Alarm over the dumping of mine tailings and debris at an ocean dumping site in 2008 led local conservationist John Buchanan to a most intriguing discovery.
More than 15,000 cubic metres of material, enough to fill 2,500 dump trucks, was being dumped into Howe Sound at Watts Point, north of Britannia Beach, to make room for upgrades to the Sea to Sky Highway and Buchanan was featured on news reports, expressing his worries over the impact on the ocean environment.
"Somebody came up to me after and said, 'Why are you making such a fuss? There is nothing alive down there anyway,'" recalls Buchanan. The question led him to question what really lived in the depths of the sound. Not one to let things rest, he conducted more research and found a book from the University of Alberta, containing the observations of a manned submersible, the Pisces IV, on numerous dives in Howe Sound during the 1970s and '80s.
One of their most remarkable findings was the sighting of glass sponges.
Glass sponge reefs were common when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. In the late Jurassic period, a massive sponge reef stretched across a prehistoric sea where Europe is today. But ocean conditions changed. Glass sponges survived, dotting the world's oceans as individuals. But their reefs were thought extinct 30 million years ago - until an astonishing discovery in the late 1980s in B.C. waters. The reefs are considered living fossils, descendants of a prehistoric sea.
"It was fascinating to know that, in our own backyard, we have these rare glass sponges," Buchanan said.
The world's oldest multi-cell organisms, glass sponges produce a skeleton made from silica (glass) extracted from sea water and generally exist in deep, cold parts of the Pacific and the southern ocean bordering Antartica. The continental shelf off of the B.C. coast provides the unique environment that allows them to form vast reefs in water only 150 to 200 metres deep.
There are four glass sponge reefs in Hecate Strait in Queen Charlotte Sound and two in nearby Georgia Strait - on McCall Bank, just off the Sunshine Coast and one near the mouth of the Fraser. Estimated to be more than 9,000 years old and spanning more than 700 square kilometres, the reefs have been dubbed the Amazon rainforest of the ocean.
The Pisces IV had discovered glass sponge skeletons off Watts Point where the dumping was taking place.
"They found skeletons of these animals all over the place, which told them at one time the oxygen levels were high enough for them to exist," Buchanan said.
"It was our actions, with Woodfibre, the effluent coming out of the old pulp mill, the high concentrations of heavy metals leaching into Britannia Creek, the sewage effluent from the town site of Squamish... those things settle down to the bottom of the ocean, and would affect the oxygen levels down there," he said.
It's not known whether industries played a role in killing the glass sponges, but it appears that human activity can be damaging to the sponges.
Another possible threat to the sponges is now heating up at Halkett Bay, a small inlet on Gambier Island. The Artificial Reef Society of B.C. has been spearheading a campaign to sink a naval vessel there as a site for recreational diving.
Ramona C. de Graaf, a marine biologist and forage fish specialist, wrote a letter to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in September expressing her concern over the lack of surveys for critical fish and marine habitat.
She worries that heavy metals, such as lead, copper and PCBs, will escape from the ship.
"Placing a very large point-source of contaminants in Halkett Bay in the immediate proximity of habitats used as spawning and rearing habitats of fish seems counter to the decades of efforts to restore the health of the Strait of Georgia," de Graaf said.
Glass sponge populations currently exist off Lions Bay, and Buchanan fears they too will be destroyed if the naval vessel is sunk.
"It looks like where they are sinking this ship is very close to where the glass sponges are. I think that this is another reason that DFO should reject that whole proposal of sinking that ship.
"It gets back to the mentality [that] we are still thinking of the ocean as a disposal site," he said. "A lot of people are making a living now off fishing. The human impact of ocean dumping in Howe Sound is that the high content of metals, mercury and pollutants make their way up the food chain and wind up on your dinner plate as prawns or crabs or whatever you are fishing for the day.
"I think that it is important for the public to realize it doesn't matter where you go on this Earth, whether it be to the bottom of the ocean or to the highest peak, there is something unique that lives there," Buchanan said.
"So I really think we need to re-look at exactly how we do things. I have never believed that sinking anything to the bottom of the ocean is a smart thing. It's a piece of the planet we just turn our backs on."
