Issue 72 - May 2021

Houston Flooding Polluted Reefs More Than 100 Miles Offshore

Flower Garden Banks fouled by runoff from 2017’s Harvey and 2016’s Tax Day floods

fish in the coral reef — The coral reefs of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary are about 100 miles from the Texas coast. (Photo by G.P. Schmahl/NOAA)

Runoff from Houston’s 2016 Tax Day flood and 2017’s Hurricane Harvey flood carried human waste onto coral reefs more than 100 miles offshore in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, according to a Rice University study.

coral reef in a deep blue sea — Giant barrel sponges, or Xestospongia muta, were studied by Rice University marine biologists investigating the impact of extreme storms on coral reefs of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

“We were pretty shocked,” said marine biologist Adrienne Correa, co-author of the study in Frontiers in Marine Science. “One thing we always thought the Flower Garden Banks were safe from was terrestrial runoff and nutrient pollution. It’s a jolt to realize that in these extreme events, it’s not just the salt marsh or the seagrass that we need to worry about. Offshore ecosystems can be affected too.”

The Flower Garden Banks sit atop several salt domes near the edge of the continental shelf about 100 miles from the Texas and Louisiana coast. Rising several hundred feet from the seafloor, the domes are topped with corals, algae, sponges and fish. Each bank, or dome-topped ecosystem, is separated by miles of open ocean. The Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary, which was recently expanded, protects 17 banks.

Correa and colleagues sampled sponges at the sanctuary in 2016, 2017 and 2018. They showed samples collected after extreme storm flooding in 2016 and 2017 contained E. coli and other human fecal bacteria. They also used a catalog of E. coli genetic markers contributed by Rice environmental engineer and co-author Lauren Stadler to show that E. coli on sponges in 2017 came from Harvey floodwaters.

Lead author Amanda Shore, who conducted the research while a Rice Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in Correa’s lab, said many studies have shown nearshore reefs can be harmed by pollutants that are washed into the ocean by rainfall over land. But marine biologists generally assume ecosystems far from shore are safe from such dangers.

“This shows perhaps they aren’t protected from severe events,” said Shore, an assistant professor of biology at Farmingdale State College in New York. “And these events are increasing in frequency and intensity with climate change.”

Correa said, “That’s the other piece of this. There actually was a massive flooding event in 2015 with the Memorial Day flood. Dips in salinity after that event were detected at surface buoys offshore, but nobody looked or sampled out at the Flower Garden Banks. Nobody imagined you would see something like this 160 kilometers out.”

three scuba diver on deck — Rice University marine biologists (from left) Lauren Howe-Kerr, Amanda Shore and Adrienne Correa prepare for a research dive at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in October 2017. (Photo by Carsten Grupstra/Rice University)

In April 2016, widespread flooding occurred in the Houston area when a severe storm dropped more than 17 inches of rain in some places in less than 24 hours. Three months after the flood, recreational divers reported murky waters and dead and dying organisms at East Flower Garden Bank. Marine biologists, including study co-author Sarah Davies of Boston University, arrived two weeks later to investigate.

Shore and co-authors Carsten Grupstra, a Rice graduate student, and Jordan Sims, a Rice undergraduate, analyzed samples from the expedition, including tissue collected from sponges. Shore said sponges are indicators of water quality because they “are basically filtering seawater to catch organic material to use as food.”

a female scuba diver — Marine biologist Adrienne Correa, an assistant professor of biosciences at Rice University, prepares for a research dive at the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in August 2016. (Photo courtesy of Jason Sylvan/TAMU)

She said previous studies have shown sponges have a microbiome, a population of bacteria that normally live in and on these animals. In this study, Shore characterized the microbiomes on two species: giant barrel sponges, or Xestospongia muta, and orange elephant ear sponges, or Agelas clathrodes. It was the first time the species’ microbiomes had been assayed at Flower Garden Banks, and Correa said that was one reason it took so long to understand what happened in the flood years.

Correa said, “In 2016, we saw differences between sponge bacteria at a location that showed signs of death and a location that didn’t show signs of death, but we couldn’t get at the cause of the differences because we had no baseline data. We thought we’d be able to get the baseline data — the normal year — the next year in 2017. But then there was another disaster. We couldn’t get a normal sample in a no-flood year until 2018.”

Shore joined Correa’s lab in 2018, helped collect samples that year and analyzed the microbiomes from each year.

Correa said, “There was a big change in community composition, a shift of the team players, on the sponges that were most affected in 2016. Then, following Harvey in 2017 there was also a shift, but less water made it out there that year, and we think it was less stressful. We didn’t see dead and dying organisms like we had the previous year.”

Harvey, the most intense rainfall event in U.S. history, dropped an estimated 13 trillion gallons of rain over southeast Texas in late August 2017. The researchers said Harvey posed a greater potential threat to the Flower Garden Banks, by far, than the 2016 flood. So why did reefs fare better in 2017?

a marine biologist in a laboratory — Marine biologist Amanda Shore works with samples during a research cruise to the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in October 2017. (Photo by Carsten Grupstra/Rice University)

“Because we got lucky with ocean currents,” Shore said. “Instead of going straight out from Galveston Bay and over the Flower Garden Banks, the water ended up turning a bit and going down the Texas coast instead.”

Harvey’s runoff still sideswiped the banks. Research buoys at the reefs measured a 10% drop in salinity in less than a day on Sept. 28, and Correa’s team found genetic evidence that fecal pollution gathered from the banks in October originated in Harvey floodwaters in Houston.

Orange elephant ear sponges, or Agelas clathrodes, were studied by Rice University marine biologists investigating the impact of extreme storms on coral reefs of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary (Photo courtesy of NOAA)

Correa said the story in 2016 was more complicated.

“There was an upwelling event that brought nutrients and cooler waters up from the deep to the top part of the Flower Garden Banks,” she said. “Fresh water is less dense than salt water, and we think the floodwaters came at the surface and sort of sat there like a lens on top of the salt water and kept oxygen from mixing in from the top. The combination of this surface event and the nutrients coming up from the bottom contributed to a bacterial bloom that drew down so much oxygen that things just asphyxiated.”

The big question is whether pollution from extreme storms poses a long-term threat to the Flower Garden Banks. Correa said the answer could come from an investment in research that follows the health and microbiomes of individual sponges and corals on the reef over time. She said her group at Rice and her collaborators are committed to learning as much as they can about the reefs, and they are determined to support efforts to conserve and protect them.

Study co-authors also include Lauren Howe-Kerr of Rice; Shawn Doyle, Kathryn Shamberger and Jason Sylvan of Texas A&M University; and Lory Santiago-Vazquez and Michael Grimes of the University of Houston-Clear Lake.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (1800914, 1800905, 1800904, 1800913), and Early-Career Research Fellowship from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (2000009651) and Rice University.

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Related Topics:Houston ocean conservation ocean news reef

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SEVENSEAS Travel Magazine – May 2021 – Issue 72

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The FREE Weekly Conservation Post and Jobs List

Signing up for the free Weekly Newsletter & Jobs List will get you a round-up of upcoming events, webinars, meetings, reports, funding opportunities, photos of the week, and recent postings to the jobs list.

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Since 2004, SEVENSEAS Media has fostered an informal and non-partisan platform to promote understanding of key issues and challenges while building partnerships across an increasingly diverse group of marine conservation professionals and students.

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Feature Destination

Homalco Wildlife & Cultural Tours, British Columbia

a welcome sign inferno of a national park

The tourism business began serendipitously with the long-term efforts at Algard Creek, situated within their traditional territory, where members of the Nation proactively sought to establish a hatchery to restore the wild salmon population. The hatchery enabled the community to harvest food stocks, rear eggs and release fry to slowly re-establish the once plentiful wild salmon runs (Coho and Chum), depleted by years of exploitation and industrial activity by outsiders (largely through clear cut logging, leading to landslides that transported debris and sediment into critical spawning areas). are a world-class wildlife viewing and cultural experience tour provider owned and operated by the Xwémalhkwu, or Homalco First Nation, a people known as ‘the people of the fast-running waters’. The Homalco traditional territories run from Dent Island, just north of Sonora Island, over to Raza Passage and extending over the entire Bute Inlet. Bute Inlet is a spectacular fiord wilderness area running 80 km between peaks reaching up to 2,700 metres east of the northern end of Vancouver Island on the western coast of Canada. The Xwémalhkwu people lived for thousands of years at village sites spread throughout, near rivers along the fiord and at the mouth of Bute Inlet. Today Bute Inlet is a paradise for photographers, sports fishermen, hikers, kayakers, mountain climbers, wildlife enthusiasts, and experienced backcountry users.

As with most coastal First Nation peoples, the Homalco thrived on rich natural harvests from the ocean. As they travelled with the seasons foraging, hunting and fishing, the Homalco people shared in sustainable resource use throughout the territory, and above all were taught to respect the sacred cedar tree. The fibres of the cedar provided the Homalco people with clothing, shelter, baskets, canoes and hand tools as well as burial boxes.

With the arrival of non-Indigenous peoples in the mid 1800’s the Xwémalhkwu were banned from practicing their traditional ceremonies, dances and songs and were forced to burn their regalia. During the early years of colonialization the elders kept the language alive secretly. They were moved from their traditional community locations in the late 1800’s. And then in the early 1900’s generations of children were taken away to Residential Schools. The Xwémalhkwu resisted and, despite the impacts of these schools, they maintained their connection to their cultural heritage.

The increased fish population had an unexpected but fortuitous spin off in leading to a return of the grizzly bear population to the valley (with as many as 50 grizzly bears returning to the Orford River to feast on salmon). The bears’ return led to the idea to invite visitors in to enjoy the wildlife that was now thriving there, and in turn led to the creation of Homalco Wildlife Tours. The community initially created the tour company to offer safe wildlife viewing for paying guests from Sonora Resort, a nearby commercial luxury resort.

Very early on the Nation successfully developed relationships with local existing tour operators to bring visitors to Orford Bay from Campbell River, a city on Vancouver Island touted as the ‘Salmon Capital of the World’. A business model was created with Campbell River operators, providing them with guaranteed times to arrive and view wildlife including the grizzlies in the Orford Valley, in the Homalco territory. This model capitalized on the tour operators’ existing marketing and sales channels and their infrastructure including professional tour boats. The Homalco business focused on providing an outstanding wildlife experience for guests of the tour operators.

As the market demand for the fall seasonal wildlife viewing program grew, management of the Homalco business realized there was potential to expand into the shoulder seasons with a diversified experience offering. The trained youth wildlife guides provided the solution as to how to diversify – to begin offering cultural programs. The guides were then provided with professional training to begin offering cultural tours, showcasing the Nations history, language, songs, stories and dances. The cultural tour programs proved successful and the seasonality was expanded through the spring and summer months. The fall wildlife programs were also expanded to include a cultural element as well. The benefits of this went far beyond economics as community members, typically spread across Vancouver Island and other parts of BC, began to see a reason to come home, learn the language and traditions and reconnect/travel within their traditional territory, and in doing so create a livelihood guiding visitors.

The cultural tourism program helped reduce the dependence of the business on the seasonal wildlife viewing. In addition it increased the operating season length from 74 days in 2014 to over 150 days in 2019, leading to a more profitable business.

A total of four partnerships were created with tour operators in Campbell River and one partnership with a luxury lodge. The partnerships supply the Homalco Wildlife Tour business with guests for their fall bear viewing program. In 2019 the business also began to market and bring it’s own guests into Orford, along with the partners.

Homalco Wildlife Tours has enabled many community members to access their traditional village sites, which they have not had access to since being relocated in the 70’s. It has also led to a revitalization of the community’s cultural traditions and practices – the Homalco language, songs, dances, and stories, which are now being shared with visitors from around the world. Most importantly the business has helped to re-connect Homalco youth to their culture by training them as tour guides. The business has created four permanent full time positions, eight full-time seasonal positions, and supported 20 positions for the expansion and development of the tours.

A small conservation fee is added to the tour price for every guest on Homalco tours, as well as for all guests on partner tours that visit the Orford Valley. These fees help to support the wild salmon enhancement program at the hatchery.

Note: The story is developed by Mike Robbins for LT&C. To see the original story, please CLICK HERE…

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Feature Destination

Feature Destination: British Columbia

ʔiymot kʷunome – It is good to see you. Homalco Wildlife & Cultural Tours invites you to visit, explore and learn on the traditional territory of the Homalco First Nation. Bute Inlet offers spectacular wilderness and some of North America’s most sought-after wildlife, including grizzly bears, salmon, eagles and whales.

Enjoy an unforgettable experience with orcas, humpbacks, sea lions and more remarkable marine mammals in their natural habitat as we venture through the Salish Sea. Bear witness to BC’s magnificent coastal mountain range and watch for bald eagles, other marine birds and wildlife on this notable expedition.

Join this exclusive group for a day of whales, cultural discovery and wildlife. Travel to Bute Inlet and through the Salish Sea, while searching for humpback whales, orcas, sea lions, bald eagles and other marine wildlife. Accompany a First Nation guide on an interpretive journey to learn about traditional uses of the land while watching for grizzly bears and more.

COVID-19 UPDATE: We are booking now for 2021 tours with full COVID safety procedures in place. Whales, Wildlife and Culture, Great Bears of Bute, and People Water Land tours are fully refundable up to 48 hours before travelling with us. Thank you and stay safe.