Sea enemies come together to protect ocean floor twice size of Washington state

Spots slated to gain protection include a rare ecosystem known mostly from dinosaur-era fossils.

An area of sea floor twice the size of Washington state would be protected from fishing under a proposal from the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The federal agency is proposing to protect 140,000 square miles of habitat off the West Coast from bottom-trawl fishing, including at least one ecosystem that thrived when dinosaurs roamed.

In a time of polarized politics and the removal of environmental protections, the federal move is unusual: It has the support of environmentalists and the trawling industry, long-time adversaries on how to manage the living ocean.

The fishing industry supports the proposal because their boats would get access to 3,300 acres of seafloor. These are less-fragile areas that have been off limits to bottom-fishing following the population collapse of several species of rockfish in the 1990s.

Many West Coast rockfish species have rebounded over the past two decades after fishing restrictions were put in place.

“They kind of did a trade,” Brent Paine with United Catcher Boats, a Seattle-based association of West Coast trawlers, said of the new proposal. “We were able to close areas that some of the main environmental groups wanted closed. And we were able to get some known, good rockfish areas reopened.”

“Some people are calling it ‘the grand bargain’ because we really made a lot of changes throughout the West Coast,” said biologist Ben Enticknap with the environmental group Oceana in Portland.

The vast majority of the acreage to be protected lies off the California coast, but Oregon and Washington would also get new protected areas.

About 340 square miles off the Oregon coast and 150 off the Washington coast would be put off-limits to trawling.

Jurassic Park of the Deep

One of the areas to be protected sits about 30 miles west of Grays Harbor, Washington, at the edge of deep cleft called Grays Canyon.

On the edge of the canyon, some 500 feet beneath the waves, is a living reef of glass sponges.

Like coral reefs, sponge reefs build up long-lasting structures by growing on the skeletons of previous generations, and the intricate structures they form support dense populations of fishes and other sea life.

But the skeletons of the sponges are made of silica, just like glass.

“They are very fragile," Enticknap said. “In this really deep water habitat, they're not used to any type of disturbance. There's no waves down that deep that would that would topple them.”

Glass-sponge reefs were known only from fossils – they thrived in the Jurassic era, some 150 million years ago – until the 1980s. That’s when underwater explorers discovered the reefs thought to be extinct for 40 million years off the coast of British Columbia.

Much of the sea life crowding the reefs today is similar to what sponge-glass reefs would have harbored in the Jurassic era.

In 2007, University of Washington researchers found a reef on the continental shelf west of Grays Harbor.

“It’s like looking at an overcrowded aquarium in an expensive Japanese restaurant,” University of Washington oceanographer Paul Johnson said shortly after discovering the Grays Canyon reef.

"It's the largest glass-sponge reef that we know of on the [U.S.] West Coast,” Enticknap said. “Protecting that from bottom trawling is so important because the single pass of a trawl could damage that forever."

“It flattens the reef to nonexistence,” Makah tribal fisherman Larry Buzzell said in a text from off the Washington coast. He said he trawls, but only in muddy or sandy areas that are not damaged by heavy fishing nets being dragged across them.

Paine said the trawling industry had hoped to have an area off Grays Harbor reopened to trawling, given the rapid recovery of rockfish populations.

“This is a really, really big success story,” Paine said of the rockfish rebound.

The changing habitat protections, nearly five years in the making, were approved unanimously by the Pacific Fishery Management Council last year.

The 14-member council includes representatives from state governments, tribes, fishing groups and environmentalists and is largely responsible for setting regulations for fisheries off the West Coast.

By law, the National Marine Fisheries Service must defer to the council’s recommendations unless they violate some federal law.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is taking public comment on the proposal until September 16.