With Redfish Rocks in the distance, Port Orford fishermen prepare for a day at sea. (Photo: Heath Korvola)

Performing surgery on a fish is tricky enough. But when the surgeon wields his scalpel while kneeling in a boat that’s bucking like a mechanical bull, the task requires a whole new level of finesse.

One high-overcast afternoon off the shores of Port Orford, that’s exactly what Oregon State University researchers Scott Heppell and Tom Calvanese are about to do. They have motored out to a rocky reef in pursuit of five species of rockfish — blacks, canaries, Chinas, coppers, quillbacks — and a species of sculpin called a cabezon, for implantation with acoustic monitoring tags. Idling their outboard motor inside a cluster of craggy outcroppings known as Redfish Rocks, the men brace themselves in the bow of a heaving Boston Whaler named OSU Fisheries & Wildlife. Each man drops a hook and line into the ocean.

The rockfish are biting like crazy. Over and over, the researchers reel them in, only to find that they’re members of non-targeted species. “Another blue,” Heppell grouses after releasing the fourth grayish-blue specimen. Then his pole arcs hard as another fish takes his bait. He draws it to the side of the boat. “It’s a black!” he announces.

He gently unhooks the steel-gray fish whose spiny head looks like a Japanese fan unfurled. “All species of rockfish are beautiful,” he observes. “Their genus name, Sebastes, is Greek for ‘magnificent’.”

After a couple of false starts when the slippery animal writhes out of his hands and flops onto the floor of the boat, he and Calvanese invert the fish onto the “surgery cradle,” a v-shaped acetate device custom-made for this procedure. The fish lies still as Calvanese bathes its gills with fresh seawater to keep them wet and oxygenated. Working fast, Heppell makes a half-inch incision in the body wall, avoiding the liver. He sterilizes a black plastic cylinder about the size of a ballpoint-pen cap and tucks it into the tiny opening. Every few minutes, the battery-powered electronic device sends out an acoustic signal uniquely coded for that individual fish. A series of underwater microphones, which Calvanese previously deployed around the reef’s perimeter, will pick up the ultrasonic pinging from the fish’s transmitter and store the data, allowing the researchers to track its movements over the coming year.

Still unfazed by the boat’s rocking motion, Heppell takes a couple of deft stitches with a nylon thread to close the wound, applies an antibiotic, and sets the fish carefully inside a pyramid-shaped wire cage attached to a 50-foot yellow rope. He and Calvanese lower the cage, which is equipped with a miniature camera, into the depths of the reef.  They watch the fish’s behavior on a small monitor mounted on the dashboard, holding their breath. Despite the trauma of surgery, 98 percent of tagged fish survive, studies have shown.

Redfish Rocks, a temperate reef just offshore at Port Orford, is under study as one of Oregon’s two pilot marine reserves (Photo: Heath Korvola)

“OK, he’s swimming,” Heppell says a few moments later.

The researchers pull a release lever, and the cage pops open. The black rockfish — one of seven fish tagged that day — returns to the reef, where it could live for 50 years or more.

The study — which Calvanese is conducting in collaboration with local fishermen for his master’s degree in Marine Resource Management — is part of a massive multi-institution research undertaking at Redfish Rocks, one of two pilot sites that were set aside as no-fishing zones called “marine reserves” in 2008 by the Legislature on the recommendation of Oregon’s Ocean Policy Advisory Council (OPAC). Scientists like Calvanese and Heppell, an assistant professor in OSU’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, are studying the cold-water reef ecosystem for data that will form a baseline “snapshot” against which future findings can be compared.

OPAC’s overarching research question is, Can marine reserves help protect biodiversity, marine habitats and areas important to marine fisheries in Oregon’s coastal waters? If so, how big should the no-fishing zones be for optimal effectiveness? Tracking rockfish is one way to find out.

“With acoustic tracking, we can see the fish’s home-range patterns,” says Heppell. “How far does a fish move in a day? How far does it move over the course of a season? How often does it swim outside the protection of the reserve? From a management perspective, this study will let us know how often and how long the fish are vulnerable to harvest.”

These are questions that have engaged oceanographers, marine biologists and Sea Grant Extension agents at OSU for at least a decade. Despite strong scientific evidence that marine reserves, when well designed and carefully monitored, provide safe haven for fish, thus allowing dwindling populations to rebound, many Oregon fishermen perceive them as threats to their livelihood. If fishermen don’t buy in, reserves won’t work, research shows.

“The first element of marine reserve success is that people don’t fish there,” says OSU’s Selina Heppell, an associate professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife who sits on OPAC’s Science and Technical Advisory Committee (and is married to Scott Heppell). “Biological response, economic benefits — those all come later. If you put lines on a map and people ignore them, your reserve is a failure.”

The fate of marine reserves in Oregon, it turns out, hinges not only on science, but also on buy-in from a host of stakeholders: commercial and recreational fishermen, environmentalists, business proprietors, local government, property owners and coastal communities. Port Orford, with its thriving reef at Redfish Rocks, has been at the forefront of getting that buy-in.

Diving for Data

One recent wind-lashed morning, Alix Laferriere finds herself ashore, stuck at a desk. “The seas are too high for sampling,” the biologist grumbles from her Newport office.

As the West Coast’s only dry dock, Port Orford launches fishing boats by crane (Photo: Heath Korvola)

As soon as the swells subside, she’ll be back aboard a boat overseeing deployment of scuba divers to install an underwater electronic device to record water temperature and light hourly for six months. All sorts of other high-tech scientific gear — high-def cameras, laser equipment, a remotely operated vehicle named Sea Cow — will be used throughout the winter as weather allows. Laferriere’s job at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) is to coordinate scientific studies testing the effectiveness of Oregon’s marine reserves. Data and technical support from OSU-based PISCO (Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans) are contributing to the pool of findings along with OSU scientists Scott and Selina Heppell and Calvanese. Marine geologist Chris Goldfinger has mapped Redfish Rocks with underwater imaging technologies. Marine ecologist Mark Hixon has provided leadership on the national, state and local levels. Oregon Sea Grant has studied the socioeconomic impacts of marine reserves as well as serving as a neutral convener for community dialog.

When half a dozen divers — on contract to the ODFW from UC Santa Cruz — flop tanks-first off the boat and disappear, one by one, into the waters at Redfish Rocks or when the agency’s $20,000 pressurized video-cam is gentled toward the seafloor on its tether, the human researchers and their sophisticated hardware sink into a silent world of kelp forests undulating in the current, of massive, algae-mottled boulders festooned with scarlet sea stars and giant, snow-white anemones, of sand-dollar beds and colonies of Crayola-colored sea pens, of big-eyed rockfish grazing on plankton with dour mouths, of sea lions churning round and round in the murk, eyeing the divers curiously.

“We’ve collected an amazing amount of information to characterize the site,” says Laferriere. “We’re collecting data on seafloor structure, on ocean conditions — temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, dissolved oxygen — and on the abundance and distribution of algal, invertebrate and fish species.”

James “Jimbo” Jennings, owner and captain of the vessel My Girl, voices mixed feelings about reserves as a member of the Redfish Rocks Community Team (Photo: Justin Smith)

As biological research leader for Oregon’s marine reserves, Laferriere gives regular updates to the Redfish Rocks community team — about 20 people from all walks of coastal life, from business and politics to charter and commercial fishing to science and conservation.

Underwater videos are a highlight of her reports. On the first Monday in October, team members who are gathered at Port Orford City Hall for their monthly meeting watch with interest as the reef comes alive on a big screen. A rock face bristling with spiny urchins sheers off steeply to depths of 65 feet. Giant, ghostly anemones cling to the submerged cliffs. Divers swim in waters as green as tea (a “mega-bloom of mysid shrimp” lends the water its “eerie” green tinge, Laferriere remarks) as they inventory resident species, from invertebrates to fish to marine mammals. They record their observations on waterproof slates.

“The whole time we were out, a gray whale was playing around,” Laferriere tells the team. “The place is obviously alive.”

But on this particular Monday night, the serene ocean imagery soon gives way to a testy tone. James “Jimbo” Jennings, one of three fishermen on the team, is feeling frustrated. Like many fishermen up and down the Oregon Coast, Jennings worries that reserves will hamstring a commercial fishing industry already tangled in a phalanx of state and federal rules restricting catches and seasons. Wave-energy parks, wind turbines and fish farms are sure to carve up and close off even more ocean real estate in coming years.

The fear starts with dollars and cents (“How hard can you squeeze a fisherman till he can’t make a living?” he demands).  But it goes deeper. The team’s grand vision for the port — to build a research field station on the dock and a marine interpretive center for tourists — threatens to alter Port Orford’s character in ways that could marginalize the fleet, says Jennings, owner and skipper of a 34-foot vessel named My Girl. He complains about the “Disneyland effect” of tourism and the ivory tower of science, contrasting those endeavors against the practical, putting-food-on-the-table impact of fishing. Port manager Gary Anderson chimes in angrily, railing against proposals that he predicts will infect the traditional fishermen’s dock with alien interests. David Smith, president of the local chamber of commerce, sympathizes with the fishermen’s concerns, but argues for the economic opportunities and diversification that tourism and research would bring to a slumping economy. Jennings fires back, offering a paean to the fisherman’s critical role in feeding the world that ends with a plea to safeguard an ancient way of life.

“I think you’re throwing out a culture,” Jennings tells the members gathered around the table.

Political Ecology of Fishing

This core conflict — the survival of ocean ecosystems versus the survival of human economies and traditions — is at the crux of Oregon’s community team process, which the Legislature laid out in House Bill 3013 passed in 2008. The act not only established pilot marine reserves at Redfish Rocks and Otter Rock but also charged ODFW with studying the potential of three additional reserves: Cape Falcon, Cascade Head and Cape Perpetua. A fourth reserve at Cape Arago-Seven Devils was pegged for preliminary discussion.

Biology was only half the mandate. The other half was sociology. ODFW was tasked with assessing the impact of marine reserves on local livelihoods as well as on ocean ecosystems. To make sure all points of view were honored, community teams had to represent all stakeholders, from commercial and recreational fishermen to conservationists to scientists and local leaders.

Port Orford dock worker Faron Busso holds a rougheye rockfish, one of many species that live in the temperate reefs off the southern Oregon Coast. (Photo: Heath Korvola)

These disparate voices are full-throated on this Monday-night meeting in Port Orford. The contentiousness catches everyone by surprise. While other coastal communities have fought bitterly against the concept of no-fishing zones, Port Orford has been the poster child of civility and open-mindedness in the state’s marine reserve debate.

OSU researcher Mark Hixon has been at the frontlines of the battle since the beginning.

“Oregon is way behind most other states in establishing marine reserves — and definitely way behind the other Pacific states of Hawaii, Alaska, Washington and California,” says Hixon, who chaired the national Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee before taking on the co-chairmanship of Oregon’s Cape Perpetua community team. “The simple reason is that there’s great resistance by the fishing community in Oregon.”

Redfish Rocks team member Dave Lacey, an organizer for the nonprofit environmental group Our Ocean, has felt the bitter resistance first-hand. A former commercial fisherman who spent a season tending gear for divers harvesting sea urchins and another catching rockfish at Port Orford and Gold Beach, Lacey saw both fisheries crash beneath him. The demand for urchins bottomed out when tottering Asian economies made the delicacy unaffordable. Then the groundfish collapse of 2000 — when the U.S. Secretary of Commerce declared the fishery a disaster because populations of rockfish, lingcod, and other bottom dwellers dipped dangerously low — “woke me up to conservation,” he says. The guys he once fished with saw his epiphany as a defection. He’s been called a “sell-out” and worse on the streets of Gold Beach where he lives. But he doesn’t think the maw between them and him is impossibly wide. “I think most fishermen want to take care of the resource,” he says. “Most of them are conservationists in some shape or form.”

That’s what OSU social scientists Flaxen Conway and Bryan Tilt found last year. They, along with Port Orford resident Leesa Cobb, surveyed residents for an Oregon Sea Grant study.

“The perceptions of people (in Port Orford) have changed,” wrote Conway and graduate student Christina Package in their 2010 report, Longform Fishing Community Profile. “In the past, people wanted to catch everything, but today they want to maintain a balance as far as catching and preserving the resource.” The researchers interviewed one fisherman who had returned a 100-year-old yelloweye rockfish to the sea so that it could go on spawning. “You just can’t kill everything you catch and catch as many as you want,” he explained.

Jennings, too, voices the sustainability mindset. “We’re really all on the same page here on this planet,” he says. Even as he vents the fishermen’s skepticism about marine reserves, he gets the scientific rationale behind them. “The positive effect that we’re looking for — that we’ve been sold on — is that you’ll get a spillover effect of more fish to catch in the future by giving up territory that we fish right now. We just want to make sure we get something back for what we’re giving up.”

To make sure Redfish Rocks yields data useful to both fishermen and scientists, Jennings has lent not only his voice but also his boat. Calvanese chartered My Girl and its captain and crew to help conduct hydrophone range testing. Other members of the Port Orford fleet have aided the research effort, as well, lending their time, their vessels (such the Leesa and Darrell Cobb’s Eagle III, which Calvanese used to deploy the hydrophones around the reef’s perimeter) and their expertise.

At the meeting’s end, Jennings apologizes to the team for letting his emotions spill all over the meeting room. Hey, no problem, they tell him. Honest dialogue is, after all, the whole point of the team process.

Carnal Instinct

On the bright blue morning following the October meeting, gulls wheel and screech above the bay. Redfish Rocks shimmers just offshore. Jennings sits on the dock and tries to explain the wariness with which fishermen and scientists often regard one another. Their different modes of understanding the ocean — academic versus experiential ways of knowing — can put them at odds. Fishermen like Jennings tend to scorn insights gleaned from labs and laptops. He complains that scientists too often fail to respect the hard-won, hands-on learning that happens during many seasons at sea.

Part of the Port Orford fleet, Eagle III has participated in scientific research with scientists from OSU (Photo: Heath Korvola)

“We’re out there on a daily basis,” says the skipper, who started fishing commercially as a 9-year-old kid supplying the aquarium trade in Hawaii.  “As a fisherman, you’re readin’ the birds, you’re readin’ the depth meter, you’re seein’ the bait fish, you’re watchin’ everything, because to be a fisherman you have to kinda revert back to that carnal instinct of bein’ a hunter. And a hunter has to gather information just like a scientist does in order to quarry his prey. He has to take everything into consideration — the whole environment, the whole ecosystem. What’s going on with the upwelling? Where’s the temperature change? Where’s the action? We’re right in the middle of where there’s whales feeding and birds taking off and sea lions workin’. We get to see the active part of nature on a daily basis.”

Fisherman Blane Steinmetz, president of the Port Orford Fishing Marketing Association, puts it this way: “When we go to work out there, the scenery is a big part of it. Our ‘traffic’ is to watch the whales and the dolphins, not some stoplight on some asphalt. We see it, we live it, we breathe it. We are more concerned about overfishing than most people are. We want to keep this a sustainable fishery — fish smarter, not harder.”

The rancor rang out loud and clear in 2008 at a series of forums moderated by marine extension agent Ginny Goblirsch of Oregon Sea Grant. OSU researcher Selina Heppell was on hand to explain the science of marine reserves. Fishermen from Astoria to Brookings vented their anger and frustration at the meetings, which were convened by OPAC to engage coastal communities in discussions about a network of marine reserves proposed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski. Words and phrases like “suspicion,” “tough sell,” “mistrust,” “fracas,” and “overwhelming opposition” peppered the news coverage of the forums. The biggest concern expressed by fishermen was a fear that scientists and conservationists involved in the marine reserve effort were harboring “hidden agendas,” according to Goblirsch. Ultimately, the “listening and learning” forums revealed an acute need for more dialog and led to the creation of community teams like the one at Port Orford.

Port Orford fisherman Scott Hill unloads the day’s bounty of sablefish – also called black cod by local fishermen (Photo: Heath Korvola)

But Port Orford was already well ahead of the curve. Fishermen and local leaders had gotten out in front of the issue several years earlier, forming a group called the Port Orford Ocean Resources Team (POORT) to study and discuss a raft of issues, including marine reserves. Leesa Cobb — who took the helm of POORT from founding director and OSU alum Laura Anderson after Anderson opened a restaurant and fish market in Newport called Local Ocean Seafoods — says the action was a way for the community to take charge of its own destiny.

“Marine reserves have been on the radar for ocean management worldwide for years,” Cobb says. “It wasn’t something we tried to avoid. We didn’t try to run from it, we didn’t try to hide from it. We said, ‘It’s out there; let’s talk about it.’”

Fisherman and team member Aaron Longton explains it this way: “We figured marine reserves were inevitable. It was either engage with and shape this thing so it works for us or have it done to us, kicking and screaming. That didn’t make any sense.”

And so this forward-leaning band of Port Orfordians nominated Redfish Rocks just off their shores as Oregon’s first pilot reserve. Says Blane Steinmetz: “We’ve given up Redfish Rocks so, hopefully, the research will be done on it. We want to help with the research. We know these grounds. We’ve fished on ‘em. We know where the fish are.” To further engage the broader community, Calvanese has launched a website called Fishtracker where people can read about his work and even adopt a fish to help raise funds to support his rockfish tagging research. His “Adopt-A-Fish” program was created in partnership with the Redfish Rocks community team.

Struggling for Consensus

As the morning sun warms Jennings’ back, he looks toward the reef whose six basaltic pinnacles (“emergent rocks” as the scientists call them) break through the cobalt surface of the sea.

“I think it’s very easy to criminalize the fisherman,” he says. “It always comes down to ‘us and them.’” He wonders why a “warm-and-fuzzy” meeting of the minds — “you know, rainbows and everybody lovin’ each other” — is so elusive.

For her part, Leesa Cobb sees more harmony, more unity of intent, among Port Orford’s fishermen and the scientists who study their ocean. “Our community has been working with scientists for years, and we learn from each project something new about our area,” she says. “Do we need to learn about our fishing region? Absolutely, if we want sustainable fisheries.”

Still, resentments continue to simmer even as the team-crafted proposals for a network of five Oregon marine reserves move forward. Approved by OPAC in December, the plans are headed for legislative action and, ultimately, implementation and enforcement. Fishermen harbor ongoing doubts that shrinking fishing grounds now will boost their catches down the road. Scientists like Hixon, on the other hand, question the true biological value of the two pilot reserves that were whittled down in size during months of negotiations — reserves that he characterizes as “dinky.”

Still, Hixon sees hope in the Cape Perpetua process he helped lead, a process that has resulted in a proposal both sides can live with. “I was heartened by the fact that the majority of the members on our community team were open-minded, respectful, learned from each other, listened to each other, struggled to find a compromise and to reach consensus,” he says. “And we did.”

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You can view the locations of marine protected areas around the globe through Google Earth and find additional information at a website managed by the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, or PISCO.

You can also download an Oregon Sea Grant report on the community listening forums conducted in 2008.

See a profile of Selina Heppell’s work on ocean fisheries policy in Oregon’s Agricultural Progress magazine.

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

A school of yellow tang in Hawaii (photo by Bill Walsh)

The findings add credibility to what scientists have believed for some time, but until now been unable to directly document. The study also provides a significant demonstration of the ability of marine reserves to rebuild fishery stocks in areas outside the reserves.

The research was published this week in PLoS One, a scientific journal.

“We already know that marine reserves will grow larger fish and some of them will leave that specific area, what we call spillover,” said Mark Hixon, a professor of marine biology at OSU. “Now we’ve clearly shown that fish larvae that were spawned inside marine reserves can drift with currents and replenish fished areas long distances away.

“This is a direct observation, not just a model, that successful marine reserves can sustain fisheries beyond their borders,” he said. “That’s an important result that should help resolve some skepticism about reserves. And the life cycle of our study fish is very similar to many species of marine fish, including rockfishes and other species off Oregon. The results are highly relevant to other regions.”

The findings were based on the creation in 1999 of nine marine protected areas on the west coast of the “big island” of Hawaii. They were set up in the face of serious declines of a beautiful tropical fish called yellow tang, which formed the basis for an important trade in the aquarium industry.

“This fishery was facing collapse about 10 years ago,” Hixon said. “Now, after the creation of marine reserves, the fishery is doing well.”

The yellow tang was an ideal fish to help answer the question of larval dispersal because once its larvae settle onto a reef and begin to grow, they are not migratory, and live in a home range about half a mile in diameter. If the fish are going to move any significant distance from where they are born, it would have to be as a larva – a young life form about the size of a grain of rice – drifting with the currents for up to two months before settling back to adult habitats.

Mark Christie, an OSU postdoctoral research associate and lead author of the study, developed some new

Yellow tang larvae drift for miles on ocean currents before settling to live in coral reefs (Photo: Sarah Mctee)

approaches to the use of DNA fingerprinting and sophisticated statistical analysis that were able to match juvenile fish with their parents, wherever they may have been from. In field research from 2006, the scientists performed genetic and statistical analyses on 1,073 juvenile and adult fish, and found evidence that many healthy juvenile fish had spawned from parents long distances away, up to 114 miles, including some from marine protected areas.

“This is similar to the type of forensic technology you might see on television, but more advanced,” Christie said. “We’re optimistic it will help us learn a great deal more about fish movements, fishery stocks, and the genetic effects of fishing, including work with steelhead, salmon, rockfish and other species here in the Pacific Northwest.”

This study should help answer some of the questions about the ability of marine reserves to help rebuild fisheries, the scientists said. It should also add scientific precision to the siting of reserves for that purpose, which is just one of many roles that a marine reserve can play. Many states are establishing marine reserves off their coasts, and Oregon is in the process of developing a limited network of marine reserves to test their effectiveness. The methods used in this study could also become a powerful new tool to improve fisheries management, Hixon said.

“Tracking the movement of fish larvae in the open ocean isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do,” Hixon said. “It’s not like putting a radio collar on a deer. This approach will provide valuable information to help optimize the placement of reserves, identify the boundaries of fishery stocks, and other applications.”

The issue of larval dispersal is also important, the researchers say, because past studies at OSU have shown that large, fat female fish produce massive amounts of eggs and sometimes healthier larvae than smaller fish. For example, a single two-foot vermillion rockfish produces more eggs than 17 females that are 14 inches long.

But these same large fish, which have now been shown to play key roles in larval production and fish population replenishment, are also among those most commonly sought in fisheries.

The study was done in collaboration with the University of Hawaii, Washington State University, National Marine Fisheries Services and the Hawaii Department of Natural Resources. It was funded by Conservation International.

“The identification of connectivity between distant reef fish populations on the island of Hawaii demonstrates that human coastal communities are also linked,” the researchers wrote in their conclusion. “Management in one part of the ocean affects people who use another part of the ocean.”

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See Mark Hixon’s 2010 “Oceans of Life” presentation, including videos and images of seafloor trawling.

This lionfish (Pterois volitans) swam to within six inches of the camera as the shot was taken. “We think that he saw his reflection in the glass and was trying to scare off his ‘rival,’” says Robbie Wisdom. (Photo: Daniel Wisdom)

When talk turns to the mud-dwelling creatures of the deep seafloor, Mark Hixon jumps up from his swivel chair, strides to a cabinet in his office and swings open the door. Taking out a long cardboard box, he gently lays it on his desk.

“This,” he says, reaching inside, “is a sponge from just off the Oregon coast. Isn’t it cool?”

He holds up the dried organism, an 18-inch-long spire the color of raw pinewood, delicately honeycombed. Its tousle of roots tells you why scientists long classified sponges, mistakenly, as plants. In your hand it is nearly weightless.

“There’s a whole host of things that live down there,” says Professor Hixon, an internationally known marine ecologist in OSU’s Department of Zoology.

The astounding array of seafloor organisms — brittlestars and bivalves, marine worms and sea pens, cold-water corals and sponge species by the score — plays a vital role in ocean systems by providing food and shelter for finfish and shellfish. Before manned submersibles and remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) gave scientists direct, deep-water access, Hixon says, many viewed the teeming ocean mud as empty ooze. Now they know the seafloor is the “nursery” for many of the finned species humans eat.

Hixon’s research on fish population dynamics has taken him to most of the planet’s oceans, both temperate and tropical. One of the world’s leading authorities on coral reefs, he has been cited in scientific journals more often than any other coral-reef ecologist in the Western Hemisphere over the past decade, according to the Thomson Institute for Science Research. He was ranked third worldwide behind two scientists who live adjacent to coral reefs year-round.

One big mystery relevant to both fisheries management and marine conservation is whether and how isolated populations of adult fish are linked. Understanding these links will help answer questions such as, Can protecting fish in one location compensate for overfishing in another location? Hanging in the balance are decisions about marine reserves that, while designed to sustain fisheries, have raised fishing industry concerns.

In two ongoing studies — one in Hawaii, the other in the Bahamas — Hixon and his graduate students are investigating connections among isolated populations of coral-reef fishes. They are studying the demographics of the yellow tang on Hawaii’s Big Island and the bicolor damselfish in Exuma Sound off the Bahamas. They are sampling DNA from adult and juvenile fish at multiple reefs. Their goal is to understand the drift patterns of fertilized eggs and larvae that travel with tides and currents in a process known as “larval dispersal.” And they are testing whether a high level of larval connectivity is also reflected in the population dynamics of adult fish.

Ultimately, the answers will guide conservation and management, not only of fish, but of the reefs themselves. These complex ecosystems brim with more species than anyplace on the planet, even tropical rainforests. And many are dying. Pollution, global warming and overfishing have degraded about 20 percent of Earth’s coral reefs so far. Another 50 percent are at risk. In Hawaii, the yellow tang, coveted by the aquarium trade for its brilliant color, was depleted until the state created marine reserves along the Kohala-Kona coast to protect them. Preliminary data from Hixon and his colleagues suggest the reserves are working. “Long-term policy about marine reserves must be based on data rather than hearsay,” he says. The yellow tang genetics, still being analyzed in Hixon’s lab, will reveal which of Hawaii’s reefs need replenishment from spawn drifting in from highly productive “source” reefs and where those respective reefs are located.

Ocean Views

In his three decades as a fish ecologist, Hixon has dived in oceans from the Pacific to the Atlantic, the Caribbean to the Coral Sea. Studying marine science at UC Santa Barbara was, for him, just a natural extension of a sea-centered boyhood as a surfer and the son of a naval officer. As the family moved from one coastline to another, young Mark – a fan of Sea Hunt and ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau – had a recurring dream: He would be standing on the beach trying to imagine what lived beneath the heaving seas when, suddenly, the water would disappear, revealing fishes “swimming around in the air.”

As a doctoral student in the 1970s, he shivered through dozens of bone-chilling dives in cold-water kelp forests. These days, he relies on small research submarines in the frigid northern waters as he studies the ecology of coastal marine fishes, focusing on what naturally regulates populations and sustains biodiversity. His scuba gear gets used mostly in warm-water ecosystems.

The tropical reef research, part of OSU’s top-ranked efforts in conservation biology, has relevance here in Oregon. “Off Oregon, it’s impossible to gather the enormous amount of data we can extract from warm, clear tropical waters,” Hixon says. “However, once our methods are developed and tested in the tropics, we can bring them home to Oregon.”

Such research is timely. Governor Ted Kulongoski is leading an initiative to create marine reserves in the Oregon Territorial Sea to replenish and preserve the state’s marine ecosystems and fisheries. Hixon’s work will help test the effectiveness of Oregon’s reserves. For example, in the 1990s, Hixon, who chairs the Marine Protected Areas Federal Advisory Committee, witnessed a post-trawl patch on Oregon’s continental shelf from the portal of a research sub named Delta. He and his team were surveying fish populations on the rocky reefs between Bandon and Cape Blanco, a fish-rich outcrop called Coquille Bank, when they stumbled upon a muddy area deeply scarred by groundfish trawl nets. An adjacent area unmarred by trawl tracks provided a readymade control site. The researchers decided to conduct a comparative study, the first-ever documentation of trawling impacts on the deep mud seafloor off North America’s West Coast.

The contrast was stark. About half as many groundfish species were living in the trawled area as in the untrawled area. Numbers of individuals, too, were significantly lower in the trawled site. Most striking, though, was the disparity in sea pens and other invertebrates. Members of the jellyfish phylum, the fragile, soft-bodied sea pens stood out brightly in Delta’s spotlight as it scanned the sediment in the lightless depths. Forests of the flowerlike stalks of yellow-and-orange polyps were anchored in the untrawled mud. But where the nets had passed, sea pens were virtually absent, Hixon and Brian Tissot of Washington State University reported in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology last year.

Sea pens and other such invertebrates can’t swim away when their habitat is disturbed. Nor can they quickly rebound. These “sessile, slow-growing, long-lived species,” Hixon notes, “are likely to recover slowly” from the effects of bottom dragging.

“What we saw off Coquille Bank,” Hixon concludes, “was completely consistent with studies conducted all over the world showing that bottom trawling has severe impacts on seafloor habitat.” Unfortunately, Hixon and Tissot’s findings were dismissed by the Oregon trawl industry, which questioned their validity, despite appearing in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

“My greatest frustration as a scientist happens when any special interests reject peer-reviewed science,” says Hixon. As Chair of the Ocean Sciences Advisory Committee for the National Science Foundation, Hixon notes that rejection of scientific findings about climate change and ocean acidification stem from the same attitude. Hixon likes to quote Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

For Hixon, biology and conservation have become inseparable as threats to the oceans continue to grow. “The challenge,” he says, “is to successfully walk the fine line between scientific objectivity and personal advocacy. Some scientists refuse to walk that line, but I did not abdicate my citizenship when I became a scientist.” Discovering how to connect science (left-brained and analytical) with public engagement (right-brained and passionate) is as urgent to Hixon as tracking fish movements across reefs. Data alone won’t save our oceans. “People must feel it here,” he says, placing his hand over his heart, “to value not only themselves and the present, but also to value others and the future.”

To that end, he and Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Dean Moore, director of OSU’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word, are investigating the psychology of conservation communications: how to craft messages that effectively change minds and behaviors.

Mark Hixon wants our progeny to inherit a world still relatively intact. He wants tomorrow’s children to have a chance to dive into the pulsating rainbow of biodiversity that is the tropical reef. “You feel as if you’ve fallen into a universe of stars,” he says. “It really, truly is amazing.”

Meet the photographers, Daniel and Robbie Wisdom

Protecting tropical reefs is a passion for these two graduate students in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. The Idaho natives plan to live in Australia where they can pursue scuba and underwater photography. Both are enrolled in OSU’s Marine Resource Management program. Daniel works with Assistant Professor Kelly Benoit-Bird analyzing fish-school movements with high-frequency sonar. Robbie is studying cooperative marketing programs for small seafood micro-canners in the Pacific Northwest with Gil Sylvia, superintendent of the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station in Newport.

See Mark Hixon’s 2010 “Oceans of Life” presentation for the F.A. Gilfillan Memorial Award

• Mark Hixon’s Web site
• Department of Zoology
• College of Science
• National Science Foundation
• National Undersea Research Program
• OSU Foundation

OSU news releases

• OSU Recognized for Coral Reef Research (9-24-07)
• ‘Ten Commandments’ Could Improve Fisheries Management (2-19-07)
• OSU Marine Biologist to Chair Federal Advisory Committee (10-19-06)
• Experts Propose Major Mapping Program on Oregon Coast (3-22-06)