks could be held in one palm and easily passed. Others were the size of small boulders, requiring strong posture and extra exertion to settle the rocks into their ...

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26
JUN
0

WSG News Blog

Debris from Shellfish Aquaculture Finds New Life as Crab Gauges

From the Autumn 2022 Sea Star

Washington Sea Grant supported an innovative pilot project repurposing marine debris, transforming it into a useful tool for recreational crabbers

By Benjamin Haagen, WSG Science Communications Fellow

Aquaculture in the Salish Sea brings both benefits and challenges to coastal communities and ecosystems. The yellow aquaculture rope commonly used in shellfish farming is contributing to a key environmental issue facing the world today: plastics pollution. This issue is being addressed in a novel way by Nicole Baker, ...

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15
SEP
0

WSG News Blog

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