“The best overview of the FOCI’s Marine Stewardship Initiative (MSI), the absolute best overview in a nutshell, is an Arthur C Clarke’s quote. It’s the mantra of the MSI. Arthur C. Clarke wrote ‘How inappropriate to call this Planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.’ That is, in a nutshell, the Marine Stewardship Initiative,” explained Sabina Leader Mense, Program coordinator.
Sabina Leader Mense: “Perhaps we could have called it Marine Awareness Program. We’re making people aware of the marine environment, so that they can in turn steward and take care of that marine environment. It’s a bit of an uphill battle with the Marine Stewardship Initiative because what you need to understand is that we’re terrestrial mammals, and so we have a natural bias to terrafirma, to the land.”
“We’re islanders and, as an islander, I felt it was very important that people recognize the chunk of land we live on is totally surrounded by water and ocean. That is our vision, that is our purpose and the importance, I believe, of the Marine Stewardship initiative.”
“We have five major programs at this point in time.”
“The Cortes Island Foreshore monitoring program, our very first marine stewardship initiative began in 1995 through conversations with Delores Broten. I was working together with Delores on some ‘Reach for Unbleached’ reporting and Delores said, ‘we really need to get onto monitoring the marine environment. Somebody’s got to do that.’ And I said, ‘okay.'”
“We’re going on 28 years coming up to the new year.”
“Cortes Island Foreshore monitoring is our longest standing program. We have established 12 permanent research sites around Cortes Island where volunteers go out every year. We lay quadrats down along a transect line that is permanently established with pins that are located and relocated every year.”
“We collect information to say, here’s what we see at these quadrat sites, these half meter by half meter square sites, in half meter elevations from 3.5 meters, right down to 1.0 meters in the intertidal. So incredibly valuable in today’s day and age of dramatically changing climate, we are looking for changes.”
“We are monitoring for changes. As water temperatures increase, we could see a change in the species that we see in our quadrats every year. FOCI has always been a champion of this idea of long-term environmental monitoring.”
“I think the real success for this program, and it’s our longest standing program, is the fact that it is completely volunteer run. We’re not at the whims of somebody deciding to fund us or not fund us. This is a 100% volunteer program with community members that get out every year. They’ve adopted sites within the intertidal. They take pride in contributing to the long term monitoring and they’re making us aware of what’s happening.”
“This information has just been picked up by the Strait of Georgia Data Center in the last year. They’ve scanned in all of our original data sheets, our hard copy. As of this week, there is a student hired at UBC who is now entering that data into this very large data bank at UBC, funded by the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
“Cortes has been recognized as having the longest standing record of environmental monitoring in the Strait of Georgia. So our very first program, one of our most prominent programs, is now being acknowledged for the long-term efforts that we put into it.”
Cortes Currents: Have you noticed a shift in the species that you’re monitoring?
Sabina Leader Mense:“We have not, and that’s good news.”
“We don’t do any formal analysis of our data. This will be done and can be done as this information is digitized and entered into this very large data bank. That information will become available to students and programs who may want to start doing some formal analysis at detailed levels, but basically on the ground we are not seeing that.”
We see an introduced species that was here when we started. Still there, but not really moving in abundance. We don’t see any change in the species of seaweeds, which we could see as temperatures increase. So no, things are looking good and things are not changing at that gross level of our visiting one year to the next. That’s good news.
Our second big program is the Sensitive Marine Habitat Mapping Program, which involves mapping and documenting the sensitive marine habitats.
Cortes Island, is blessed with probably three of the most spectacular reef systems in the Strait of Georgia. We have these fabulous reefs, intertidally exposed, reaching off the south end of Marina Island, Cortes Island and Hernando Island. We established what’s called the Three Reefs Project. We annually monitor these sites, watching for changes, seeing what’s there.
We have a beautiful three reefs atlas that’s out to explain this program to the community, and we’re constantly defining and refining what we know of interstitial space.
Interstitial space, I always say to people is as elusive as outer space. And that’s what we have in spades on these reef systems. Interstitial is the space between. If you walk out on these reefs, you’ll find cobble the size of grapefruits and sometimes they’re piled three high. All the spaces in between, that are flushed by the ocean waters going out and coming back in on the tides, are where marine organisms live.
The biodiversity on these reefs is stunning. That’s what we’re documenting because ultimately we are going to go for marine protected area status for all three of these reef systems. We have the best areas in the Strait of Georgia.
Eelgrass is another sensitive marine habitat that FOCI monitors.
Seagrass BC is a network of organizations up and down the coast. We are partnered with them. We meet at the Hakai Institute on Quadra out of Heriot Bay. We’re monitoring, we have subtidal sites, as well as intertidal sites that we have documented and can monitor against looking for changes as we go forward.
One of the biggest threats to our coastal eelgrass beds up and down coastal BC is the foraging by Canada Geese.
The first official goose culls have just occurred last summer in Comox and we will be following on their research and their good work there to try to give some break to our intertidal eelgrass beds that have basically been removed by this introduced species of Canada Goose.
Coastal sand ecosystems, another marine habitat that’s sensitive, is big in the conversation on Cortes right now. This is the whole conversation happening at Manson’s Landing with BC Parks. A coastal sand ecosystem is exactly what it says it is. It’s a biological community of organisms interacting with the physical surroundings of shifting sand.
It’s a very unique ecosystem in coastal BC. It is also a red listed, threatened ecological community in British Columbia; Very small remnants. One of those remnants is Manson’s Landing. Manson’s Landing all the way out to the spit is one of our finest examples.
This is an area that’s very convenient to pull boats up onto the beach and leave them there all year or leave them seasonally. BC Parks is under a lot of pressure to protect that habitat for this ecological community at risk. As well, it has the forage fish, which I’ll talk about in a minute. This is the impetus for moving boats and coming up with some creative solutions as a community together with BC parks as to how we can create small boats storage at Manson’s Landing that is not destroying the coastal sand ecosystem or the forage fish habitat.
Our third main program is called the Forage Fish Program. We’re four years into it, and the big highlight here is that the spawning of Pacific Sand Lance, that we have documented in 2019 and continue to document every year, is a bumper spawn.
This is one of the heaviest, most significant spawns on the east coast of Vancouver Island, from Sayward south to Victoria. Our FOCI team was trained by Project Watershed out of Courtenay, who we’re partnered with. They are just excited every year for us to call in two weeks before anybody else spots specific Forage Fish or Pacific Sand Lance eggs in the sand. We provide very significant spawning for these beautiful little Pacific Sand Lance, or Needle Nish, as some people know them.
The old timers called these Small Forage Fish ‘sweevies’ on Cortes.
We have a team, we call ourselves ‘Team Sweevy.’ We’ve been out there every November through January monitoring for their presence, and they’re back in numbers at Manson Spit this year. So we’re always excited to welcome them. Team Sweevy is out there on the beaches as I speak right now.
The fourth main program within MSI is the Subtidal Biodiversity Program, and five years ago I established 12 subtidal research sites in the Waters surrounding Cortes Island.
We’re just going to hit the water here in the next several weeks. This is the time to dive. The waters are clear and again, long-term monitoring. We establish 12 permanent subtidal research sites around the island. We get in and we look and we monitor and we watch for changes that are happening.
Our fifth main program within Marine Stewardship is our community education, our community outreach work, our citizen science programs. We’re constantly partnering with other agencies to provide these.
For example, the Hakai Institute in Quadra Island in Heriot Bay. We work together with them on citizen science programs that we bring to Cortesians. We have a Starfish Wasting Disease project. We have a larval Dungeness Crab recruitment dispersal study using light traps. We work with the Marine Education and Research Society to monitor Humpback Whale presence. We work together with DFO to monitor European Green Crab presence. We have a very strong citizen science program that people can sign up for any time of the year. There is an activity that brings people into the marine environment and engages them in that marine environment.
FOCI is partners with the Wild Cortes Partnership. We’re one of five partners there. We run an Ecolab, the Ecology Lab. Wild Cortes is centered at the Linnaea Education Center, and that is where we have our outreach displays on Subtidal Biodiversity, Forage Fish, ‘Humpback Comeback,’ and so forth.
I always, in every program I run, include youth. I have what’s called at FOCI, Youth Working for Nature, and you’ll see that youth are involved at every level of the work.
So five main programs within the Marine stewardship initiative
Cortes Currents: What kind of challenges are you facing?
Sabina Leader Mense: The greatest challenge we have is that we are terrestrial mammals. We’re trying to explore this amazing marine environment., it covers three quarters of the planet, to the greatest depths. We could do a better job, if we could be in the water more. We don’t have that thick blubber protection that the marine mammals have to allow them time in their environment. We’re terrestrial mammals trying to work in a marine environment. We have limited technology and certainly FOCI has limitations on the equipment we have to get out there.
We get our dry suits on and we get in the water. We are on those beaches, every low tide, whatever the hour of the day. Most recently, we have just received the funding for a research skiff that allows us more time on the water, more access to sites that require boat access.
It’s a big uphill battle just because it’s such a big environment and has so many things going on there. It’s a three-dimensional fluid environment. It’s nuts. So lots of challenges, which is why the program is so exciting. The excitement of marine stewardship is simply that it’s very mysterious. We can never know all the answers, so we aren’t going to run out of work.
Cortes Currents: If you were asking people for something, a way that we can help, what would it be?
Sabine Leader Mense: Oh, volunteer: All these programs, take your pick. It’s like walking into a candy shop.
You can be a volunteer on the foreshore. You can adopt a site. We have families adopting sites. This is a fabulous way. I have Team Zella for example, out at Red Granite. She gets her parents out there every year and they adopt that site and they monitor. I’ve got Tosh Harvey up at Seaford and he gets his dad Ryan Harvey out there. They’re monitoring their site and putting that information in every year for us.
The sensitive marine habitat mapping: I have youth accompanying me, people accompanying me out on the reefs, making the observations, getting out there. We have fabulous artwork that’s come back from some of our youth, in terms of they’re trying to describe the beauty of what they’re seeing out there.
The Forage Fish program is up and running right now. Volunteers just call us up and say, ‘Hey, I want to be a member of Team Sweevy. I want to know what a sweevy is, for heaven’s sakes.’ So we have these programs running. We’re out every three to four weeks taking samples at different sites, sitting down looking at them under the microscope. Great way to get involved. The subtidal biodiversity: want to be a Boat Tender? Come on out and tend Boat with us. See what we’re up to.
In terms of all the marine education, wow. We’ve got displays to put up, come and help us design displays and get them up at Cortes Wild. We’ve got data to enter. We’re keeping a master species list of marine species, and I’ve had fabulous volunteers that have digitized data that was only in a hard copy form, so that we can get things up and running in new formats.
Fill your boots any way you want to volunteer, you step up and if there’s nothing that perfectly fits what somebody wants to do, I can design it.
I’m going on 28 years here with this program. I work professionally as a marine biologist. One of the things I’ve done for many of my years is to work in marine based educational tourism at sea, from the Arctic to the Antarctic, and just about everywhere in between. I train interpreters.
I think one of the most important aspects of this Marine Stewardship Initiative is our engagement, my engagement, FOCI’s engagement with the community of Cortes, with the greater community through our partnerships on coastal BC in engaging people in the marine world in getting these terrestrial mammals to pay attention to this environment that’s very foreign to them, but literally covers three quarters of the planet and surrounds us as islanders.
I want people traveling across on the ferry to Campbell River, instead of trying to figure out what they’re going to do on their list, get out and look at that ocean that they’re crossing. Wonder what’s down there and how they can be involved.
We have opportunities for them to be involved here through the Marine Stewardship Initiative. It’s all about community engagement, that’s how we get things done.
Top image credit: Sabina Leader Mense explores Cortes Island’s subtidal region – Photo courtesy FOCI
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