Invasive Tunicates - Rubbery Oyster-Like Creatures - Overruning Puget Sound Ecosystem - ST

[hatrack]

HOOD CANAL — Like knights heading into battle, two dozen people in rubber-coated diving suits and 40-pound air tanks clanked down the gravel beach. They each clutched weapons: windshield ice scrapers, barbecue tongs, a spatula nabbed from the kitchen. Their hated enemy lay beneath Hood Canal's frigid waters, a creature that had scorned a previous assault, expanding its territory at a ferocious rate.

It's a 6-inch-long blob of goo called a tunicate, a siphon-feeding animal much like a clam without a shell. Around Puget Sound, the appearance of the tenacious, fast-spreading breed of sea creatures, also called sea squirts, is alarming divers, biologists and government officials.

While their impact on the Sound's troubled ecosystem is unknown, some of the same species have wreaked havoc elsewhere, coating miles of underwater habitat in slime, smothering farmed shellfish, displacing native species and proving extraordinarily hard to fight off. One species found here has already damaged shellfish farms in eastern Canada.

Their presence may be further evidence that the Sound is under stress, making it particularly vulnerable to invaders, like a bulldozed piece of land overrun by blackberries and dandelions.

EDIT

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003580083_tunicate20m.html

[kestrel91316]

1. We better learn to eat them. And jellyfish.

[soothsayer]

2. peanut butter and jellyfish sammitches?