Oregon Fish and Wildlife worries about non-native creatures on dock set adrift by earthquake tsunami-
There are many ways that non-natives travel the globe to invade foreign land and water. One rarely considered until recently is riding debris pushed out of sea by giant tsunami. Tiny starfish, an invasive mussel and foreign algae get the most worry here it seems. They are many stories about this today. One of the more detailed is in the Chicago Sun-Times/Associated Press. Dock from Japan tsunami washes ashore in Oregon. By Jeff Bernard.
Comments
I thought the some of the Haida men I saw in British Columbia looked Japanese. Perhaps some Japanese fishermen survived on a fishing boat trapped in debris during some ancient sunami and intermarried with the North American natives when they washed ashore.
Probably the only thing I miss about living on the Oregon coast is the beachcombing. I still have almost 24 Japanese glass floats, 3 are the size of basketballs and 2 are small rolling pin type. Anybody remember hearing about the container of rubber ducks that fell over board, they tracked those things and they had quite the journey.
Chuck, your comments are to the point, things have been floating across the Pacific for thousands of years and there is no new threat…this is all fear mongering by the popular press…and has no place on this blog….
Of course, things have been floating on the currents around the world ever since there have been currents, but what is floating makes a big difference.
If a ship had hit that dock while at sea, the ship might have been sunk.
This is a time line about the rubber ducks floating around the Ocean’s.
THE JOURNEY SO FAR:
10 JANUARY 1992: Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean nearly 29,000 First Years bath toys, including bright yellow rubber ducks, are spilled from a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean.
16 NOVEMBER 1992: Caught in the Subpolar Gyre (counter-clockwise ocean current in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Siberia), the ducks take 10 months to begin landing on the shores of Alaska.
EARLY 1995: The ducks take three years to circle around. East from the drop site to Alaska, then west and south to Japan before turning back north and east passing the original drop site and again landing in North America. Some ducks are even found In Hawaii. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel approximately 50 per pent faster than the water in the current.
1995 – 2000: Some intrepid ducks escape the Subpolar Gyre and head North, through the Bering Straight and into the frozen waters of the Arctic. Frozen into the ice the ducks travel slowly across the pole, moving ever eastward.
2000: Ducks begin reaching the North Atlantic where they begin to thaw and move Southward. Soon ducks are sighted bobbing in the waves from Maine to Massachusetts.
2001: Ducks are tracked in the area where the Titanic sank.
JULY TO DECEMBER 2003: The First Years company offers a $100 savings bond reward for the recovery of wayward ducks from the 1992 spill. To be valid ducks must be sent to the company and must be found in New England, Canada or Iceland. Britain is told to prepare for an invasion of the wayward ducks as well.
2003: A lawyer called Sonali Naik was on holiday in the Hebrides in north-west Scotland when she found a faded green frog on the beach marked with the magic words ‘The First Years’. Unaware of the significance of her find she left it on the beach. It was only when she was chatting to other guests at her hotel that she realised what she had seen.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-464768/Thousands-rubber-ducks-land-British-shores-15-year-journey.html#ixzz1xaeufPYK