The care and feeding of thousands of trout and salmon at OSU’s Salmon Disease Lab are the solemn responsibility of fish biologist Ruth Milston-Clements. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

It was dinnertime at the Milston-Clements home. The hubbub of feeding a 6-month-old baby and a hungry toddler was at full clamor when a ringtone interrupted. Handing off the jar of creamed spinach to her husband, Ruth grabbed her cell phone.

“Hello?”

“Ruth, we have a broken pipe.”

As manager of Oregon State’s Salmon Disease Lab, Ruth Milston-Clements is on-call 24/7. With a network of alarms protecting the facility’s 25,000 research fish from disasters both natural and human (power outages, floods, equipment malfunctions, vandalism), she’s accustomed to running out the door at odd times. It happens once a month, on average.

So this dinnertime call seemed fairly routine. A researcher had accidentally backed her truck into a water pipe supplying 30 fiberglass tanks full of fingerlings, the caller reported. Quickly, an onsite technician cranked down the valve to stop the flow. He then rigged a fix that should hold till morning. However, the margin of error between life and death is, for a fish, as thin as a fin. “Without water flow or oxygen, the fish will suffocate in about 20 minutes,” says Milston-Clements, a fish biologist who grew up in Lancaster, England. In her field, there’s no such thing as an excess of caution. So, after tucking her little girls into bed, she spent the next few hours at the lab helping to construct a temporary backup system in case the quick fix failed before morning. It was after midnight when she finally flopped into bed.

The 3 a.m. ringtone blaring from her nightstand jolted her upright. “My heart started beating really loud, and I was hyperventilating,” she recalls. The electronic message from the lab’s security company read: Zone 1, low water. “This is the worst! This is what I’ve been dreading! Thousands of fish could die!” she moaned to her husband as she threw on her sweats and rubber boots and headed out once again.

In fact, no fish died that night. The second alarm turned out to be a minor malfunction unrelated to the burst pipe. But the adrenaline rush highlights what’s at stake in a live-animal research facility.

Crabs Count, Too

Of the 600,000 animals used in Oregon State’s research and teaching programs, 80 percent are aquatic species. Most of these half-million water dwellers are housed in fiberglass tanks on and around the Corvallis campus or at a research hatchery in the Alsea River Basin. Some live in simulated streams or raceways. Still others are on display in touch tanks or seawater aquariums at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. They come in outrageous colors and preposterous designs: pouty, big-eyed rockfish in shimmery golds and coppers; pincushion-like sea urchins bristling with purple spines; a giant Pacific octopus, its suction-cupped arms undulating around a bulbous orange body. The charismatic Chinook salmon, the elusive black prickleback, the tendrilled basket star, the diminutive zebrafish — more than 400 species in total — all are members of Oregon State’s aquatic animal community.

The care and feeding of thousands of trout and salmon at OSU’s Salmon Disease Lab includes disinfecting brushes after each tank is scrubbed to avoid cross-contamination. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

The vertebrates among them are subject to the rigorous protocols of humane treatment laid out by the AAALAC (Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care International) and overseen by OSU’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (see Terra, “The Ethic of Care,” Fall 2012; and “Caring for Cows,” Winter 2013). But the ethical distinction between the spined and the spineless has blurred in recent years. In the same way that the animal-care ethos for rodents and livestock has evolved, so have sensibilities for aquatic animals of all kinds. Just ask Tim Miller-Morgan. In his two-decade career, OSU’s aquatic veterinarian has witnessed an ethical sea change.

Take the case of the ailing crustaceans, for example. Miller-Morgan was moonlighting at the Oregon Aquarium a few years back when he noticed that the spider crabs were lethargic and droopy-mouthed. In the old days, he says, a sick crab would have been euthanized. “The attitude was, ‘It’s only an invertebrate; let’s just get another one.’” But instead of discarding the crabs, he drew their blood and discovered a bacterial infection. He treated the animals with antibiotic injections and medicated feed. “Typically, this wasn’t something that was done,” says Miller-Morgan, who also serves as backup veterinarian for OSU Attending Veterinarian Helen Diggs. “But now we understand that we shouldn’t look at these animals as disposable. We brought them into captivity, and we have an obligation to keep them as long as we can, as close to their natural lifespan as possible — or even longer.”

It’s today’s students, he says, who are driving the new morality. In the aquatic-medicine classes he teaches at OSU’s College of Veterinary Medicine, questions about animal welfare are top-of-mind among the Millennials, also known as Gen Y. “Eight or nine years ago, students started telling me, ‘We’d like to hear information on what we know about fish welfare, how we assess welfare, what do we know about pain?’ That was a new thing.”

He hears the same kinds of queries from students enrolled in the aquarium science program he helped develop at Oregon Coast Community College. It boils down to a centuries-old debate among philosophers, scientists, veterinarians, farmers, ranchers, aquarists, and pet owners: What is our obligation to captive animals?

For researcher David Noakes, the answer is crystal clear. “We have an inordinate responsibility,” says Noakes, who directs the Oregon Hatchery Research Center run jointly by Oregon State and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). “We need to go to extraordinary lengths.”

It’s the Water

Because of the extraordinary lengths taken by Noakes and his staff, international scientists flock to the research center on Fall Creek, a tributary of the Alsea River, which ripples prettily through a mixed woodland of fir, aspens and big-leaf maple. From faraway nations like Japan, China, Iceland and South Korea, they come to conduct studies on the secrets of salmon navigation, the impact of temperature on sexual maturity, the ability of steelhead to negotiate woody debris, and other hot topics in fish biology. “This is the only place on the planet that has everything in one location for salmonid research,” explains Joseph O’Neil, a senior ODFW technician who lives onsite at the hatchery. “It’s the No. 1 destination in the world.”

If O’Neil were to tell you that water is the most critical component for fish husbandry, you might be tempted to say “duh.” But “water” doesn’t come close to conveying the complexity of the systems that support research fish. When O’Neil says, “Fish need water,” he’s not talking about any old water. Whether it fills a 50-gallon fiberglass tank full of Coho smolts, a 40,000-gallon simulated stream stocked with brook trout, or racks of incubation trays, flushing a million salmon eggs at a rate of five gallons per minute, the water O’Neil is talking about is some of the world’s most pampered. Pumped mainly from Fall Creek, this water may be treated with UV sterilization, carbon filtration or aeration so it’s free of viruses and bacteria. O’Neil’s also talking about precise temperature regulation matched to each species’ native environment and each animal’s stage of life. Eight miles of underground pipe circulate up to 2,500 gallons of freshwater a minute and return it to Fall Creek.

Out here in the Siuslaw National Forest, where the nearest town is picturesque Alsea, population 1,153, things do indeed go wrong. The power fails when gale-force winds howl through the hills; the property floods when biblical rains push the creeks beyond their banks; outdoor tanks crack and pipes rupture when branches crash to the ground. The staff takes pride in being able to improvise a solution or jury-rig a repair for just about any piece of equipment, even amidst the wildest squall, wettest deluge or blackest night.

How to Ship a Fish

In Oregon State fish circles, they’re known as “The Two Carries.” The self-described “guard dogs” of OSU’s zebrafish lab, Cari Buchner and Carrie Barton make a solemn commitment each morning when they punch in their pass codes at the high-security building across the river from downtown Corvallis. Tens of thousands of lives hinge on the skill and vigilance of these fish-husbandry professionals.

Carrie Barton, co-manager of the Sinnhuber lab, feeds Artemia nauplii, a juvenile form of brine fish, to zebrafish schooling in a stock tank. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Barton and Buchner are co-managers of OSU’s Sinnhuber Aquatic Research Laboratory. The species they oversee — a type of minnow that has been dubbed the “new lab rat” for its growing popularity among biomedical researchers — multiplies fast, matures quickly, shares important disease processes with humans, and rapidly regenerates certain body parts and organs. Best of all, it’s transparent during development. Researchers can see what’s happening inside, literally.

For these reasons, zebrafish make great animal models for medical and environmental research.
“The water here is probably cleaner than most people drink at home,” Buchner attests. That level of purity applies even to water flowing into the staff restrooms, toilets included. If you are granted a visit to Sinnhuber, expect this email in your inbox: “Due to our biosecurity protocols we need to ask that you refrain from any contact with other aquatic species, labs, water sources — especially home aquariums, pet stores and outdoor fish habitats — for 24 hours prior to your visit.” Once you arrive, anticipate being asked to sanitize your hands and slip sterile booties over your shoes.

No one here is taking any chances of jeopardizing the lab’s highly specialized, technically sophisticated, razor-edged enterprise: raising fish that are free of the pathogen Pseudoloma neurophilia, rampant in the commercial aquarium trade and common in many research facilities. “Every fish in this room will be tested for that specific pathogen,” says Buchner. Newly arriving fish are raised, spawned and rigorously tested in a quarantine chamber before their offspring can join the general population.

These uniquely healthy zebrafish are in demand not only at Oregon State but also at other labs. So a couple of years ago, Sinnhuber decided to sell them on its website at a nominal cost. But safely shipping live fish is as tricky as it sounds. The package has to be double-bagged, foam insulated, heat controlled and hand-delivered on the tarmac for transfer to the airplane. For months, Barton and Buchner worked with FedEx, testing various containers and running multiple mock shipments, climaxing with a battery of bumping, shaking, dropping, crushing and tumbling trials.

“The container has to be 100 percent secure,” Barton explains. “It has to hold up even when someone says, ‘Oops, that box fell off the forklift.’” (All this TLC comes at a price, ranging from $50 to $500 for U.S. shipments to $1,700 for international deliveries.)

Soon after becoming a Certified Research Fish Shipper, the lab passed a harrowing real-life test when a container of fish en route to Australia got held up in customs during the hottest part of the summer. Despite an extra five days of travel, the fish arrived in perfect health and were spawning within a fortnight.

Fish Food a la Carte

A “happy tank” is the gold standard in a fish lab. When Ruth Milston-Clements lifts the lid of a tank and sees the sleek, silvery smolts schooling round and round in vigorous uniformity, she can rest easy. But if the fish are “dancing” or “flashing” or “looking a bit itchy,” she immediately calls in the lab pathologist. The telltale signs of trouble recently showed up among some rainbow trout. A scale swipe revealed a parasite called Gyrodactalus. She treated the tank with a hydrogen peroxide solution and monitored the fishes’ behavior every 10 minutes for an hour. They revived. Happy tank.

Carrie Barton, co-manager of the Sinnhuber lab, feeds Artemia nauplii, a juvenile form of brine fish, to zebrafish schooling in a stock tank. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fish like it when someone lifts the lid on their tank. That’s because it usually means mealtime. Over at Sinnhuber, the two Carries show off their brand-new commercial-grade kitchen where they concoct customized diets to researchers’ specs.

The proteins, carbs, oils, vitamins and minerals are tightly calibrated for optimal animal health. For many studies, researchers order special formulas. One of those researchers had a terrifying jolt a week before Christmas when he discovered his supply of custom fish food wasn’t going to last through his experiment. So while most people were baking gingerbread cookies and fig puddings, Barton was down at the lab whipping up an emergency ration of experimental fish food. “I went into my superhero mode,” Barton says with a satisfied grin. She saved the day — and the study.

“Basic care for aquatic animals is much more intricate than it is for most mammals,” she observes. “It’s really a science unto itself.”

This video produced by Facebook, Degrees of Separation, shows how they did it.

In 2011, the researchers netted a dazzling array of fish from the Cuyuni River in Guyana, some never before seen by scientists. The challenge: how to make sense of the bounty. The answer: reach out to colleagues through the Internet.

Sidlauskas and his graduate student, Whitcomb Bronaugh, took photos of the fish and posted them to Facebook. Within 24 hours, they had identifications from dozens of colleagues around the world.

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.

Research vessels in the northern Gulf of Mexico are never out of sight of the more than 4,000 active oil and gas platforms in the area. (Photo: Stephen Brandt)

Bruce Mate didn’t wait long. Within days of the April 20 Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, he was on the phone with officials from the U.S. Minerals Management Service. From 2001-2004, the agency had funded him to study the Gulf’s endangered sperm whales. Now, the director of Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute had an idea: By tracking the sperm whales again, he could provide useful data to federal agencies and the well’s owner, British Petroleum, on the impact of spilled oil on the marine ecosystem.

Working through an emergency-response process known as Natural Resource Damage Assessment, Mate negotiated a contract with BP in which OSU would own the data. BP and the National Marine Fisheries Service would have access to determine damages for future settlements. By the end of May, Mate and institute staff members Craig Hayslip and Ladd Irvine were on the research ship Gordon Gunter (owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which had been quickly re-tasked from the North Atlantic to support five spill-related science missions.

Mate wasn’t the only OSU researcher to respond as the world watched crude spew into what the Census of Marine Life has ranked as one of the globe’s most diverse marine systems. Professor Kim Anderson in the university’s Superfund Research Program marshaled a crew to track chemical contamination along the shore. At four sites from Pensacola, Florida, to Grand Isle, Louisiana, they deployed devices that essentially sniff the air and water for an oil component known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. And in September, a team led by Stephen Brandt, director of Oregon Sea Grant, conducted an acoustic survey of fish in an area northwest of the spill site.

Researchers are still analyzing data, and while images of oil-soaked pelicans, turtles and other animals are seared in the public mind, it will be a while before the broader biological significance of the spill is known.

Following the Whales

In late December, Mate was following six of the dozen whales that he had tagged in June near the damaged well. One of them was among 58 that he had tagged in the previous project. Data from that effort, he says, form a baseline, which can be used to compare whale behavior after the 2010 spill.

“I don’t expect to see sperm whales directly affected by oil,” Mate says, “but if oil or dispersants have dramatically affected the squid they eat, the secondary effect will likely influence the movements of the whales. They sort of vote with their flukes.”

A pioneer in satellite-based whale tracking, Mate says the whales that had initially traveled northeast from the well (in the direction of oil visible at the surface) had changed course and were in the western Gulf, some close to the Mexican coast. As his lab continues to monitor whale movements, researchers will use the data to analyze the size of the whales’ home ranges. They’ll also consider whether significant differences between 2010 and previous years suggest that whales avoided heavily oiled waters.

Pollutants on the Increase

While Mate was making his plans, Kim Anderson in OSU’s Department of Environmental and Molecular Toxicology was assembling sampling devices and personnel to track PAHs, a group of more than 100 compounds that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency classifies as “highly potent carcinogens.”

Supported by OSU’s Environmental Health Sciences Center, Anderson and her team, including Ph.D. student Sarah Allan (see “After the Spill”), started deploying their equipment on May 9, before oil began washing ashore. As the oil slicks and tarballs hit beaches and wetlands through the summer, PAH concentrations rose to about 40 times over baseline levels, according to preliminary data.

“There are a range of health effects associated with PAHs,” says Anderson. “They are toxic by several different modes of action. We’re now using a technique that looks at the fraction of PAHs that are bioavailable — that have the potential to move into the food chain.”

Over the next two years, with support from a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant, the lab will continue sampling in each location for more than 1,200 different compounds: PAHs, pesticides, PCBs and other industrial chemicals, many of which are known to disrupt hormone signaling.

Fish-Eye View

For Stephen Brandt, oil is only one of the threats to fish habitat in the Gulf of Mexico. At least as significant is the persistent presence of a low-oxygen region west of the Mississippi River outlet, a.k.a., the “dead zone.” As part of a multi-institution project that began in 2003, Brandt has collected data on water quality and fish behavior in order to assess the dead zone’s impact on fisheries.

A pioneer in the use of acoustics to study fish, Brandt has led five sampling expeditions to the Gulf. His September cruise, with OSU faculty research assistants Sarah Kolesar and Cynthia Sellinger, was the first after a major oil spill, but it was not the first to reflect the presence of crude. Natural oil seeps pour an estimated 41 million gallons into the Gulf every year, he points out.

During eight days of sampling, Brandt and his team saw no oil, but they did see evidence for the first time of “a very intense double-layered dead zone” with low-oxygen patches near the bottom as well as higher in the water column. The location and severity of low-oxygen zones can shift from day to day. It will take additional data analysis to identify the factors behind the 2010 pattern.

Brandt knows it will take time for the Gulf’s rich marine life to respond. In 1979, the region received a large gush of crude from Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 well, which fouled beaches and estuaries from Texas to the Yucatán Peninsula. After that event, it took three to five years for fisheries to come back, he says. Some species, he adds, may never recover.

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See the locations of Kim Anderson’s PAH sampling stations and a video of Stephen Brandt’s Nov. 8, 2010 Corvallis Science Pub presentation, Troubled Waters.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.