Local Washington Coast Residents Volunteer for NOAA's Mussel Watch Program

The NOAA Mussel Watch program, in existence since 1986, is the longest-running and continuous contaminant sampling program in US coastal waters. At more than 300 sites across the coastal US, Mussel Watch utilizes mussels and oysters to monitor spatial distributions and temporal trends of chemical contaminant levels in the coastal environment. This winter, sampling will take place at more than 20 sites in Washington through the support of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Snohomish County Surface Water Management Division, Sea Grant, Puget Sound Partnership, and several county Marine Resources Committees, among others. With a slightly new format, Mussel Watch is now designed to work more closely with local communities to help foster a partnership between agency scientists and citizen scientists for the sample collections throughout the state to help educate participants about biological sample collection and the health of their local waters.

Grays Harbor and Pacific Counties have been selected as the program’s coastal testing sites and the Grays Harbor Marine Resources Committee and the recently formed Pacific County Marine Resources Committee have volunteered to support the program as site lead coordinators. The site leads and local volunteers will first participate in a sampling training and will then be deployed later this month to the testing sites to conduct the sampling. The data collected for Mussel Watch is contributing to an important scientific investigation on contaminant levels from the Puget Sound and beyond and will help bring communities together in an effort to become better acquainted with issues of water quality in their own community.

For more information about the Mussel Watch Program email to: kgreer@surfrider.org or visit http://celebrating200years.noaa.gov/datasets/mussel/welcome.html.