Jill Parker of the College of Veterinary Medicine scans the course to see where a teammate's shot landed. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

Not far from the bustle of Third Street, the course seems a world apart, as the only sounds are the steady thwack of club against ball, and the gentle laughter of friends reuniting.

For the women who comprised the Marysville Ladies Club, the regular weekly gathering is a time to decompress from the stresses of academic life, to sharpen golf skills and to enjoy a bit of nature. It’s also a chance for women from across different disciplines to come together over a shared love of golf, without concerns about rank, college or background.

“You’re out here, and having lots of fun, and its nice and smells good,” said Mysti Weber, a senior research assistant with the College of Oceanography. “We’re outside, doing a little bit of exercise.”

Marching across the course with an OSU golf club cover prominently displayed, Weber spent a lot of time smiling, even when her shots didn’t quite land where she’d planned. She began golfing at age 19, but gave it up when family commitments got in the way. About a decade ago, she got re-interested in the sport, and took professional lessons to get herself back into the game.

Women faculty and staff gather weekly to play golf at Marysville.

“It’s a very hard game to master,” she said. “It’s a challenge.”

She said having a regular group to golf with has helped keep her immersed in the sport.

“You get to meet a lot of really nice people,” Weber said. “It’s a whole package thing that’s really fun. There’s no sense in doing it if it’s not fun.”

While Weber golfs on many different local courses, Marysville is the place she considers “home.” She’s had her best games there, and finds the course comforting and the staff understanding, even when she’s having a particularly poor performance.

Golfing is a good way to get exercise and release work stress. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

“They’re really patient,” she said.

The Marysville Ladies Club has members of all skill levels, and is an official Oregon Golf Association Member Club. The women who join get an official USGA golf handicap index and play by the USGA Rules of Golf.

Tricia Maynard, an accountant with the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, is a newcomer to the sport. She took up golfing a few years ago, but didn’t get serious until friend SueAnn Bottoms in the College of Education told her about the Marysville Ladies Golf Club.

Maynard, who said she’s not really the athletic type, appreciates that golf is a sport that she can ease into, and now that she’s in the club, she sees her skills, if not her score, improving.

“My score’s not really improving much but I feel I’m hitting the ball better, so at some point it will all come together.”

She’s also meeting women from other departments that she said she would have never met on campus.

Jill Parker is an associate professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences with the College of Veterinary Medicine, and has been a member of the club for at least six years.

“I really feel like I learned to play golf by joining,” she said. And the welcoming atmosphere is conducive to learning without feeling self-conscious.

“It’s a fun group of women who are really nice,” she said. “If you’re a terrible shot that’s ok.”

An OSU alum, Cheryl Hatch is now a professional photographer, and likens golf to her passion for photography.

Mysti Weber and Tricia Maynard, both of OSU, walk the course at Marysville on a Thursday afternoon. (photo: Theresa Hogue)

“It’s visual, and it’s a feeling and intuitive game,” she said. And even though they’re playing the same course, it’s never boring.

“Every time is different, every day is different but it’s got a really good groove.”

There is a morning and evening group that meets at Marysville Golf Course each week through the end of September. New members are always welcome, and some members play through the fall and winter even though the group doesn’t have regular meetings at that time. The course is located at 2020 S.W. Allen.

For more information, contact Chi Meredith, current club champion and past president, at meredithchi2@gmail.com

Trysting Tree Golf Club, on the east side of Corvallis, is an affiliate of the OSU Foundation, and contributes back to OSU by contributing to a number of programs on campus. It is the home course for OSU women and men’s golf teams, and also has a number of men and women’s groups. For information call 752-3332.

~ Theresa Hogue

Equally adept with hands and head, Kelly Benoit-Bird readies an experiment aboard a research vessel. (photo: University Marketing)

At 9, she became fascinated with oceans while on a family trip to an aquarium in her native Connecticut. Now, even though she still sometimes gets seasick aboard a research ship at sea, Kelly Benoit-Bird has been named recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s Early Career Award for Ocean Sciences. Only one is given every two years.

“It’s pretty humbling,” said Benoit-Bird, an assistant professor in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. She will receive the citation Tuesday at a national conference in San Francisco. “I’m being recognized by my peers who were once my role models. I’m incredibly grateful.”

Learning from others started early for Benoit-Bird, who studies how changes in resources over time and space affect competition and behaviors among oceanic organisms. From the time she could walk, she would visit her dad at his garage and hand him tools in the pit as he worked on engines.

As a teenager, she wasn’t allowed to drive a car until she could rebuild an engine by herself. Now, she designs equipment for the oceanographic research she leads and often finds herself fixing something mechanical or electronic aboard ships hundreds of nautical miles from shore.

“You become very self-sufficient on a boat,” said Benoit-Bird, who earned her doctorate in zoology from the University of Hawaii in 2003 and then did post-doctorate work on the islands. She joined the OSU faculty in 2004 and received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2005.

Besides wrenches and pliers, Benoit-Bird’s toolbox now includes passive and active acoustics devices as well as imaging optics to study a wide range of  “critters,” as she calls them, as small as zooplankton and as large as whales, in marine ecological communities.

“It’s a critical perspective needed to understand whole systems,” she says. Ocean life, unlike animals and plants on land, exists in three-dimensional space, mixed together, constantly moving, with no permanent structure to hide or eat in.

“I ask the kinds of questions that look at three-dimensional problems and search for unifying explanations,” she said.

Her use of acoustics began as an undergraduate at Brown University where a unique curriculum placed students in major research laboratories. The husband-and-wife team that ran hers used acoustics in exploring the behaviors of bats and frogs. Most recently at OSU, Benoit-Bird utilized sophisticated acoustic monitoring to track the ballet-like movements of foraging spinner dolphins at night when the use of cameras and lighting would be intrusive. Read story and see acoustic video links here.

Back in that Brown laboratory, though, and more importantly, Benoit-Bird learned to understand something she had never known before: what it means to be a scientist.

“I’m the first in my family, on both sides, to go to college,” the OSU oceanographer said. “It was not something I understood.”

Once she got it, however, Benoit-Bird started off on a journey that has led to the prestigious AGU award. She is the second OSU oceanographer to receive it. The first was Andreas Schmittner in 2006. His research focuses on ocean circulation and climate change.

The AGU’s Early Career Award recognizes significant contributions to oceanographic sciences and the potential for a promising future.

“Kelly is a superb scientist, teacher and colleague who already is making significant contributions in biological and ecological oceanography,” said Mark Abbott, dean of the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

“She is rapidly becoming a leader on the national and international scene.”

“Both of us (Schmittner and herself) getting this award says a lot about COAS and Oregon State,” Benoit-Bird said. “It shows we have a lot of energy here and that the quality of faculty is exceptional.”

In her travels, Benoit-Bird has found the geography and oceans of New Zealand “spectacular” and so much like Oregon. She sees the Hawaiian custom of working barefoot in boats an important cultural difference that “challenges your assumptions and makes you see things in a different way.”

She’s married to Chad Waluk, a faculty research assistant who works alongside her aboard ship, which makes being at sea for weeks on end feel more normal. In her free time, she paints with oils and recently has gotten involved in digital scrapbooking – a hobby that’s “a great way to fill the down time” without having photographs and paper scraps flying everywhere when rolling about on the waves.

Working with her hands on engines and scrapbooks is good, Benoit-Bird said, but for the scientist within,  the important thing is each question that life and the ocean present.

“The questions are always ahead of the equipment you might need to answer them,” she said. “If you wait to have a tool to discover something, if you only think inside the box, you’ll never get to the next level.”
~ by Ed Curtin

Oregon State's Kelly Benoit-Bird adjusts a sonar device aboard a research ship. (photo: Nick Kelsh)

If you’re older, imagine square dancers. Younger? Try hip-hop break dancing. Either way, when partners dart into the center of the circle to do their moves and grooves, they are not unlike spinner dolphins feeding in ocean waters, according to new images recently captured by an Oregon State University marine ecologist. (Four links at the end of this story provide spectacular images of this feeding strategies. — Editor)

“Synchronized swimmers have nothing on spinner dolphins,” OSU’s Kelly Benoit-Bird said. “The degree of synchrony they display when feeding is incredible – especially considering that they’re doing it at night, several meters below the surface where they can’t see their prey or each other.”

Long been known for their teamwork in capturing prey, the synchronization exhibited by seven-foot mammals is even more complex than scientists have realized and likely evolved as a strategy to maximize their energy intake, said Benoit-Bird.

The study, by scientists at Oregon State University and the University of Hawaii, with Benoit-Bird as the lead author, utilized high-tech acoustics to make the discovery.

It found that spinner dolphins engage in a highly choreographed night-time “dance” to enclose their prey. Then they dart into the circle of confused fish in pairs, feed for 15 seconds, back out and let the next pair in line take their turn.

To match their 3,200-calorie-per-day diet, they need to eat at least 650 fish each night – plus enough extra to fuel the energy they burn during the hunt, perhaps another 200 to 300 fish.

“To make that work, they need to eat about a fish a minute,” Benoit-Bird said, “and we think that’s why they’ve developed this elaborately complex system of group predation. Dolphins can’t open their mouths like baleen whales and swallow large amounts of food at once. They have to target individual fish and it’s too difficult and energy-consuming to hunt solo.”

The study is important, scientists say, because it greatly expands knowledge of spinner dolphin behavior and opens up new fields of scientific inquiry into underwater ecosystems made possible by technological advancements in acoustical monitoring.

It was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, and the results were published last week in the journal, Acoustical Society of America.

Until now, much of the knowledge about spinner dolphin feeding has been anecdotal because they are primarily nocturnal in their feeding, Benoit-Bird pointed out. However, acoustical eavesdropping allowed the scientists to “view” the dolphins’ behavior without interrupting their routine with lights and underwater cameras.

In their study off the coast of Oahu, Hawaii, the scientists used sonar readings from a “multi-beam echo-sounder” to monitor groups of spinner dolphins. The animals’ systematic approach to feeding was eye-opening.

Initially a small group of about 20 dolphins would swim side-by-side in a straight line until finding concentrations of prey – in this case, 3-5 inch lanternfish. When they got to within five meters of their prey, they would pull into a tight circular formation and sequentially swim up and down vertically, in essence, doing “the wave” like fans at a sporting event, Benoit-Bird said.

“They were using their bodies like a plow,” she said. “We’re not sure if they were creating a pressure barrier or trying to confuse the prey. But the result among the lanternfish was chaos.”

As the lanternfish became concentrated, the dolphins tightened their circle and formed 10 pairs. The pairs at one o’clock and seven o’clock would move in, feed for 15 seconds, and retreat back to the circle. Then the pairs at two o’clock and eight o’clock would do likewise.

The feeding would last for about five minutes, during which time each dolphin got two opportunities to feed, and then the group rose as one to the surface to breathe, maintaining their circle. The dolphins would take one breath, Benoit-Bird said, and then dive down and begin the process anew.

“If one or two individual dolphins would break the circle or head to the surface to breathe, it breaks their whole system up,” Benoit-Bird said. “They never did. So then you have to ask: How do they communicate with each other, and how do they pass on that knowledge to their young?”

The researchers are still working on the latter puzzle, but their acoustical monitoring study found that much of what scientists had assumed about dolphin communication may, in fact, be wrong in this species.

In a companion article also published in Acoustical Society of America, the researchers describe how they used underwater hydrophones to listen to the dolphins during their feeding forays.

Dolphins are often vocal and their use of frequency-modulated whistles was thought by many to cue their coordinated behavior. But the researchers found they didn’t use those whistles at all while hunting prey – just during non-foraging times or when they were surfacing. Instead, they used a series of “clicks,” with the highest click rates taking place just prior to foraging.

“Whistles are omni-directional, like turning on a light bulb in a room,” Benoit-Bird said. “Clicks, on the other hand, are directional like a laser. We think it may be a strategy to communicate only within the group and not to other potential lanternfish predators. Tuna and billfish are looking for the same prey and they can hear the whistles but not the clicks because the frequencies are too high and so focused.

“If you’re lined up to eat this great smorgasbord, would you want to tell the tuna next door about it?”

~ by Mark Floyd and Ed Curtin

Descriptions of the four images are followed by the links. Just click!

• This top view of actual data from multi-beam sonar observations of dolphin foraging is shown at eight times real speed. The yellow dots show the position of each dolphin in this group of 20, while the purple background shows their prey. Each time the color purple becomes brighter, it represents a doubling in the numerical intensity of prey. This foraging occurs in four distinct phases, highlighting in the timeline at the top of the clip:  1) Wide line, where the dolphins find a good spot in the prey to begin; 2) Tight line, when the dolphins begin to herd the prey forward; 3) Circling, the separation of the herded prey from the rest of the prey; and 4) Inside circle, when dolphins move into the circle of food in pairs to eat. ftp://ftp.coas.oregonstate.edu/pub/MarkFloyd/benoit_bird_animation_1.mov

• This is a side view of data, also at 8X real speed. The blue dots show dolphins behind the center of the circle of prey, while the yellow dots are dolphins in front of the plane. The brightness of the color purple increases with the density of prey and the four distinct foraging stages (see above) are visible. From this observation, it is apparent how the dolphins cover nearly the entire extent of the prey layer, working together to force it into a dense patch – first in front of the line of dolphins, and then within the circle of dolphins. ftp://ftp.coas.oregonstate.edu/pub/MarkFloyd/benoit_bird_animation_2.mov

• This visualization shows a 3-D representation of multibeam sonar data of foraging dolphins. It becomes clear from this view how the dolphins work together to surround an entire slab of the layer of prey. They circle their prey, forming a cylinder of dense fish between them, before rising as one to breathe at the surface. ftp://ftp.coas.oregonstate.edu/pub/MarkFloyd/benoit_bird_animation_3.mov

• An underwater image of spinner dolphins is available at: http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/photos/spinner_dolphins.JPG