Dylan McDowell will spend six months studying wildlife management in Africa. (Photo courtesy of Dylan McDowell)

In the place where Dylan McDowell grew up, wildlife meant sea lions, sandpipers, salmon and passing pods of spouting whales. Where he’s going this summer, wildlife means something else entirely, something reminiscent of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, exotic and fearsome: wildebeests, jackals, baboons, leopards, warthogs. And rhinos that have been poached nearly to extinction.

These are the beasts McDowell will encounter when he travels to Africa for six months of study and research, first with Nyati Conservation Corps in Zimbabwe and then with SIT Study Abroad in Tanzania.

But wild animals aren’t his sole interest. Humans captivate him, too. “I feel it’s my responsibility as a person to explore and embrace different cultures,” says McDowell, who’s working on two degrees at Oregon State University, one in K-12 education and the other in fisheries and wildlife.

Giraffes at the Cawston Block in Zimbabwe (Photo: Dylan McDowell)

In McDowell’s coastal hometown of Yachats, skin-color variations had more to do with degrees of sunburn than with ethnic or racial diversity. “There was only one African-American student in my high school,” McDowell says, sounding a little regretful. He wants to fill that cultural gap in his education. So he’s heading to Africa not only to study wildlife conservation but also to meet African people and learn firsthand about their values, their politics, their struggles, their aspirations.

“I like looking at things through different lenses,” McDowell explains. Which might explain why he gravitates toward the junctures of disparate fields — for instance, the nexus of science and public policy, his current passion. The program in Tanzania fits that passion to a T. “The program focuses on wildlife conservation and political ecology — basically, how people interact with the environment,” he says.

So although his research is on rhinos, it’s as much about the humans who kill and sell the endangered ungulates for their horns, believed to be an aphrodisiac in some Asian societies. It’s also about the people who protect the massive horned animals, which are being reintroduced to the Serengeti where they have been wiped out.

“Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world,” says McDowell. “There’s a lot of money in the rhino trade.” Noting that Africa is “still trying to recover from European hegemony” of earlier decades, he argues that to take an American perspective on the rhino issue is to miss the social, political and cultural context in which the poaching occurs.

Endangered rhinos must co-exist with people in some of the world's poorest countries. (Photo: Engineers Without Borders, Oregon State University)

Besides interviewing rangers and local residents about the rhinos, McDowell will live with members of the Maasai tribe, camp out during a four-week safari and take classes in Swahili.

McDowell may not have had many cross-cultural experiences growing up in Yachats, but he did get plenty of cross-species interactions at the Oregon Coast Aquarium as a volunteer and later as a part-time guide and an aquarist. He became acquainted with puffins and octopi, whiskered otters lolling in their artificial habitat and ethereal jellyfish pulsing in their tubular tank. He even kissed a sea lion named Leah. “Very fishy,” is how he describes the marine-mammal’s smooch, for which tourists happily paid extra as part of a behind-the-scenes tour.

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Follow McDowell’s travels through his blog, Under the Baobab Tree.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) at 541-737-3006.

Caitlyn Clark's enthusiasm for ecological research wasn't deterred by her trip to mosquito-infested Manitoba arctic tundra (Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Clark)

On her first-ever research trip, Caitlyn Clark trudged up and down hundreds of spongy hummocks spanning miles of arctic tundra, all the while swatting at giant mosquitoes and scanning for hungry polar bears. She was in Manitoba to collect data about the habitats of boreal frogs and stickleback fish for Earthwatch Institute Student Challenge Awards Program.

For a lot of people, the bumpy, buggy, beary expedition would have been their last-ever research trip. Clark, though, was enchanted. Having to sign a polar bear release form — and then spotting three of the great white predators within the first 10 minutes of arriving at the campsite — was an adrenaline rush. And those monster mosquitoes? They just made everything more amazing. The swarms of juicy bugs brought out hordes of insect eaters, which in turn enticed the meat eaters.

“There’s a huge mosquito population that bursts forth,” says Clark, who was a student at Lakeridge High School in Lake Oswego when she went to Manitoba. “We had to wear full mosquito-net gear and Deet up every morning. It was ridiculous. But the wildlife just erupts. The food web is so pronounced!”

After 10 days on the tundra, her rudder was set.

“I knew that I could do this for the rest of my life,” recalls Clark, now an Oregon State University Honors College sophomore. Her grin telegraphs her delight. “I love research.”

Lough Hyne in County Cork, Ireland, is home to plants and animals that are unique to the Emerald Isle.

But she wants her research firmly connected to solutions. That’s why she chose OSU’s Ecological Engineering program, whose focus is on “optimizing the interface between humankind and the environment,” according to its homepage.

“The mindset of the program is systems theory, understanding how all the pieces interact so we can find more natural ways to solve problems,” she says.

Solutions will be top-of-mind for Clark this summer on the rocky shores of County Cork, where she’ll be studying purple urchins in Lough Hyne, the nation’s first marine reserve. (A “lough” in this sense means a bay or inlet.) One of four American students chosen for the International Research Experiences for Students (IRES) project in Ireland, Clark will be looking for clues to the plunging numbers of urchins, which are key members of tidal-pool communities. The suspect list is topped by the invasive brown algae, Sargassum muticum.

“We’ll be looking at threats to the community structure of the lough,” says Clark, who will be the youngest member of the IRES team and one of only two American undergrads. “We’ll be trying to figure out why the urchin population is declining — is it predation? Do they need more sheltered areas? Is the algae making the rocks too slippery for the urchins to attach?”

Once those questions are answered, Clark’s devotion to solutions will come in: “Is there anything we can do to fix it and, if so, should we step in?”

Caitlyn Clark has conducted research as part of Sarah Henkel's lab at Oregon State's Hatfield Marine Science Center. (Photo courtesy of Caitlyn Clark)

Purple urchins like these on the West Coast of the United States will be Caitlyn Clark's focus in Ireland this summer. (Photo courtesy of the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans)

Already, Clark is a seasoned marine researcher, collecting baseline data on bottom-dwelling organisms for Professor Sarah Henkel at OSU’s Benthic Ecology Lab/Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center. Before flying to Ireland, Clark and her teammates will spend five days at an orientation workshop in the Coos Bay area at the Oregon Institute of Marine Biology, run by the University of Oregon. But first, she’ll be navigating Oregon rivers as a raft guide for Oregon State’s Adventure Leadership Institute during the early summer months.

Clark is eager to see the “dramatic landscape” of the Emerald Isle. But as a native Northwesterner, she can be tough to impress. When she first saw the boreal forests of Manitoba, she remarked, “These trees are pretty short.” The scientist leading the trip turned to look at her. “You’re the one from Oregon, aren’t you?” he said.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Rachel Miller will head for Poligny, France, this summer to test ice-cream recipes. (Photo: Lee Sherman)

When Rachel Miller was shadowing a pie scientist in her hometown of Spokane, Washington, no one — not her teachers, not her parents, and certainly not she herself — could have predicted that her high school job shadow would lead to possibly the coolest summer internship in the universe: tasting ice cream in France.

OK, so let’s back up a minute. A pie scientist? Really? The year was 2008, and transfats were the newest boogeyman in the food industry. The scientist Miller shadowed at Cyrus O’Leary’s Pies was reformulating recipes, replacing shortening with healthier palm oil. Sugar, too, was on the food industry’s hit list as Americans’ waistlines swelled and their blood sugar spiked. Enter low-sugar pies and yet another reformulation.

Miller admits that her teenage choice of a job shadow had more to do with her sweet tooth than with any carefully thought-out career goal. Nonetheless, a career path began to unfold for this child of a meteorologist dad and a veterinarian mom (who worked with bomb-sniffing dogs during a military tour in Kuwait). After a senior-year visit to Oregon State University, Miller set her sights on the Department of Food Science and Technology. Studying food appealed to her practical nature.

“Food science is so applicable to everyday life,” she says. “It’s not one of those sciences where you have to work in a lab. Your kitchen can be your lab.”

A part-time freshman gig crunching data for OSU cheese researcher Lisbeth Goddik introduced Miller to the chemistry, microbiology and artistry of curds and whey. So a logical spot for her first summer internship was Oregon’s famous Tillamook Cheese Factory, where she chemically analyzed milk samples and inspected incoming ingredients like sugar and salt. The next summer, she worked at the Darigold plant back home in Spokane.

Finally, her professional life looped back to its origins: that sweet tooth. At the end of her senior year at OSU, Miller was accepted as a summer intern at ENILBIO, the National School of Dairy Industry and Biotechnology. Tucked away in the picturesque French town of Poligny, the school resides in one of the world’s finest cheese-making regions. The school also researches ice cream.

Miller’s delighted grin seems to say, “Can you believe it?” as she explains her summer job testing the texture of ice cream made without chemical emulsifiers — compounds like polysorbate 80, monoglycerides and diglycerides — that give ice cream its smoothness, free of gritty ice crystals.

“It’s all about mouth feel,” she says, sounding very much like a vintner after swishing, sipping and spitting a pinot noir. “Consumers want a creamy, pleasant mouthfeel, but they don’t want the substances that create that pleasant texture. It’s a Catch 22.”

In France, she’ll be looking at what happens to ice cream, texturally, without those multisyllabic emulsifiers. It’s all part of an international trend, Miller says. More and more, consumers avoid foods listing unpronounceable additives and unrecognizable terminology on their packages. “There’s a big push to clean up the labels on food products, to limit the number of ingredients and to use only natural ones,” she says.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

WeiLi Hong (Photo: Lee Sherman)

When the Earth burps, WeiLi Hong listens. Whether Earth’s gaseous emissions bubble up from “mud volcanoes” on the planet’s surface or seep out of fissures on the ocean floor, the Oregon State University Ph.D. student has his monitoring gear to the ground.

And sometimes, he’s actually in the ground.

“I fell in twice,” Hong admits, describing the hazards of surveying mud volcanoes in his home country of Taiwan. “I was trapped in thick mud up to my waist. There was nothing solid to grab onto. I had to kind of roll across the surface of the mud until I could pull myself out.”

Which brings up a couple of questions: What is a mud volcano, anyway? And why would anyone risk life and limb traipsing around these oddities of nature?

The answer is methane — millions and millions of tons of it trapped in ancient sediments. Under pressure from the bumping and grinding of tectonic plates, the gas migrates upward through Earth’s crust, seeking the atmosphere. Certain countries, such as Taiwan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Azerbaijan, are “burping gas like overfed infants,” to borrow a metaphor from one New York Times writer on the subject of methane emissions. As the methane escapes, creating a slurry of fluids and dissolved solids, volcano-like mud domes mound up across the landscape. They can be as small as a toddler’s backyard swimming pool and as big as several kilometers in diameter.

Mud can act like quicksand. WeiLi Hong needed a helping hand during his research in southern Taiwan. (Photo courtesy of WeiLi Hong)

WeiLi Hong conducts mud volcano science in Taiwan. (Photo courtesy of WeiLi Hong)

But that’s not the only way methane migrates. It comes up through the bottom of the ocean, too. On the seafloor, where it’s super-cold, seeping methane gets locked into ice-like structures called “hydrates,” Hong explains. Studying methane emissions on land, despite the pitfalls, is a walk in the park compared to studying them 2,000 feet beneath the sea.

“With mud volcanoes, we’re looking at how much methane is emitted to the atmosphere,” says Hong, who specializes in chemical oceanography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. “With cold seeps, we’re looking at how much methane is emitted to the water column. To do that, we need a vessel with the ability to drill.”

The discomforts of being at sea for two months didn’t deter Hong two summers ago when, along with OSU researcher Marta Torres, he joined an exploratory expedition to Korea’s East Sea hunting for hydrates aboard the research ship Fugro Synergy. His job was to analyze the physical properties of sediment samples taken from the depths.

Methane hydrate will burn when lit. The inset image shows the structure of methane hydrate; the green and grey molecule in the center is methane and the red cage is the ice structure. (Photo courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

For scientists and engineers, this trapped methane presents both threats and opportunities. On one hand, Hong says, melting hydrates could trigger Earth-warming greenhouse-gas emissions and tsunami-causing landslides. On the other hand, methane could be an energy bonanza — if it could be safely harnessed. That’s why the Korean government and the U.S. Department of Energy cosponsored the 2010 Ulleung Basin Gas Hydrate expedition.

“We were looking at porosity, permeability, texture, composition,” he says. “We used an X-ray machine to get 3-D images of the cores.” Opening his laptop, he clicks on a grainy gray image from the bathysphere. As he toggles the image this way and that, he points out traces of long-dead organisms in the long-buried layers. “On the computer,” he notes, “you can rotate the sediment column to see how the geosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere interact.”

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Renee Albertson (Photo: Lee Sherman)

Rain was pouring hard the day Renee Albertson first connected, face-to-face, with a marine mammal. She was a 7-year-old visiting British Columbia’s Sealand aquarium (Canada’s now-defunct answer to California’s SeaWorld) with her mom and dad. The daily show had been cancelled because of the downpour. The usual crowds were absent. As the soggy trio from Portland stood looking into a small tank, the resident killer whale surfaced. The young whale — a rescue named Miracle — was balancing a plastic ring on her nose. And she was looking straight at little Renee. Again and again, Renee tossed the ring. Again and again, Miracle brought it back, always to Renee.

“There was just a low fence around the tank, and you could literally reach over and throw the ring,” recalls Albertson, a Ph.D. student in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute. “She kept coming back to me. It was a neat connection. It really made an impact on me.”

Dolphins in the Marquesas (Photo: Renee Albertson)

That childhood encounter fed Albertson’s ever-deepening fascination with marine science and led her, eventually, to join the international research team of Oregon State cetacean scientist Scott Baker. “Increasingly, I knew I wanted to help conserve these intelligent animals,” she says. “I just didn’t know how.” But with stubborn single-mindedness punctuated by moments of pure serendipity — fortuitous convergences she characterizes simply as “perfect timing”— she found her way into an elite circle of researchers who follow cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises) to the farthest reaches of the Earth.

Portland to Polynesia

Albertson always loved biology. But the notion of making a living helping whales seemed unrealistic and out-of-reach. Chemistry — now there was a practical path to a career, she decided. After earning a bachelor’s in chemistry at Portland State University, Albertson took a job in an environmental lab analyzing water and soil samples. But lab work was, for her, too solitary. So she got a master’s in education at Pacific University and taught chemistry at David Douglas High School for 10 years. She loved teaching. But in the recesses of her mind, the eyes of the captive killer whale were still on her.

On the island of Hao in French Polynesia, villagers gave Renee Albertson a look at this jaw bone from a sperm whale. They agreed to let her sample the bone for genetic analysis. (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Then one day she heard about renowned whale researcher Michael Poole from a friend who had taken one of Poole’s whale-watching trips in French Polynesia. Poole had deeply inspired the friend, who encouraged Albertson to meet him. She was intrigued. “My friend didn’t realize that his whale-watching trip would end up being a life-changer for me,” Albertson says.

She emailed Poole, offering (begging, actually) to assist in his research during her summer break from teaching. “I never heard back,” she recalls. “I emailed and emailed and emailed.”

Finally, she sent one last message. She told him she was coming, regardless, and that if he didn’t need her, she joked, she guessed she would just have to spend the summer drinking martinis while writing lesson plans on the beach. Two days later, Poole’s name popped up in her inbox. His Ph.D. student wouldn’t be coming to collect samples that year, he explained, and it was humpback whale season. There was no money available for salary or living expenses. But if she were willing, he could offer her an unpaid internship.

When she got to the island of Moorea, Poole handed her not a life jacket but a notebook. Inside the fat binder was a photographic catalog of humpback whales’ tails. Poole tasked her with comparing the tails of recently sighted whales with those of previous years. “If you still like biology when you finish this, I’ll take you out in the boat,” Poole said. For two weeks Albertson “sat in a little beach cabana with a little magnifying glass, matching whale tails.”

She had earned her creds. Soon after, she was on the boat learning about dolphins, whales and conservation and helping Poole collect new whale-tail photos for the catalog. They also collected skin samples from breaching whales for eventual mitochondrial DNA analysis as part of her master’s research.

Posts From the Boat

The work led her to the University of Auckland, where Professor Baker had just accepted a new position as assistant director of the Marine Mammal Institute located in (how ironic is this?) Albertson’s home state of Oregon.

Renee Albertson and colleague Marc Oremus just published the first genetics paper on rough-toothed dolphins. Albertson, Oremus and whale researcher Michael Poole are known locally as the "French Polynesia team." Albertson says, "Believe it or not, it isn't that warm there, as our jackets illustrate. I was freezing most of the time on the boat!" (Photo courtesy of Renee Albertson)

Since joining Baker’s Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Laboratory, she has studied humpbacks in Polynesia and Antarctica, rough-toothed dolphins from Hawaii and the South Pacific, and multiple species of dolphins and whales in the Marquesas archipelago, a “hotspot” for cetacean diversity. She is coauthor on a paper about the population structure of rough-toothed dolphins recently accepted by the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology. “Even though they live in the open ocean, they live in very discrete communities,” she says of the findings. She has presented to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Scientific Review Group on the status and restructuring of marine mammal stocks. And she’s back in the classroom, this time teaching courses on the conservation and biology of marine mammals, both online for OSU and at the Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Visit Albertson’s blog for a day-by-day account of her most recent research expedition http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/marquesas/

Learn more about marine mammal studies through the South Pacific Wale Research Consortium.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Rebecca Hamner (Photo: Lee Sherman)

A dolphin’s dorsal fin can be as distinctive as a human fingerprint. As the fin slices through the sea, its unique pattern of pigments, nicks and scars relays the animal’s personal story to observers on the surface. Often, scientists can use these markings to ID individual dolphins. But for some species, fin IDs are not precise enough. That’s why researchers like Oregon State University Ph.D. student Rebecca Hamner have turned to DNA.

Several summers ago in Australia’s Shark Bay, Hamner learned to recognize 200 distinct dorsal fins on bottlenose dolphins with names like Puck, Noggin and Tool. Their scars recorded entanglements with fishing nets, skirmishes with tiger sharks and battles among themselves for mates — personalized markings she quickly came to know around the resort town of Monkey Mia as a field assistant for two professors from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the University of Zurich.

At Monkey Mia, fin ID was a piece of cake. “Ninety percent of the dolphins in Shark Bay have shark bites or other distinguishing scars,” notes Hamner, a student in OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute.

But then she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study the endangered Hector’s dolphin of New Zealand, which Scientific American’s “Extinction Watch” blog calls the “world’s smallest and rarest dolphins.” She joined the international research team of Scott Baker (who has appointments at both the University of Auckland and OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute) and began investigating the population structure of the Hector’s, which is about one-third the size of a bottlenose with a distinctive black mask and rounded dorsal fins. This time, she ID’d the animals by collecting tiny skin samples using a modified veterinary capture rifle to fire a floating biopsy dart from a boat.

Scouting for Scientists

So how did Hamner wind up studying dolphin genetics at the internationally known OSU Cetacean Conservation and Genomics Lab? Turns out, it had more to do with Hamner’s tenaciously tracking down faculty members who needed research assistants than with a burning passion for marine mammals per se. One research topic led to another — from dolphins to microalgae to invasive seaweed to lionfish and, finally, back to dolphins.

Hector's dolphins in Cloudy Bay, New Zealand (Photo: Anjanette Baker)

Her path to marine mammal expertise began in North Carolina, where she grew up tent camping at Lake Jeanette, tramping the woods, stalking wildlife behind the family home and splashing in the Atlantic Ocean on summer beach trips. When she started college at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, she knew she wanted to do “something with animals and nature.”

She wasted no time getting started. It was only her second week as an undergrad double-majoring in marine biology and psychology when she approached a dolphin researcher, who quickly put her to work doing photo-ID and acoustic surveys for bottlenoses along the North Carolina coast.

“I worked on those surveys every weekend for four years,” Hamner says. “That’s where I got my passion for field work.”

Species Spin

Meanwhile, during her second semester, she met a professor who was identifying microalgae by DNA sequencing. “Hmm,” she thought, “genetics is kind of interesting.” After working with him on the unicellular species (“these little green dots that you need a microscope to see”), she was recommended for a paid position with the researcher next door. So she switched to studying invasive red seaweed called Gracilaria vermiculophylla. When she was asked to process a few invasive lionfish samples sent over by one of the researcher’s collaborators, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist in Beaufort (home of the Rachel Carson Coastal Preserve), she was captivated. For the next three years, she studied the venomous fish and presented her findings in her honors thesis.

After graduation, Hamner circled back to dolphins, heading first to Shark Bay for that finny summer and then on to New Zealand. After collecting tissue and analyzing DNA from the Hector’s dolphins and comparing it against existing samples in the Cetacean Tissue Archive at the University of Auckland, the team documented an alarmingly low abundance for the subspecies called the Maui’s dolphin.

“Suddenly, I was being invited to be a scientific panel member at a risk-assessment meeting organized by the New Zealand Department of Conservation and Ministry of Primary Industries,” Hamner says, her tone a mixture of pride and surprise. Her work with Baker has spurred the New Zealand government to reevaluate current protections and extend fishing restrictions along the coastline they inhabit. “Because of our findings, the Maui’s Dolphin Threat Management Plan is being accelerated.”

With only about 55 remaining individuals over the age of 1, the stakes couldn’t be higher.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Rick Spinrad, Vice President for Research, Oregon State University

When land grant universities were created 150 years ago, science was already an international activity. Well before the signing of the Morrill Act in 1862, American scientists aboard six U.S. Navy vessels had circumnavigated the globe, collected thousands of plant and animal specimens and mapped parts of the Pacific Ocean from the Columbia River to Antarctica. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution partly on the basis of a worldwide voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. The world’s first international scientific conference was held in 1860, two years before President Abraham Lincoln set the land grant research and education engine in motion.

These universities — the people’s colleges as they were called then — are a singular American innovation. They put a college education and the world’s collected knowledge within the reach of everyday people and focused their energies on such practical endeavors as agriculture and engineering. And they have made global impacts (think the Green Revolution or the computer). They have also made global opportunities available to the sons and daughters of every state, regardless of income or social class.

My own career as a scientist, begun through connections made at Oregon State, has taken me to South America, Africa, the Mediterranean and more than a few unlikely places, such as a cattle-hauling freighter in the Congo River. By its very nature, oceanography is an international endeavor. Ocean currents and ecosystems have no respect for political boundaries.

In one of the Earth's most active fault zones, OSU geoscientist John Nabelek and colleagues are defining the forces that created Mt. Everest and threaten millions of people. (Photo courtesy of John Nabelek)

While we are committed to this state — its people, governments and businesses — international collaborations are also crucial to our mission. Our researchers, faculty members and students alike, work on transdisciplinary projects on every continent. In Terra, you can read about students studying wildlife management in Africa, deep-sea methane near South Korea and sea urchins in Ireland. Our anthropologists and agronomists are at work in India and China. Our geologists are studying the Himalayas and the Andes. Our chemists work with colleagues in Scandinavia, Germany and France. Water resources scientists advise the United Nations and national governments. Public health researchers work in Africa, Mexico and Taiwan.

In the OSU Research Office, we regularly review proposals from faculty members who are being recruited for international projects, but their work pays off for Oregon. It gives them a rich perspective on the world and enables them to train our students with the latest knowledge. And our graduates help Oregon businesses (farmers, equipment manufacturers, apparel design companies) compete in the global marketplace.

There are still important challenges to address in managing this far-flung enterprise. The volatility of the global economy means that three-month-old financial agreements might need to be renegotiated. Concerns about protecting national commercial interests raise regulatory compliance issues, which dictate careful, sometimes complicated considerations about access to equipment and materials. And, despite translation apps and cultural competency training, the Tower of Babel is still standing (How do you say “earned value management principles” in Farsi?).

Just as technology links the world economy and events echo within minutes across the globe, researchers collaborate across international boundaries in ways unimaginable only a generation ago.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Fistula survivors gathered with Bonnie Ruder at Terrewode shortly before her departure from Soroti in March. (Photo courtesy of Bonnie Ruder)

Bonnie Ruder, a midwife in Eugene and an Oregon State master’s student in public health and anthropology, had gone to Uganda to learn about a traumatic condition known as obstetric fistula. It arises when labor is prolonged and the constant pressure of the baby on the birth canal causes tissue to die and a hole to open between it and the colon or urethra. Globally, about 2 to 3 million women suffer with the condition and the heartbreaking social isolation it causes. In Uganda alone, about 140,000 women live their days unable to control persistent leakage of urine or fecal matter, and about 1,900 new cases arise there annually. (See Birth Knowledge, an October, 2011, Terra story about Ruder’s research.)

During her time in Uganda, Ruder worked in a regional hospital in the town of Soroti. She interviewed 17 fistula survivors in their homes and in the offices of Terrewode, a nearby women’s health organization. She wanted to know what they had experienced and how they understood the causes of fistula. This summer, she is analyzing the information for her master’s thesis in OSU’s Reproductive Health Lab, but her eventual goal is to assist Terrewode in educating and treating women and reducing the number of new cases.

“It was eye opening,” she says. “I heard their stories about trying to get to a hospital (to give birth), and once they got to the hospital, being ignored for days. They said that the doctors checked on them and just kept saying it wasn’t time. When it finally became ‘time,’ the baby could be dead, and they would rush the women into surgery. The women would be told their baby was dead, that there was nothing the doctor could do, and they would be sent home.”

It was common, Ruder adds, for a woman to be told nothing about what it meant to live with a fistula or how it could be treated. “Sometimes the health-care people would say ‘come back,’ but if she is really poor, how is she supposed to come back? In the meantime, her husband would leave her, and she would be pushed further into poverty to the point where she won’t be able to come back.”

Meanwhile, a potential source of help has been outlawed by the government, she adds. The majority of rural women still give birth at home with the help of a family member or traditional birth attendant. About 60 percent of Uganda’s births occur in this fashion, but in 2010, the government made birth attendants illegal. “They’re really trying to import the Western way of birth without the resources to do it. It doesn’t feel locally appropriate,” she says.

Policy Not Enforced

Fortunately for women who still rely on birth attendants, it’s a cosmetic policy, adds Ruder. Enforcement is nonexistent. Still, what little support birth attendants had received from non-profit organizations has declined, and women have a harder time getting access to attendants’ services.

At the same time, the hospital birthing system is badly overworked. So-called free beds are available, but to use them, patients must bring all their own food and supplies and have a relative or friend bring them any drugs they might need. To get timely help from a doctor or a midwife requires a “tip,” which is usually out of reach of the very poor.

While she was in Soroti, Ruder worked with Terrewode to identify women with fistulas and to get them treated. “If fistula victims can get to town, Terrewode will take them to the hospital and give them all the supplies they need and check on them daily. They’ll tip the doctor to move them up higher on the list of people in line for surgery. And when the surgery is done and women are ready to go home, they also give them bus fare,” says Ruder.

Although she returned to Oregon in March, Ruder continues to assist Terrewode by writing grant proposals. The group is educating a network of women who can promote sound birthing skills and identify fistula sufferers in need of help.

Oregon State’s relationship with Terrewode continued through the efforts of another master’s student in public health, Lauren Baur from Pennsylvania. In July, Baur followed in Ruder’s footsteps and went to Soroti to assist Terrewode. See a video about Baur’s experience below.

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Robert Zemetra leads Oregon State's wheat-breeding program. (Photo courtesy of Robert Zemetra)

Still, the Oregon State University wheat breeder doesn’t regret his decision to create new plant varieties for a living. “Between getting to teach, working with students at a university and doing the wheat breeding, I can’t think of a better job,” he says.

Wheat growers have gotten a good deal too. Since 1993 when he was a professor at the University of Idaho, Zemetra has led the development of nine new strains of soft white winter wheat. In more than two decades of wheat-variety improvement, efforts by him and his colleagues have enabled farmers to produce more grain and earn more money as they’ve supplied products to millers, bakers and even noodle makers in the United States and abroad.

It’s the kind of achievement the architects of the land grant university system envisioned when they passed the Morrill Act 150 years ago. When he signed the bill into law, President Abraham Lincoln called public universities an investment of the people’s hope, support and confidence. (For details on the political history of the Morrill Act, see Milestones in the Legislative History of U.S. Land-Grant Universities)

A Timeline for Oregon Wheat

Starting in the Willamette Valley, wheat farmers grew crops that fed miners in California’s gold country and fetched top dollar in East Coast markets. Today, Portland, Oregon, ships more wheat than any other U.S. port.
Read more…

Zemetra takes that mission seriously. “Our primary thrust is to improve the productivity of wheat cultivars, so we improve profitability for wheat growers,” he says.

Matchmaker

In 2011, the native of California’s San Fernando Valley accepted the endowed Warren Kronstad Wheat Research Chair at Oregon State. He followed in the footsteps of former OSU wheat breeder James Peterson who is now vice president for wheat research at Limagrain Cereals in Colorado.

As a researcher, Zemetra is matchmaker, data collector and analyst. He marries existing wheat strains to produce stronger offspring that resist disease and thrive in Northwest soils and climate. He evaluates new varieties for traits such as their ability to resist disease (stripe rust, Pseudocercosporella foot rot and Septoria leaf blotch, among others), straw strength (will plants remain standing in a stiff Northwest wind?) and grain quality.

“You can think of disease resistance as a form of insurance to prevent loss,” he says. “Losses can occur through lost yield because of disease, or if farmers have to pay for fungicide treatment. It’s an ongoing battle.”

One of his primary adversaries is a tiny fungus, Puccinia striiformis, which causes a disease known as stripe rust. On wheat leaves, the organism erupts into orange blisters and diverts the plant’s energy from making grain to the care and feeding of more fungus. It reduces grain production and can kill plants outright. Moreover, it can evolve rapidly, creating a moving target for researchers who need to make sure that wheat varieties have the right genetic characteristics to stay ahead of the disease.

Front Lines

Stephens wheat, a popular variety introduced by legendary OSU wheat breeder Warren Kronstad in 1978, was highly resistant to stripe rust, but in 2000, the fungus evolved new races, Zemetra explains. Stephens became partially susceptible and gave way to other varieties such as Foote (named for Oregon State’s first wheat breeder, Wilson Foote), Goetze (particularly useful in the Willamette Valley) and ORCF 101 and ORCF 102, herbicide resistant Oregon State cultivars, which now dominate wheat acreage in Oregon and Washington.

“Disease resistance is being overcome a little faster in some lines. Some races (of the fungus) are more aggressive. The challenge is making sure we have resistant lines for the growers. We’d like to reduce their use of fungicides,” says Zemetra.

Maintaining wheat production is a collective effort. Zemetra’s breeding research proceeds as a cadre of scientists on the OSU campus in Corvallis and at OSU Agricultural Experiment Stations and Extension offices test new varieties in small plots and work directly with farmers to evaluate plant performance under commercial growing conditions.

The quality of new varieties released to the industry can be measured by the traffic on Zemetra’s phone. “Farmers aren’t shy. If I release a variety that’s good, I don’t receive many phone calls,” he says. “If anything goes wrong, I hear about it right away.”

Fortunately, his first year at Oregon State turned out pretty well. In 2011, Oregon wheat growers achieved their highest yield per acre (81 bushels) and highest revenues ($521.5 million) ever. Collecting data in the rain had a silver lining for the new OSU scientist.

Oregon State is one of 28 land grant universities whose accomplishments will be celebrated at the festival from June 27 to July 1 and from July 4 to 8 on the National Mall. More than 1 million people are expected to attend.

Students crash ocean waves into plastic models in the Oregon State University Hinsdale Wave Lab's mini-flume. (Photo by Teresa Morris)

Participants will have a chance to learn how OSU research has turned surimi seafood into a $2.1 billion industry. Students and 4-H faculty will demonstrate robotics and information technologies through Tech Wizards, an after-school mentoring program. And festival-goers can test their engineering skills against crashing ocean waves in a mini-flume designed by OSU’s Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory.

These activities complement gatherings among OSU alumni and faculty, U.S. senators and representatives, Capitol Hill staffers and representatives of the Smithsonian Institution, prime sponsor of the Folklife Festival. The OSU Alumni Association will also host a gathering at the headquarters of the National Geographic Society, where two OSU graduates (Chris Johns, editor in chief; Dennis Dimick, executive environment editor) hold leadership positions with the magazine.

On the Smithsonian University Stage, three OSU faculty members (Robin Rosetta, Sam Chan and Jae Park) will give repeated 15-minute presentations during the festival on integrated pest management, aquatic invasive species and seafood.

This year’s festival honors the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which created the land grant university system. Signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, the act made grants of federal land available to states for the development of colleges and universities to teach agriculture, engineering and military skills. Subsequent revisions extended the benefits to black and Native American institutions.

The Smithsonian Institution has created an online schedule of events and exhibitors.
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For details on the political history of the Morrill Act, see Milestones in the Legislative History of U.S. Land-Grant Universities by Arnold Appleby, Oregon State University Department of Crop and Soil Science.

The Morrill Act has had far-reaching benefits. See a timeline of milestones for Oregon’s wheat growers and a story about Oregon State’s groundbreaking wheat-breeding program.

Wheat near Pendleton, Oregon (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

It is arguably the plant that made the West. Pioneers brought wheat in practically every wagon on the Oregon Trail. It fed farm families in the Willamette Valley and miners in the John Day and California gold-rush towns. It was currency and foreign exchange.

As the nation grew, scientists developed dryland and irrigated growing techniques. They learned to control competition from weeds and to manage soils. And they bred new varieties that enabled farmers to keep up with demand. The partnership between scientists and farmers — envisioned by the creators of the land grant university system — has more than doubled yields, held diseases at bay and generated revenue for Northwest economies.

Starting with the Morrill Act of 1862, the impact has been worldwide. Here are some of the milestones for Oregon wheat.

George Harth outfit threshing wheat on Howard Pearcy Place, 1910. Garth-Scott steamer and J. I. Case separator (Ray Pearcy Collection)

1833: First receipt
Robert Ball records the first sale of wheat in the Willamette Valley.

1845: Good as gold
Wheat is used as legal tender to pay off debts in the Oregon Territory. Wheat export begins with shipments from Astoria to the East Coast via Hawaii.

1860s: River of grain
Wheat is a major commodity on Willamette River steamboats.

1861: Disaster
Heavy rains destroy flour mills along the Willamette River. Swelling grains burst warehouses.

Farmers used a team of 14 draft animals to harvest wheat. (Photo courtesy of OSU University Archives)

1862: Peoples’ universities
Abraham Lincoln signs the Morrill Act to establish land grant universities focused on the agricultural, mechanical and military arts.

1867: Best of show
Oregon flour is reported to be the highest-priced and best flour on the New York market.

1883: Connected by rail
The Union Pacific Railroad punches through the Columbia Gorge, reaching Portland and signaling the start of increased wheat production in Eastern Oregon.

1887: A statewide experiment station
Passage of the Hatch Act provides federal funds for ongoing agricultural research. Early efforts focus on a 35-acre farm near Corvallis.

1893: Sowers and reapers
Umatilla County produces 4.5 million bushels of wheat.

1901: Research network
The State Legislature appropriates $10,000 to establish the first agricultural experiment station in northeast Oregon.

1910: Better wheat
Oregon Agricultural College opens the Sherman County Agricultural Experiment Station with a focus on wheat variety selection.

1926: A league of their own
Farmers establish the Eastern Oregon Wheat Growers League in response to low prices and a catastrophic freeze in 1924. The league is the first association of wheat growers in the country.

Wilson Foote

1947: Fees by the bushel
The State Legislature authorizes formation of the Oregon Wheat Commission funded by per-bushel fees assessed to growers.

1948: Breeding champions
Oregon State University begins its wheat-breeding program under the direction of Wilson Foote.

Warren Kronstad

1961: Legendary hire
Wilson Foote moves into administration, and Warren Kronstad, Foote’s former graduate student, directs the wheat-breeding program.

1967: Foreign investment
OSU contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development to improve wheat production in Turkey. By 1980, increased yields and production efficiencies had generated an estimated $750 million for the Turkish economy.

Wheat research plots (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, Oregon State Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

1975: Global impact
OSU’s Eastern Oregon research in dryland wheat production techniques is key to a USAID training program for agricultural scientists in developing countries. Warren Kronstad maintains relationships with about 200 programs.

1978: Top variety
OSU releases Stephens, a variety that quickly becomes one of the most successful in the Northwest. By 1980, Stephens is planted on more than 80 percent of Oregon’s soft winter wheat acreage and is the dominant variety in Washington and Idaho. It is estimated to have increased wheat revenues about $25 million per year between 1981 and 1984.

1998: Next generation
James Peterson arrives at OSU as the Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair to direct the wheat-breeding program.

Jim Peterson led Oregon State's wheat breeding program for 12 years. (Photo: Bob Henderson)

2001: Bang for the buck
OSU Crop and Soil Science researchers developed a new nitrogen mineralization test to help wheat growers reduce fertilizer applications and save money.

2003: Herbicide resistant
Clearfield wheat, a variety released by OSU in cooperation with the German chemical company BASF, becomes Oregon’s most widely planted variety. It tolerates applications of an herbicide that is effective on downy brome and other persistent weeds.

2010: Revenues for research
Clearfield wheat royalties to Oregon State top $1 million, providing additional support for wheat research.

Wheat elevators at the Port of Portland, the nation's largest wheat export facility. (Photo: Tom Gentle)

2011: New leader
Robert Zemetra arrives at OSU as Kronstad Wheat Research Endowed Chair.

2011: Setting the bar
Farmers produce a record-breaking 80.5 million bushels, earning $521 million in farmgate revenues. Yield per acre (81 bushels) was double that achieved in 1977.

Sources:

Mike Flowers, Dept. of Crop and Soil Science, OSU Extension Service

Department of Crop and Soil Science, Oregon State University, Origin and Evolution 1907-1990, by Arnold P. Appleby

100 Years of Progress: The Oregon Agricultural Experiment Station, Oregon State University, 1888-1988, 1990

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Read Kernel Chemistry, a story about wheat research from genetics to baking innovations, published by Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine, 2009.

Haley Ohms (Photo: Lee Sherman)

A river runs through Haley Ohms’ life. Actually, a whole bunch of rivers. So spending the summer hip-deep in fast-moving water will feel familiar to the Oregon State University graduate student — even if those cold, tumbling waters flow on the other side of the Pacific Rim. The fish will seem familiar, too. The Dolly Varden, which she’ll be studying in 10 woodland streams on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, is a cousin of steelhead and rainbow trout, the topic of her master’s thesis in the Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Sitting at her computer, she pulls up a photo on the screen. “This is the Dolly Varden,” she says, pointing to the underwater image of a moss-green fish speckled in red. “See how it’s spotted? It’s very similar to a trout.”

Photo courtesy of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game

Fish is a subject she knows well. After all, you don’t sit atop a 30-foot tower in Alaska counting sockeye salmon at a rate of a million a month without getting really conversant with them. She was an undergraduate at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, when she took the tower-sitting job with the state Fish and Game Department, hopping a float plane from King Salmon to Bristol Bay and living in what she calls a “cabin-slash-shack” for two summers monitoring sockeye runs in the Egegik and Ugashik rivers.

But her kinship with fish started even earlier as a kid in Alaska. She was in her mid-teens when her dad, living out a lifelong dream, began taking summers off from his electrician’s job, bought a “bowpicker” boat, and took up gillnetting for Chinook and sockeye in the Copper River and for pinks and chums in Prince William Sound. She started crewing for him at 15.

At Oregon State, Ohms has spent two years learning the secrets of steelhead and trout in nine streams and rivers up and down the West Coast, places like Pudding Creek in California, Big Ratz Creek in Alaska, East Fork Trask River in Oregon and Secesh River in Idaho. Now she’s about to add Japan’s Sorachi River and its many tributaries to her growing list of study sites. She’ll be looking at the role of water temperature in the maturation rate of the Dolly Varden during her fellowship, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. The Sorachi River, she explains, contains tributaries with two distinct thermal regimes: cold, groundwater-fed systems and systems fed by warmer surface water. That duality makes it a perfect place for an experiment, a readymade setting for studying the impact on fish of cold versus warmer habitat.

Photo courtesy of Fisheries and Oceans Canada

To get her data, she’ll be “electro-fishing” — sending a low-voltage electric pulse into the water, which stuns the animals and sends them floating to the surface. She’ll then net them, weigh and measure them and, finally, squeeze them, gently, to see if any eggs or sperm come out. “It sounds cheesy,” Ohms says, laughing. “But it’s the only nonlethal, low-tech way to tell if the fish are sexually mature.”

The timing of maturity in fish is critical to the survival of their offspring and, ultimately, of the species. “The males need to mature at the same time the females return to spawn,” says Ohms. “The females need to lay their eggs so they’ll hatch at the optimal time, not when the river’s frozen over or flooding. It’s a delicate balance.”

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For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Zachary Dunn, a student in ecological engineering, coordinated a trip by OSU students to Kenya. (Photo: Lee Sherman)

How far would you go to help someone get a glass of clean water? Zachary Dunn knows exactly how far he’d go: 9,000 miles. And that’s just one trip, one way. By summer’s end, Dunn and fellow Oregon State University students had traveled almost 36,000 miles — greater than the Earth’s circumference — to help bring drinkable water to Lela, a tiny farming community in Kenya.

So why would engineering students fly halfway around the planet from bucolic Oregon to struggling East Africa, not once but twice? Why would Dunn say that contracting malaria on his first trip was a “small price to pay”? Why would he shrug off a State Department travel warning about terrorism and piracy in the region?

“In Lela, women and children walk up to three miles a day carrying 40-pound buckets of water,” explains Dunn, who grew up in Albany, Oregon. “I’ve seen kids as young as five with buckets on their heads. It’s a feat. They don’t complain. But the loss to productivity and education is huge.”

It’s not despite the chasm between the Kenyan village (where waterborne disease is common) and his Oregon hometown (where pure water flows from faucets and fountains at the twist of a wrist) but because of it that Dunn joined the OSU project in 2010 to survey water sources, test water quality and commission a groundwater survey. He and a student team headed back to Lela in July to help spearhead drilling a well and installing a rainwater catchment system.

“We all have a common fate,” says Dunn. “These kinds of projects can help shape the future of the world. It benefits all of us. It’s a win-win.”

During the dry season, women and children in Lela walk about three miles to get clean drinking water in a nearby town. (Photo: EWB-USA, Oregon State University)

That all-embracing, planetary vision is what led to Dunn’s participation in OSU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders USA (EWB-USA), which is dedicated to the vision of a world in which all communities have the capacity to meet their basic human needs. And it’s that vision that steered him to the Ecological Engineering program for his undergraduate work. The program, he says, is based on “systems theory,” the notion that everything is connected and, thus, solutions must be holistic.

“I’m interested in redefining the relationship between humans and the planet,” says Dunn, who describes himself as a “born tinkerer,” always tilting toward problem solving even in childhood.

The Lela Women’s Water Committee linked up with EWB-USA when they were looking for a partner on their quest for a better life. “We only partner with communities that have identified a need and have asked for help,” says Dunn, who will start graduate studies in public policy this fall.

The other EWB-USA requirement: The project must be sustainable. “A huge number of wells in Africa are in disrepair,” Dunn notes. “Many communities do not have the capacity to maintain them.”

That’s why EWB-OSU’s team of six (five students and one professional mentor) recommended a hand pump for Lela’s new well. Other power-source options, such as diesel or solar, cost too much to maintain or are targets for theft. With guidance from faculty and a groundwater expert from engineering firm CH2M Hill, the students have researched everything from the compressive strength of concrete (for the foundations under rainwater storage tanks) to the reliability and availability of pumps.

Zach Dunn celebrated with members of the women's water committee in Lela, Kenya, after completing a water project for the community. (Photo: Justin Smith)

In Kenya, Dunn and his team stay in a “simba,” a house made of wood and mud with a corrugated metal roof, on the land owned by village elder Charles Olang’o. The elder’s son Paul is the translator for the Oregon State engineers. A fast friendship has formed among the Kenyans and the students.

“We have a really special bond with Lela,” Dunn says. “Charles calls me his son; Paul calls me his brother. They are very gracious people.”

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Read updates and see photos of the Oregon State students’ work in Kenya.

For more information about education abroad opportunities for OSU students, contact the International Degree & Education Abroad (IDEA) office at 541-737-3006.

Mark Whitham

Mark Whitham’s know-how is a sought-after commodity for small canners hoping to kick-start or upgrade their facilities. Coos Bay entrepreneur Mike Babcock isn’t the only one singing Whitham’s praises. Here’s what others are saying.

Fish to Soup

“When Mark came to the area, I sort of enlisted him to help with our processing records and update our cook times and scheduling,” says fisherman Mark Kujala, who runs his family’s cannery, Oregon Ocean Seafoods, in Warrenton. The family has canned salmon, tuna, and sturgeon under their brand, Skipanon, for nearly two decades. With Whitham’s input, Kujala soon will be releasing a new line of soups — old family recipes he’s keeping hush-hush for now. Whitham is also helping the company develop its own line of pouch-packed fish. “He’s very accessible,” says Kujala. “When I have questions in the middle of the day, I can call him up. Sometimes he’s out on the road, and he’ll pull over and take the time to listen and bounce off ideas.”

100 Diners

“Having Mark available has just been such an asset,” says Stan Eggas, owner of the Berry Patch Restaurant in Westport. “He has helped us come up with recipes and to start a processing and canning facility, which I frankly knew nothing about. It was just amazing.” Starting out as a tiny stand selling homemade jams, the business expanded to a restaurant that holds 100 diners. He also has been working with Whitham to develop a line of all-natural soups for high-end grocery stores. Eggas says Whitham helped him refine his recipes — chowders of salmon and razor clams, soups of tomato and chanterelle — to minimize preservatives and sodium and develop his canning process. “That OSU and Sea Grant have made this program and Mark available is really outstanding.”

Traditional Tribal Edibles

Jobs are sorely needed by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs. “The unemployment rate on the reservation is really bad,” says Warm Springs elder Ron Supah. “The tribes need to seek opportunities to develop work for our tribal members.” Supah hopes to do that with a facility on the tribe’s reservation that will use retort pouches to preserve traditional foods such as elk, venison, berries and roots. Supah says the tribe is also considering packaging its sought-after Chinook salmon for sale in stores off the reservation.

Supah says the decision to use retort packaging came after he and other Warm Springs members visited Whitham at his Astoria lab. “We were pretty impressed by what we saw there,” remembers Supah. So far, Whitham has helped the tribe apply for a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant that will fund a feasibility study for the proposed facility.

Mike Babcock left a thriving lumber mill and set himself a new challenge: create a seafood business. (Photo: Pat Kight)

Still, in this one-time boomtown of lumber mills and commercial fishing, the entrepreneurial spirit lives. One man, Mike Babcock, is helping to kick-start Coos Bay’s renewal with an unlikely innovation: packing fish in pouches instead cans. Besides being flat and lightweight for cheaper, easier shipping, the laminated plastic-and-metal foil pouches are superior to cans in the No. 1 consumer yardstick: taste.

“Most store-bought tuna is twice cooked,” explains Babcock’s fish-packing guru, Mark Whitham, a food scientist with Oregon Sea Grant. “That means they cook all the nutrients and flavor out. Mike Babcock’s product is cooked only once, and it retains all the good fats, juices, and nutrients, and it tastes much better.”

It all began in 2010 when Babcock, a successful-but-restless sawmill owner, was looking for a new challenge. He heard about the packing pouches — called retortable or “retort” pouches in the industry — from coastal residents who had worked with Whitham on other projects. “I wonder if pouches would work for albacore?” he thought. To find out, he tracked down the food scientist, and together they investigated the pouch potential for Coos Bay. Within the year, Babcock had launched Oregon Seafoods.

The other "Bay Area." (Photo: Pat Kight)

Since October 2011 when he started shipping sustainably caught tuna and salmon under his label, Sea Fare Pacific, Babcock’s products have landed on the shelves of all eight Market of Choice grocery stores, as well as those of Portland’s trendy New Seasons Market for health-conscious shoppers. He also has created a line of smoked salmon for outdoor recreation giant REI, and his four flavors — sea salt, salt-free, smoked and jalapeno — have made their way to several other states.

From Freezer to Pouch

Just blocks from Coos Bay’s historic harbor, Babcock’s Oregon Seafoods plant is no bigger than a medium-sized classroom, but it’s packed to the gills with canning machinery. It’s cold inside. Workers wear hats and jackets under large, turquoise-colored aprons, latex gloves and hairnets as they pack fish for Sea Fare Pacific and several other brands.

“Of course, we would like to have more space,” says the 50-year-old businessman, a hairnet snugged over his red ball cap. “But we can do a lot with a small footprint.”

From the deep-freeze at Oregon Seafoods, workers carry salmon and albacore to the filleting room, where they slice up the fish and plop the chunks, red and raw, into small plastic cups. Two machines imported from Japan stand ready to package the fish into pouches. As the machine spins, another worker transfers chunks from the cups into 8-ounce pouches, which look like UPS envelopes, only silver.

The technical know-how behind Oregon Seafood’s processing, as well as the four specialty flavors developed for Sea Fare Pacific, came from Whitham. It was he who steered Babcock through his transition from mill owner to seafood processor. A soft-spoken, laid-back 57-year-old, Whitham is an unlikely revolutionary. Yet from his food lab at OSU Extension in Astoria, the Sea Grant scientist has been in the vanguard of Oregon’s canning coup.

If there’s such a thing as a food-preservation geek, Whitham is it. And if there’s one thing he “geeks out” about, it’s the flexible, lightweight retort pouches.

Oregon Seafoods workers load individual portions of cleaned and flavored albacore into pouches for sealing and cooking (Photo: Pat Kight)

“Retort pouches aren’t new,” says Whitham. “They’ve been around about 50 years, and, from what I’ve seen, they are really big in Europe and Asia. In general, they tend to be ahead of us as far as packaging is concerned.”

Coos Bay is just starting to catch up. The pouches’ advantages are many: lightweight and compact, they take less energy to ship than conventional steel cans. For the consumer or commercial chef, there’s no can to recycle. And their flat shape makes cooking more uniform. Again, it all comes down to flavor in the end.

Whitham’s larger mission — adding value to the region’s natural seafood bounty — underpins his 30-year career working with small producers up and down the coast. “Here in Oregon, seafood has really been a stand-alone product, and there’s just tremendous opportunity for adding value,” he says. With the right price point, package and recipe, processed fish can command double, triple, or even quadruple what it sells for raw. That in turn injects money and jobs into the community.

Injecting jobs and money into Coos Bay is exactly what Babcock is doing. A self-described “pedal-to-the-metal, get-it-done” type, the entrepreneur’s steely blue eyes are now focused on fine-tuning the process that took elbow grease and determination, along with Whitham’s expertise, to get moving. In Coos County where unemployment hovers around 10.5 percent — above average for both Oregon and the nation — the eight new jobs Babcock has created are a welcome boost.

From Cannery to Shopping Cart

On the cannery’s floor, the Japanese packing machines suck the air out of each pouch and seal it. Then comes the cooking. The oven — six feet around and15 feet tall with a massive metal door — looks more like a missile silo turned on its side than something from a commercial kitchen. It can hold a lot of product — more than 2,500 eight-ounce pouches, or nearly 475 pounds of fish. The pouches cook for 75 minutes at 240 degrees. Then they’re flash cooled to retain flavor.

In the cannery’s entryway, boxes full of packed tuna, ready to be shipped, testify that things are moving smoothly. But plenty of stumbling blocks stood in the way, Babcock attests. Whitham helped the entrepreneur persevere. “Whenever I have a problem,” he says, “I call him up and he’s there.”

Babcock isn’t sure why he left his successful business to start a new one in a field in which he had little experience. When urged to pin down a reason, he cites boredom. “The day-to-day operation of the sawmill was fine,” he recalls. “But we had been building the mill for a number of years, and once we got it built and we got to the monotonous day-to-day stuff, the challenge wasn’t there.”

The cannery lets him do what he loves best: build a business. These days, his schedule is full of food tradeshows. At first, he was skeptical about pitching his fish at the crowded tradeshow scene. But his first show was a total success, generating hundreds of sales leads.

That tradeshow, incidentally, was in San Francisco — the other “bay area.” Driving home, Babcock was elated — so elated, in fact, he just couldn’t wait to make another sale. So he stopped at a small health-food store in Eureka, California, and won yet another customer.

“Everywhere I go, people who try our product, they just fall all over it, they just love the quality, like they never tasted fish like this before,” he says. For that, and for the jobs he created in Coos Bay, Babcock credits Mark Whitham and Oregon Sea Grant. “This product has Mark’s name all over it. I want to keep this relationship going.”

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Editor’s note: In March 2013, Oregon Seafoods announced that with help from Mark Whitham, the company launched a new line of soups and sauces (Seafood Bisque, Smoked Salmon Chowder, three albacore curries and a West Coast Ciopinno). Improved labeling also noted sustainability qualities such as Dolphin Safe and Line Caught. The company’s products are in more than 500 retail outlets.