A seriously good video about Ocean Acidification – well worth taking the 12 minutes to watch. If you deal with shellfish larvae in the Pacific Northwest this is a big issue and potential effects on the shellfish industry may just be a harbringer for all of us.For more about ocean acidification and shellfish read this excellent piece about how some US hatcheries and the industry  have already been seriously affected by this.

We’re doing our little bit to help monitor changes here in Baynes Sound, we’re just in the process of completing the installation of two  YSI5200 multiparameter monitoring units on our shallow and deep water intakes that will continuously monitor dissolved oxygen, salinity, temperature and pH. These will connect to the internet and as soon as we work out how – we’ll be streaming this to the web so that interested parties can see what the conditions in the Sound are in real time.

These are not “research grade” but they will allow us to start tracking changes in ocean acidification at a “working”  level and compare this to identical units being installed at other oyster hatcheries so that we can compare notes.  This we hope will be the first of other projects in this regard.

Update  – a long and interesting piece in the Strait.com