Last Summer during a dive with Pacific Adventure Charters in
Hood Canal, Washington, a group of REEF Pacific Advanced
Assessment Team (AAT) surveyors came across something
unexpected. As part of REEF’s funded project with The Russell
Family Foundation, the team’s goal was to look for invasive
tunicates and do REEF marine life surveys on several previously
unsurveyed sites. While they found the invasive tunicates they
were looking for, they also found a derelict fishing net that
was damaging fragile habitat and ensnaring marine life. AAT
members, Pete Naylor, Steve Rubin and Janna Nichols found the
abandoned gill net on a wall, amid large growths of Cloud Sponge
(Aphrocallistes vastus), one of Puget Sound’s rarest and longest
lived animals and an invertebrate species monitored in the REEF
Pacific Northwest Volunteer Survey Project program. As the name
implies, cloud sponges form pale, irregular cloud-shaped
colonies, which can be more than ten feet across and seven feet
high. These colonies attach to rocky sur