For a long time, biologists didn’t really know how many different types of fish lived in the Salish Sea. One estimate at the end of the 19th century put the count at 90 species, but newer estimates in the following decades revealed far more. By 1980, scientists had surmised that 218 species lived in local waters. Then, over the next 30 years, no one looked to see if that number had grown.
According to a new report published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 253 fish species live in the Salish Sea. But by Ted Pietsch’s count, even that number is too low. Pietsch, a coauthor of the NOAA report and the curator of the University of Washington’s Burke Museum fish collection, spent a year poring over databases that categorize millions of specimens preserved at various institutions in Washington State and British Columbia. And since he’s finished this last report published in September, he’s added three more fish species to the list.
In the latest report, Pietsch and coauthor James Orr found a total of 37 new species since the last count in 1980. They also failed to find evidence of five species that had been named in the earlier report, so they took those animals off the list.
“It’s a massive undertaking,” Pietsch said. “We’re only able to do it now because we have this huge fish collection.”
Concern over extinction, habitat loss, and a changing climate added urgency to the research, Pietsch said. In some ways, the Salish Sea is becoming a more popular destination for newcomer species. Because of warming waters, creatures that normally hover off the coast of California are entering the Salish Sea by way of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
“People sometimes get the impression that distributions are stable over time, but things shift with overall climatic change,” Pietsch added. “But a lot of times these things are small and cryptic and hiding under rocks, and people have missed them over the years.”
There isn’t a week that goes by without people contacting the fish collection to ask Pietsch about animals they don’t recognize. Quite a few of them have wild colors and strange shapes; some look like they’d belong in a tropical habitat. Pietsch names the opah, a “beautiful, deep-bodied fish,” as one newcomer that people may have never seen before. (To me, the opah looks like a giant, steamrolled goldfish. Which is not to say it isn’t beautiful.) Before the latest NOAA report, only two records documented the opah’s existence in the Salish Sea.
Soon, Pietsch will be coming out with a fully illustrated book to document the ecology and behavior of all 256 Salish Sea fishes. “It’s kind of astonishing to know what’s been here,” he says.
Again, you can find his full report online right here.
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