Oregon State University master naturalist volunteers Anne Marie Farell-Matthews and Philip Matthews cut open sacks of native Olympia oysters and spread them on a muddy flat at Oregon's South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve near Charleston. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

COOS BAY – Lots of people fantasize about appearing on American Idol or Wheel of Fortune. But Oregon Field Guide? Not so much — that is, unless you happen to be Anne Farrell-Matthews and Philip Matthews. Whether they’re heaving bags of oysters around a sandbar or hauling groundwater monitors across a salt marsh, this pair of Oregon Master Naturalists could easily imagine OPB TV host Steve Amen showing up with a video crew. For the Coos Bay couple, joining in on ecosystem science and restoration is that glamorous.

So how is it that this hip couple in their 40s gets all excited about red tree voles, beaver scat and shimmy worms? Why would a general contractor and a graphic designer get up at 5 a.m. to wade around in the muck trying to save native oysters? Why would a pair of avid surfers forego great waves to study physical oceanography and the Cascadia Subduction Zone late into the night?

Partly because the South Slough runs through their veins. Philip tramped these mudflats and salt marshes relentlessly as a kid, his Irish setter Britta beside him. Anne came to Coos Bay later, at 19, from landlocked Denver where her bedroom walls had been plastered with whale posters. Finally, she felt like she could breathe. Together, they’ve explored every twist and tangle of the slough, which became the nation’s first national estuarine research reserve in the 1970s.

The other answer is more cerebral. It has to do with making amends and taking ownership. It has to do with helping to heal the landscape they love, a landscape that has been stressed by overharvesting, pollution and population growth over the past century and a half.

Philip’s motives are particularly personal. “I’m half French, half redneck,” he likes to joke. Describing his mom’s family, the French side of the clan, as “extreme environmentalists,” he hammers home his point by saying, “My uncle once chained himself to City Hall to protect shorebirds from hunters.” It’s his dad’s side for which he’s now making atonement. “My dad came from people who took advantage of the environment — poaching, fishing for salmon with dynamite, some pretty serious abuses of nature,” he explains. “I want to help offset some of the negative stuff.”

Turning the Tide

One August morning just as the sun is displacing the moon, Philip and Anne are skimming across the slough in a skiff with a team of scientists, students and volunteers, all Velcroed into brown neoprene chest waders and slip-proof boots. They set anchor at a spit called Younker Point. Footprints of shorebirds trace trails in the wet sand as the team, working fast against the tide, digs up bundle after bundle of oysters for transfer to a new location as part of a NOAA-funded project led by the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. Restoring native Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) to the slough is the project’s long-term goal, and preliminary findings show that the oysters, transplanted from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, could survive and grow. But over time, excessive siltation turned out to be a problem at Younker Point, explains Dave Landkamer, an aquaculturist with Oregon Sea Grant, who’s helping with the oyster transfer.

“They’ve been suffocated in silt,” Landkamer says. “You can see by the ripples in the wet sand that there’s too much wave and tidal energy here for good oyster habitat. “
That’s why, after wrestling the mesh bags from the sand’s sucking grip, the team slings them into the skiff and another small boat for relocation. The morning sun is just cresting the treetops as the team speeds toward Long Island Point, a place where ancient shell middens are evidence of long-ago oyster beds. Alongshore, white egrets and blue herons stalk their prey. Cormorants circle overhead. Gulls cry out. A bald eagle rises from the pinnacle of a fir.

Out at the point, the team hurriedly stacks the bags to create a reef of oyster shells in hopes that the “Olys” will settle and spawn. This is just an early stage of longer-term studies. The National Estuarine Research Reserve Science Collaborative, which brings local stakeholders into its research process, is funding the next phase of the investigation. Someday, native oysters may once again be abundant in the South Slough.

Natural Mastery

As the team disembarks back at Charleston Bay’s boat basin, Philip’s face is smudged with mud. Anne is wet to the skin from the saltwater that “topped over” her waders. So it’s more than a little incongruous that their expressions fall somewhere between serenity and ecstasy. Clearly, getting sweaty, soggy and dirty is exactly what they signed up for when they chose to become Oregon Master Naturalists.

“I’m cold and I’m muddy,” Anne says with a huge grin. “And I had a great time!”

Then she adds reflectively: “Estuaries are the nurseries of the planet. If I can contribute in some tiny way to keeping them healthy, that’s what I want to do. After all, this is our own backyard.”

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Read more about Oregon Master Naturalists in Corps of Discovery.

Madelaine Katz catches a perfect day at Oceanside

Ever since I was very small, I’ve been enraptured by the animal kingdom. And I was very lucky: My mom fueled this fire by taking me to as many zoos, aquariums, wildlife centers and nature parks as possible on our family travels. It was a big part of my upbringing. Now, as a semi-autonomous and somewhat-functioning adult, I still manage to find ways to go to these places as much as humanly possible.

The most recent of these visits was to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

After the exhausting whirlwind that was my START orientation at Oregon State this summer, I was feeling a little bit panicked about the whole moving-across-the-continent-for-college ordeal. Being a native East Coaster from North Carolina, the move to Oregon was going to be quite a shift for me. I was excited, yes, but a heavy dose of nerves was definitely there too. And what was the one thing that could make me feel myself?

“Dad, can we drive out to Newport? There’s an aquarium there!”

And so we did. It was mostly empty on that sleepy Wednesday afternoon, and I happily roamed around the exhibits, lost and immersed in my own underwater world.

Rounding the corner from some dozing sea otters, I approached my favorite animal, the Great Pacific Octopus. As I walked toward the tank, however, a disgruntled family was heading in the opposite direction, expressing frustration. “Why didn’t it come out?” they were complaining. “Why was it hiding in a hole like that?”

As they made their way noisy way out, I slowly walked up to the glass window of the octopus’ tank. It would appear completely devoid of life if it were not for the single, telltale tentacle spilling out from a small dark crevice in the corner.

Even though I couldn’t see more than this lone tentacle, a flood of simple respect washed over me for this incredible creature. The intelligence of these mollusks is legendary among biologists. I’ve heard many a story of their cunning and wit, whether it be outsmarting predatory sharks three times their size, or figuring out how to make a coconut shell a useful tool for shelter. I closed my eyes and placed my hand on the glass, and smiled to myself. I was, and still am, in love with the fact that these animals exist in the world.

I sighed, and opened my eyes. And splayed out on the bottom of the tank, big and bold and totally orange, was the octopus, come out from hiding in its watery cave. And I swear it was looking at me.

Some part of me will always doubt it, but the larger and more playful side of me believes that the animal felt what I was feeling and came out to say hello, or at least to investigate. A volunteer told me later that the nocturnal octopus rarely comes out during the day, and that I was lucky to be able to witness it.

Lucky, yes.  I felt wonderfully lucky to be able to share that moment with that phenomenal cephalopod. But was it happenstance? Who knows, but that creature sure had a wonderful effect on me, and maybe, just maybe, I had a similar effect on him.

Madelaine Katz is a freshman in the University Honors College majoring in zoology.

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.

Waves from a powerful storm crash into the seawall at Depoe Bay, Oregon. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

If you love big surf, go to Depoe Bay on the Oregon coast during a winter storm. As swells rise and break offshore, winds whip ocean spray high into the air, but the waves move inexorably toward the harbor (the “world’s smallest navigable harbor,” reads a road sign), channel through rocks and, with a resounding shudder, launch a geyser over Hwy. 101. Enthralled tourists standing along the seawall sometimes yelp as they get a cold shower.

It all makes for good fun, but the pounding water carries a warning. Data from offshore buoys indicate that the largest waves are getting bigger. Coupled with slowly rising sea levels and the occasional El Niño, when warm waters pile up along our shores (as much as 19 inches higher than normal, due to thermal expansion), storms are eroding West Coast beaches and undermining bluffs at an increasing rate.

Examples of damage aren’t hard to find. In 2010, a series of El Niño storms “eroded the beaches to often unprecedented levels at sites throughout California and vulnerable sites in the Pacific Northwest,” said coastal geologist Patrick Barnard in a U.S. Geological Survey news release. Damage to a highway lane south of San Francisco cost $5 million to repair.

In 2006, residents of Gleneden Beach found their homes tottering on the edge of a cliff when a weekend storm removed nearly 20 feet of shoreline. In nearby Oceanside, during the El Niño of 1997-98, a 32-home development at The Capes was threatened by collapse of the bluff on which it stood. In southern Oregon during that winter, a storm breached dunes and destroyed Port Orford’s sewage treatment plant drain field. California coastal communities reported more than $100 million in property damage.

In the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Barnard and other West Coast researchers, including Peter Ruggiero of Oregon State University and Jonathan Allan of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI), raised the likelihood of increasing erosion risk in a changing climate and added: “If these trends continue, the combination of large waves and higher water levels, particularly when enhanced by El Niños, can be expected to be more frequent in the future, resulting in greater risk of coastal erosion, flooding, and cliff failures.”

While beaches wax and wane seasonally in a complex dance between land and sea, recent erosion losses have left some Oregon communities more vulnerable to the next storm. DOGAMI’s beach monitoring program has shown that in Tillamook County, beaches have not recovered from the 1997-98 El Niño. They have eroded landward an average of 30 to 60 feet and, in some areas, up to 150 feet. Rockaway Beach alone has lost an estimated 2.5 million cubic yards of sand. At Neskowin, beach retreat has enabled storm waves to threaten homes, flood streets and undermine rock-reinforcement — a.k.a. “rip rap” — in front of the dunes.

Wrestling with Risk

“Neskowin is at the head of the pin in terms of coastal erosion in Tillamook County. The community wishes to be proactive in addressing this problem,” says Mark Labhart, chair of the Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee and a Tillamook County commissioner. “OSU research papers and direct access to professors have been invaluable in providing factual data on what has been happening in the past and what we might expect in the future so the community, the county and the state can plan for the next steps.”

Waves crawl up against the lower level of a structure in Neskowin, Oregon, during a storm in January, 2008. (Photo: Armand Thibault, Neskowin)

At stake, he adds, are property values, roads, state park facilities and the relaxed quality of life for which the Oregon coast has become famous. Neskowin’s quiet, family-oriented character has lured vacationers for more than a century. According to local historical documents, Sarah Page and her husband settled on what was known as Slab Creek in the 1880s. She opened the first post office and called it Neskowin after she heard a Nestucca Indian refer to the creek by that name, meaning it had plenty of fish.

Today, the community has 408 homes (less than a quarter of which are occupied year around), a golf course and a condominium development, the Proposal Rock Inn. Nestled against Cascade Head to the south, Neskowin mirrors much of coastal Tillamook County, which has the highest percentage of second homes of all the state’s shoreline counties, according to the Oregon Coastal Zone Management Association (OCZMA).

Dedicated to protecting this idyllic enclave is a local group appointed by the county commission in 2009. The Neskowin Coastal Hazards Committee is composed of property owners and local and state officials and facilitated by Pat Corcoran, a coastal hazards specialist with Oregon Sea Grant. It has met with Ruggiero, Allan and other scientists. It has reviewed options (known as “Hazard Alleviation Techniques” or HATs) for reducing erosion hazards. With Corcoran’s help, it identified emerging research and delved into erosion processes and trends.

Working with Mitch Rohse, a planning consultant from Salem, the committee published a proposed legal policy in 2011 for counties to deal with the mounting risks: Adapting to Coastal Erosion Hazards in Tillamook County: A Framework Plan. Local planners and the county planning commission must review the document before it goes to the county commission for approval. Concurrently, the committee has raised more than $27,000 from private contributors, the Neskowin Homeowners Assn. and the Oregon Dept. of Land Conservation and Development for an engineering analysis of options and costs to protect the shoreline.

A first for Oregon, the draft framework plan calls on the county to adopt policies that help communities reduce their vulnerability to storm damage and erosion. Reflecting current state and local regulations, it draws from a variety of scientific sources, including former OSU master’s student Heather Baron’s 2011 thesis, in which she focused on “coastal hazard zones.” For her degree in Marine Resource Management, she evaluated the probability of erosion in each zone for 18 different climate change scenarios. Each scenario reflects a combination of risk factors: sea level rise, extreme wave heights and El Niño frequency and intensity. Her work builds on research by Ruggiero, Allan and their colleagues, who have used beach, wave and landscape data to define such zones along the Oregon coast.

If the plan were approved, properties in each zone would be subject to standards that reflect their vulnerability to the risk of future storm damage. Neskowin committee members expect that idea to generate debate over issues from development rights to property values. “Any time you put colored lines on a map that potentially affect property values, you get people’s attention in a hurry,” says Labhart.

Coastal Change

The threat faced by Neskowin and other communities doesn’t arise over night. It grows gradually from a series of seemingly harmless events, chief among them the construction of homes and condos and the seawalls that protect them. “A recent storm may have washed away a beach or destroyed homes lining the shore,” wrote retired OSU coastal oceanographer Paul Komar in The Sciences in 2000, “but merely blaming the weather is simplistic. Almost always, subtle factors have been acting over time to weaken the coast and make it more susceptible; the storm, when it comes, simply delivers the coup de grâce.”

Waves pound a beach and structure between Depot Bay and Boiler Bay on the Oregon coast. (Photo: Erica Harris, Oregon State University)

Neskowin’s case is puzzling, says Komar. When he started investigating erosion problems in the 1970s, Neskowin homeowners had problems with too much sand building up the dunes, blocking ocean views and even threatening to bury homes. “The change to erosion began with the 1982-83 El Niño and accelerated during the ‘one-two punch’ of the 1997-98 El Niño and storms of the following winter,” he says. Today, he adds, the community is a “classic example of ‘hot spot’ El Niño erosion. Normally during the next few years following an El Niño winter, we expect the beach sand to be carried back to the south by the ‘normal’ waves, but this has not happened yet at Neskowin, and it’s not clear why it hasn’t.”

Over the last decade, with support from Oregon Sea Grant and agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scientists have been zeroing in on those subtle factors. Basic questions motivate them: How do coastal systems work? How do currents carry sand onto and off a beach, piling it up in some years and draining it away in others? Is sand accumulating on the coast or moving permanently into the deep ocean?

Just as importantly, they are providing communities like Neskowin with the knowledge to reduce property risks in the future. “We’re getting great data about the Oregon coast now. Compared to what we had 10 or 15 years ago, the observational data we have today are like night and day,” says Onno Husing, executive director of the OCZMA.

Citizens, elected officials and policymakers can see those data at the click of a mouse. Researchers regularly profile beaches from Gold Beach to Astoria and publish charts that show present and past sand heights relative to mean low and high water levels (see “Beach and Shoreline Mapping” at www.nanoos.org). They monitor wave heights and wave “run-up” on beaches. They estimate future flood risks and how many homes, roads and businesses are in harm’s way. And they meet with citizens to share the results.

Although the broad direction of changes over at least the last decade is clear, Ruggiero emphasizes that uncertainty casts a shadow over the likelihood that any home or community will suffer damage in the future. The range of estimates for climate change only adds to the difficulty of forecasting future risk.

Speaking of just one factor, increasing wave heights, he says: “Attributing it to climate change is very difficult. I don’t do that, but the bottom line is that the waves have increased over the last several decades, and that could be for a variety reasons. Any time you look way out into the future, uncertainty is huge.”

What is certain is that big waves will continue to hit the West Coast and attract sightseers to places like Neskowin, Rockaway and Depoe Bay. How coastal communities will adapt is an open question.

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Read a National Academy of Sciences report, Sea-Level Rise for the Coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington: Past, Present, and Future (2012)

Sign up for tsunami alerts, learn about ongoing research and the global tsunami warning system, and find useful educational resources at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s premier site.

See animations and simulations based on studies of recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Indonesia, Chile, American Samoa and the Pacific Northwest.

Stories, videos and tsunami history at The Why Files.

Researchers at Oregon State University have led studies of the Cascadia Subduction Zone and calculated that there is a one-in-three chance of a tsunami-generating earthquake greater than magnitude 8 in the next 50 years. At the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab, engineers slam waves into simulated towns and shorelines to understand how tsunamis affect buildings, roads and communities and how we can improve engineering designs.

Oregon Sea Grant helps coastal communities save lives by preparing for tsunamis.

“Charismatic megafauna,” my professor said with disdain. “That’s all you guys ever want to talk about.” I exchanged knowing glances with my classmates as we settled in for a rant about the popularity of flashy, impressive species.

It was the last day of my vertebrate biology class, and I was thrilled to finally hear about my favorite, the mammals. I’d endured hardships to get to this point. First were the slimy, less-than-appealing hagfish. From there I learned about cartilaginous fish, bony fish, fish that bore live young, fish with bizarre mating rituals. Things started to pick up with the amphibians and reptiles, and the birds were charming, but my focus remained steadily on the mammals.

To my bitter disappointment, mammals were barely given an hour of discussion. “If you want to learn about mammals, take a mammology class,” was my professor’s explanation for skimming over Class Mammalia.

The Pacific coast is home to the entire U.S. population of California sea lions, according to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. (Photo: Amy Schneider)

Disheartened, I shuffled home to comfort myself with pictures of beluga whales and wallabies on Google Images. Despite what my professor said, I think it’s fairly normal to be captivated by animals with fur and big, glossy eyes. It’s no coincidence that the World Wildlife Foundation (WWF) chose a cuddly giant panda as its figurehead. I admit, the iconic, lonely polar bear stranded on a melting iceberg tugs at my heart. It’s hard to stand idly by when these animals are at risk or in pain, and that’s probably why Kim Raum-Suryan and her Steller sea lion research arrested my attention.

“I’ve been interested in animals since I was a kid,” Raum-Suryan said with a laugh. A kindred spirit, evidently.

In the 1990s, Raum-Suryan, a research assistant with Dr. Markus Horning at OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, was working for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, making observations on Steller sea lions in order to understand the reason for their declining populations. Steller sea lions were listed as a threatened species in 1990, and a subpopulation became endangered in 1997.

Traveling by research vessel, Raum-Suryan and her colleagues navigated the Alaskan waters in search of sea lion clusters, collecting blood samples and taking pictures to learn more about the giant pinnipeds. As Raum-Suryan gathered more sea lion photographs, she was disturbed to notice how many of the sea lions were adorned with tight rubber or plastic loops around their necks. These loops, a symptom of litter in the ocean, cut deeply into the animals’ flesh, causing painful wounds that could result in death through strangulation or infection.

Oregon Coast

In 2000, Raum-Suryan started taking photographs of the entangled Steller sea lions and decided to survey how many sea lions were in similar situations. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s data set spans eleven years in Alaska and Raum-Suryan’s data set spans five years in Oregon.  Off the coast of Oregon alone, she has observed 72 entangled Steller sea lions, and with the popular literature citing only one or two occurrences a year, the difference is significant.

“The number was definitely higher than we were expecting, and that’s just including the animals we actually see,” Raum-Suryan said. “So we’re dealing with the low estimate because it’s very likely that many [entangled] animals die before they ever come to shore.”

These entangled sea lions, with their blubbery bodies and whiskery faces, prompted a movement in Newport, Ore. last year. Several Oregon organizations, including the Oregon Veterinary Medical Association and OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, funded and installed a giant capture cage at Port Dock 1 where California sea lions love to “haul out” and relax before plunging into the ocean for their next meal. The capture cage floats near the docks with its doors open, providing an inviting place for the sea lions to hang out. Ideally, when an entangled sea lion enters the cage, the doors are then shut and the sea lion can be safely tranquilized and disentangled.

Naturally, I love this idea. But I have a feeling that people like my vertebrate biology professor would call into question the necessity of building such a device, and he may have a point. While thousands of animals mark the endangered species list, it’s admittedly easier to relate to the plight of the sea lions than to the equally imperiled corals that face issues of their own.

Cuddle Up to Coral

The corals are undoubtedly important. Their role in the marine ecosystem is foundational, and it’s frightening to think what might happen if they disappear. Still, people flock to animals like sea lions, and that will always be the case. It’s much more fun to watch sea lions frolic than corals filter-feed. The WWF giant panda is there for a reason – it’s meant to engage a broader audience.

If someone cares about sea lions, they must care about the entire marine ecosystem by default. The biological world is one of connections where many organisms are dependent on each other for survival. A wild California sea lion thrives only in a healthy environment, which means we need to conserve the fish, water and air quality that sea lions need to live. Without the smaller, less obvious members of the marine community, there can be no sea lions. If people grasp that concept, they may understand why conservation is so important.

And it all starts with a bunch of sea lions sprawling out on the docks. Maybe those “charismatic megafauna” aren’t so bad after all.

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See a news release from Oregon Sea Grant about Kim Raum-Suryan’s research on Steller sea lions.

Technology extends our vision. We’ve always known that the ocean is a dynamic environment, but satellite-borne sensors, sonar, time-lapse video, moored buoys and autonomous gliders are revealing new details: fish, squid and whales in unexpected places; rumblings that foretell the creation of the seafloor; wind-driven surface currents; nitrogen-fixing microbes; circulating rings of water; shifting concentrations of chlorophyll that may signal plankton blooms.

Scientists have far more devices in their toolbox than when OSU oceanographer Wayne Burt performed his initial measurements in Yaquina Bay more than 50 years ago. New technologies detect physical and chemical patterns that set the stage for ocean life, most of which is invisible to our eyes. Small-scale eddies spin off the south-running California Current. Upwelling water drives plankton blooms.

Today, OSU partners with the University of Washington, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the University of California San Diego to lead development of a new ocean observing system that will be deployed off the Northwest coast. Meanwhile, OSU emeritus professor Tim Cowles leads development of a global ocean observing network known as the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the National Science Foundation.

See a March 23, 2011 story about deployment of new Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys off Newport, Ore. and Grays Harbor, Wash.

And see images (such as lower Chesapeake Bay, mouth of the Columbia River, the Han River) taken by the new Hyperspectral Imager for the Coastal Ocean (HICO). Read an OSU news release (March 24, 2011) about the latest HICO images.

Co-chief scientist Anthony Koppers (left, Oregon State University, USA), expedition staff scientist Jorg Geldmacher (middle, Texas A&M University, USA), and co-chief scientist Toshitsugu Yamazaki (right, Geological Society of Japan at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan) led the IODP Louisville Seamount Trail expedition from December 2010 to February 2011. (Credit IODP-USIO)

Talk about taking things in stride. Three scientists stand at a ship’s railing, arms on each others’ shoulders, sun on their faces and a calm blue sea behind them. They look like tourists on a cruise. Nothing in their calm expressions suggests that they have just pulled half a mile of rock out of the Earth. Or that the rock will help them to answer questions about  how the planet’s tectonic plates move or about how microbes mingle with heat, water and pressure deep underground.

Oregon State University Professor Anthony Koppers and Toshitsugu Yamazaki of the Geological Society of Japan were co-leaders of the latest cruise conducted under the auspices of the International Ocean Drilling Program (IODP). Their target:  the Louisville Seamount Trail — a 2,600-mile-long line of underwater mountains in the South Pacific — where they hoped to learn more about the geophysical processes that produce such features as the Hawaiian Islands or the stretch of ancient volcanoes between the Oregon Cascades and Yellowstone National Park.

Koppers co-edited a special March 2010 issue of the journal Oceanography focusing on seamount science.

According to an IODP news release, the scientific team on the research vessel, JOIDES Resolution, returned to Auckland, New Zealand on February 15 with 806 meters of rock pulled from the seamounts. “During this expedition, we sampled many ancient individual lava flows and a fossilized algal reef.  These samples will be used to study the construction and evolution of the individual Louisville volcanoes,” said Koppers.

Night view of the JOIDES Resolution docked in Auckland, New Zealand before its departure on 13 December 2010. (Credit D. Buchs, Australian National University)

Added Yamazaki: “The sample recovery during this expedition was truly exceptional. I believe we broke the recovery record for drilling igneous rock with a rotary core barrel.” A rotary core barrel is a type of drilling tool used for penetrating hard rocks.

The samples were recovered from six sites at five seamounts varying in age from 50 to 80 million years old.

Linear trails of volcanoes found in the middle of tectonic plates, such as the Hawaii-Emperor and Louisville Seamount Trails, are believed to form from a hotspot – a plume of hot material found deep within the Earth that supplies a steady stream of heated rock from depths as great as 2,900 km up to the surface. As the tectonic plate drifts over the hotspot, new volcanoes are formed – and old ones become extinct. Over time, a linear trail of these aging volcanoes is formed.

“Submarine volcanic trails like the Louisville Seamount Trail are unique because they record the direction and speed at which tectonic plates move,” explained Koppers.

Scientists use these volcanoes to study the motion of tectonic plates, comparing the ages of the volcanoes against their location over time to calculate the rate at which the plate moved over a hotspot. These calculations assume the hotspot stays in the same place over time.

Shipboard technicians help carry a core of rock recovered from ancient volcanoes in the Louisville Seamount Trail. (Credit IODP-USIO)

“The challenge,” said Koppers, “is that no one knows if hotspots are truly stationary – or if they somehow wander over time. If they wander, then our calculations of plate direction and speed need to be re-evaluated.”

“But even more importantly,” he continued, “the results of this expedition will give us a more accurate picture of the dynamic nature of the interior of the Earth on a planetary scale.”

Recent studies in Hawaii have shown that the Hawaii hotspot may have moved as much as 15° latitude (about 1,600 kilometers or 1,000 miles) over a period of 30 million years.

“We want to know if the Louisville hotspot moved at the same time and in the same direction as the Hawaiian hotspot – our models suggest that it’s the opposite, but we won’t really know until we analyze the samples from this expedition,” explained Yamazaki.

In addition to the volcanic rock, scientists on this expedition also recovered sedimentary rocks that preserve shells and an ancient algal reef – typical of living conditions in a very shallow marine environment. These ancient materials show that the Louisville seamounts were once an archipelago of volcanic islands.

According to Koppers, “we were really surprised to find only a thin layer of sediments on the tops of the seamounts and only very few indications for the eruption of lava flows above sea level. It seems that the volcanoes have only been at or above the surface of the ocean for a short amount of time – we weren’t expecting this.”

Researchers hailing from all corners of the globe work together to take small samples from the Louisville Seamount Trail cores. These samples will be analyzed to determine the age, composition, and physical properties of the rocks. (Credit IODP-USIO)

The IODP Louisville Seamount Trail Expedition wasn’t solely focused on geology. More than 60 samples from five seamounts were collected for microbiology research, making the Louisville samples the largest collection of volcanic basement rock ever collected for microbiology research during forty years of scientific ocean drilling expeditions.

Exploration of microbial communities within the seafloor, known as the “subseafloor biosphere” is a rapidly developing field of research. Using the Louisville samples, microbiologists will study both living and relict microbial residents within the old sub-seafloor volcanic rocks from Louisville. They will examine population differences in the volcanic rock and overlying sediments and different kinds of lava flows. They will also look for population patterns relative to depth in the seafloor and between seamounts of varying ages.

Over the coming year, samples recovered during the IODP Louisville Seamount Trail expedition will be analyzed to determine their age, composition, and magnetic properties. Like a puzzle, this information will be pieced together to create a story of the eruption history of the Louisville volcanoes, which will be compared to that of the Hawaiian volcanoes to determine whether or not hotspots remain stationary over time.

About IODP

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is an international research program dedicated to advancing scientific understanding of the Earth through drilling, coring, and monitoring the subseafloor. The JOIDES Resolution is a scientific research vessel managed by the U.S. Implementing Organization of IODP (USIO). Together, Texas A&M University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership comprise the USIO.  IODP is supported by two lead agencies: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Additional program support comes from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, the People’s Republic of China (Ministry of Science and Technology), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.

Learn more about the IODP Louisville Seamount Trail Expedition.

Watch videos produced during the expedition.

Learn about the JOIDES Resolution.

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.

Inspired by the university’s upcoming symposium, Song for the Blue Ocean: Science, Art and Ethics (February 18 – 19), “Literature of the Ocean” will “pursue the subject across time as well as through the three-dimensional space of the sea,” says English Assistant Professor Peter Betjemann. Literary readings focus on oceanic zones (littoral, neritic, oceanic) as well as levels within the water column (surface, photic, aphotic) and places where human communities meet the sea (wharves, docks, beaches). The course, ENG 499/582, is being taught winter term.

A joint colloquium in anthropology and zoology will explore the relative strengths, weaknesses and assumptions of the worldviews underlying traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and Western scientific knowledge (WSK). “Ocean Wisdom: Integrating Traditional and Western Ecological Knowledge of the Pacific,” will focus on the Pacific Ocean and its bordering lands. “Students will compare and contrast the different epistemologies on which TEK and WSK are based via case studies throughout the Pacific region,” says marine ecologist Mark Hixon, who will team teach the class with anthropologist Deanna Kingston. ANTH/Z 499H will be offered spring term.

Photo: Alex Staroseltsev

Whether or not you’re a fan of gulping down raw oysters doused with Tabasco, recent declines in the succulent Northwest shellfish are cause for alarm. That’s because the chemical changes in seawater that are harming oysters could have far-reaching effects on other ocean species as well (see “Tipping Point”).

A few years ago in Tillamook, oyster larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery were mysteriously dying. OSU scientists diagnosed the problem: acidic seawater, which disrupts the formation of calcium carbonate, the hardening compound in shells and corals. Researchers helped the growers make adjustments in their operation to reduce the influx of acidic water.

Now, with support from the National Science Foundation, oceanographers George Waldbusser, Burke Hales and Brian Haley in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and Chris Langdon of the Mulluscan Broodstock Program at Hatfield Marine Science Center are running experiments to find the threshold at which oysters, clams and mussels are harmed by acidification.

“Scientists know very little, to date, about specific modes of action triggered by acidification,” Waldbusser says.

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Researchers in the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, PISCO, are conducting a second NSF-funded project with sea urchins and mussels from California to Oregon. See Tipping Point.

For a  2008 story on ocean acidification along the West Coast, see Acid Ocean.

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

Highest chlorophyll concentrations show as red in this spring 2003 image. The East Coast — Long Island, the Gulf of Maine and Nova Scotia — is to the left. (Image courtesy of the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center and ORBIMAGE)

If you separate predators from their prey, you get more prey. Now that simple relationship has been used to explain one of the most important annual events in the ocean: the North Atlantic spring phytoplankton bloom.

Since the 19th century, oceanographers have sought to explain its origins and have settled on the wintertime mixing of ocean waters followed by increasing light and temperature in the spring, a process known as Sverdrup’s hypothesis.

However, using NASA satellite data, Michael Behrenfeld, OSU professor in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, reported in 2010 that phytoplankton abundance begins to increase in the depths of winter, well before light and warmth return. He offered another explanation: As winter storms stir the water, predators of phytoplankton get separated from their prey, allowing more of the tiny plants to survive and initiating a bloom that lasts until the end of spring.

Critics who took issue with Behrenfeld’s use of satellite data noted that space-borne sensors capture light from only the ocean surface. However, in a second 2010 paper, Emmanual Boss of the University of Maine and Behrenfeld used additional data from a waterborne “profiling float” that sampled from deep in the ocean to the surface. They reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that float and satellite data are consistent. Phytoplankton begin to rebound in the short, dark days of winter. Move over Dr. Sverdrup.

Behrenfeld’s 2010 report in the journal Ecology is available online: http://bit.ly/aTUM3V.

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

“Many oceanographic processes — and the natural history of microbial plankton is no exception — are veiled by the vastness and complexity of the oceans,” Stephen Giovannoni says. (Photo: Karl Maasdam)

Microbes are masters of adaptation.

In some of Earth’s most extreme environments — Antarc- tica’s frigid ice fields, Yellowstone’s sulfuric hot springs, Crater Lake’s lightless depths, the oceans’ deep-sea basalts — Stephen Giovannoni has discovered thriving communities of bacteria. As the holder of the Emile F. Pernot Distinguished Professorship in Microbiology, he has discovered some of the most abundant life forms on the planet.

About two decades ago, the Oregon State University micro- biologist went looking for microscopic master-adapters in yet another place thought to be inhospitable to life: the clear, still waters of the Sargasso Sea south of Bermuda. There, he made a remarkable find. Not only do bacterioplankton (ocean-drifting bacteria) live in this sea once considered a desert, they’re everywhere. It turns out that this newly found branch of bacteria, named SAR for the Sargasso, is among the most plentiful — and thus evolutionarily successful — life forms on the planet.

“SAR11 is ridiculously abundant,” Giovannoni says, referring to the first SAR strain identified. In fact, the species came to be called Pelagibacter ubique (“ubiquitous ocean bacterium”) when it started turning up in seawater samples worldwide. “They have been present in more than 50 studies from around the globe and account for 25 percent of all the genes found in these studies.”

It had eluded detection mainly because of its diminutive size — small even for a microbe. “SAR11 was basically invisible before,” Giovannoni says, explaining that the key to its success was
simplicity and efficiency. “SAR11 is just better than any other organism at capturing the traces of organic matter dissolved in the oceans.”

After this astounding discovery in 2002, Giovannoni’s lab devised novel technologies for growing these kinds of extra-tiny organisms without Petri dishes. Using gene cloning and DNA sequencing, he and his colleagues have so far sequenced 27 hard-to-grow microorganisms never before described. They have shipped samples to scientists all over the world.

“Our research has led to a general appreciation of how impor- tant these previously unknown organisms are to global ecology,” says Giovannoni. Support from the Emile F. Pernot fund, the National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation have been key. (Emile Pernot helped to establish OSU’s Department of Microbiology. The professorship created by his daughter Mabel Pernot is awarded on a rotating basis and will next be held by Theo Dreher, department chair.)

To figure out how marine microbes compete for and adapt to spatial, temporal and seasonal niches and how they contribute to the cycling of carbon in the oceans, Giovannoni is looking at every- thing from marine snow (carbon-carrying particles that sink into deeper ocean layers) to spring upwelling and summer stratification to species richness (total species in a sample) and surface warming.

“Dynamic interactions between these marine microorganisms lie at the heart of the carbon cycle,” the researcher says. “But progress toward understanding these interactions has been slow to emerge because of the complexity of microbial community ecology.”

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

This map of the Endurance Array off the Northwest coast shows mooring sites planned at water depths of 25, 80 and 500 meters in two lines — one off Newport, Oregon, and the other off Gray's Harbor, Washington. Gliders will provide additional cross-shelf sampling. (Map courtesy of the Ocean Observatories Initiative's implementing organizations)

For more than half a century, oceanographers have ventured out of Newport to measure, probe and monitor the Pacific Ocean off the central Oregon Coast. And since the 1950s, these seafaring researchers have recorded about 4,000 “profiles” of the near-shore waters — surface to bottom measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels that begin to tell us how the world’s largest ocean influences everything from our weather to fisheries.

Then in 2005, Oregon State University scientists tested a prototype undersea glider that could be programmed to patrol beneath the ocean surface and collect many of the same measurements. At the time, the scientists predicted that these gliders could revolutionize the study of the world’s oceans.

Their vision is rapidly becoming a reality.

In the past five years, a fleet of gliders operated by OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences has covered more than 43,000 kilometers, a distance that would more than circumnavigate the globe. Even more striking is the productivity of the sleek, torpedo-like machines. In those five years, the gliders have recorded more than 156,000 oceanic profiles, almost 40 times what six decades of shipboard studies have provided.

“That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it,” says Jack Barth, a professor of oceanography and one of OSU’s glider pioneers. “Each year alone, we log more profiles than have ever been recorded via ship off Newport. And the beauty of gliders is that the data is continual. They record 24 hours a day, regardless of the weather or how rough the sea is.”

Underwater vehicles are not new to research, but the autonomous gliders used by OSU differ from earlier versions because they lack tethers or propellers — meaning they don’t have to be accompanied by a ship. The gliders instead are driven by buoyancy changes, which lessen the overall energy consumption. By displacing seawater, the gliders increase their volume and become more buoyant. Or they can decrease their volume and become heavier, sinking lower in the water. Small wings on the gliders translate some of that vertical motion into forward motion.

The machines can be programmed to run for three to five weeks, from near-shore to the continental slope, and every six hours they rise to the surface and transmit data to OSU computers via satellite. The data they collect informs scientists on conditions including El Niño and La Niña, hypoxia (low oxygen) and resulting “dead zones” and harmful algal blooms.

Expanding the Fleet

Barth and fellow OSU oceanographer Kipp Shearman, together with their team of faculty research assistants and graduate students, operate a fleet of nine gliders. Six are Slocum gliders, manufactured by Teledyne Webb Research of Falmouth, Massachusetts, and based on the original prototype tested in 2005. Three are new Seagliders developed at the University of Washington. The Slocums can go as deep as 200 meters below the surface; the newer Seagliders can explore the ocean down to 1,000 meters and stay out for months.

Each glider costs between $100,000 and $200,000, so the OSU fleet is an impressive resource that is about to get much better.

Three years ago, OSU was selected as one of the lead institutions for the $387 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the world’s oceans and their relationship to climate variability. One component of that project is to create a coastal observatory off the Northwest coast that will use moorings, buoys and gliders to better observe and monitor the ocean.

While engineers are still designing the hardware and instrumentation for the moorings, OSU in 2012 will deploy six new gliders — plus an additional half-dozen gliders on shore to be rotated into the observation array — bringing the total fleet to 21. And the new gliders will include instrumentation that has piqued the interest of ecologists, the fishing industry and others.

“In addition to the core instrumentation, these new gliders will be able to use acoustics to measure water velocity,” Barth adds. “For the first time, we will be able to nearly simultaneously map ocean currents – from the surface to the bottom of the ocean – and detect just where these underwater ‘rivers’ run.”

Public Access to Data

Data from the Ocean Observatories Initiative will be available as they are being collected and shared with researchers and the public alike.

“The fishermen we’ve talked to are intensely interested in the data we will generate,” he says. “Crabbers don’t want to put their pots into areas that have strong bottom currents, nor do trawlers want to contend with strong drifts. The findings will also be important for ecologists studying larval dispersal of marine animals.”

Technology is advancing so rapidly, Barth says, that the gliders will carry new instruments as early as the next year or two. “We’re putting hydrophones onto the moorings, for example, and there’s no reason why we can’t put them onto the gliders and listen for marine mammals or fish that have been tagged with transmitters.”

OSU’s fleet of 21 gliders will enable Barth, Shearman, scientific colleagues and the public to continually monitor five east-west transects — off the northwest tip of Washington, Gray’s Harbor, Cape Mears, Newport, and Coos Bay — while rotating the machines for calibration, maintenance and battery charging. The newest gliders will allow them to run a north-south pattern about 150 kilometers off the coast and, with separate NOAA funding, begin a new east-west transect off Crescent City, California.

“We’ve been doing the Newport sector for five years now,” Barth says, “and we’ve seen things we’ve never seen before, from the influence of coastal rivers, to details about hypoxia. It’s become one of the most well-studied ocean regions on Earth. Now we’ll be able to get similar coverage up and down the coast, from the California border to Vancouver Island.

“It will be,” he added, “revolutionary.”

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See a March 23, 2011 story about deployment of new Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys off Newport, Ore. and Grays Harbor, Wash.

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

Click on the orange text below to see the animations.

Top view: Top view of data from a multibeam sonar observations of dolphin foraging. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three-dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. Isosurfaces of prey scattering strength identified from spatial statistics are shown in purple with lighter colors representing higher scattering. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

Side view: Side view of data from a multibeam sonar observation of a foraging dolphins. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three-dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. Blue dots show dolphins behind the center of the circle and yellow represent dolphins in front of this plane. Isosurfaces of prey scattering strength identified from spatial statistics are shown in purple with lighter colors representing higher scattering. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

3-d view: Dolphin positions recorded from a multibeam sonar observation of a foraging dolphin group. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three- dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

Kelly Benoit-Bird (Photo: Craig Mitchelldyer, Getty Images for the McArthur Foundation)

Kelly Benoit-Bird studies ocean organisms smaller than a microchip and bigger than a luxury motor home — the tiniest crustaceans to the mightiest cetaceans. In effect, she studies just about anything that swims or drifts in the sea: copepods and krill, diatoms and dinoflagellates, siphonophores and salps, spinner dolphins and Humboldt squid, Pacific sardines and sperm whales. Not only is she unbounded by species classifications, she also is unrestrained by the dimensions of time and space. What drives her research is, indeed, the traversing of those very dimensions by animals and plants in search of survival.

As a pelagic (open-ocean) ecologist, Benoit-Bird investigates the intricate interactions among predators and prey that take place day and night, full moon to new moon, summer to winter, El Niño to La Niña in Earth’s vast oceans.

“Despite the apparent variety of the ongoing research projects in my lab, all of our research aims to understand the role of spatial and temporal patterns in ecological processes on spatial scales ranging from sub-meter to hundreds of kilometers, at temporal scales of minutes to years, and over a range of animal size from zooplankton to great whales,” Benoit-Bird explains on her webpage for Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

The challenge is almost beyond imagining. Within the world’s 326 million cubic miles of seawater, most species interactions happen where humans cannot witness them. Besides, as Benoit-Bird points out, the marine environment is in constant motion. On land, plants hold fast to the ground. Forests may be complex ecosystems to study, but at least they stay put. At sea, plants drift on tides and currents, rising and falling in the water column with the sun and the moon and the seasons.

“In the ocean, plants are incredibly small, have very little structure and move all over the place — sometimes even actively,” the researcher says. “Some of the plants can swim.”

To compensate, Benoit-Bird extends her senses. She devises novel acoustic and optical technologies that collect data remotely, giving scientists a virtual front-row seat on some of nature’s most mysterious processes. Her innovations are opening the world’s oceans to human understanding in ways never before possible. In 2010, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognized her pioneering work with a prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship — popularly known as a “Genius Award.”

Life in Layers

Instead of being like a big pot of soup with its ingredients evenly mixed, the ocean is more like a big blue torte with dense congregations of organisms layered vertically, Benoit-Bird and other oceanographers have learned in recent years. In coastal waters across the planet, scientists have discovered that plankton, both in its plant and animal forms, coalesce into layers two or three feet thick, sometimes extending for miles horizontally. These “thin layers” of tiny life forms — which Benoit-Bird calls “great smorgasbords of food”
— likely hold critical clues to how ocean ecosystems work.

“While thin layers are just beginning to be investigated,” Benoit- Bird writes in a recent issue of Continental Shelf Research, “thin layers are likely to be important for a variety of biological processes, including growth rates, reproductive success, grazing, predator-prey encounters, nutrient uptake and cycling rates, as well as toxin production.”

To get inside those mysteries from the deck of a research vessel, Benoit- Bird has been developing a whole new generation of tools. She uses sonar technologies to collect acoustical data that are then fed into computers for analysis. To broaden their options, she and her collaborators have experimented with linking disparate gear types, such as video cameras and echosounders (devices that locate layers and schools of organisms by sending out pulses of sound waves). They’ve designed new uses for old standbys, like retrofitting a remotely operated vehicle (“a little tethered robot”) to find and track plankton layers by following water density. They’ve invented a new kind of sonar to study the distribution of individual zooplankton inside thin layers.

Her ambitious research goals, supported by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, necessarily push her toward more expansive technologies.

“My perspective is that we shouldn’t be limited by the tools we have,” she says. “I like to think about the question first and figure out how to address it later. It may mean we have to develop a new tool or a new way of analyzing data or a new way of deploying instruments to get at the questions we’re interested in.”

A “Spatial Ballet”

Computer animations created from recent acoustical studies show fish diving through plankton layers, gobbling holes in the tightly packed, food-rich patches. Another animation shows spinner dolphins swimming in tight formation to corral layers of lanternfish during coopera- tive feeding.

“The emerging picture is one of an incalculably complex, finely tuned, and delicate interaction between predators and prey, chemistry and light, currents and water column, night and day,” writes author Julia Whitty in a recent Mother Jones article featuring Benoit-Bird. “Some semblance of this spatial ballet, played in weightless three-dimensional darkness, has likely been part of the oceans since the oceans were brought to life: layers of life gathering in extremely high densities to feed or to avoid being eaten.”

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

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.

"Fishermen are an extremely curious group. That's their nature. And they have a hell of a lot of knowledge," says Jeff Feldner (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Fishing is hard enough. The weather, changing ocean conditions and the fickleness of fish make it tough to track your quarry let alone catch them. Now competition for space in the ocean — an oxymoron in an environment defined by its seemingly limitless expanse — poses new concerns along the West Coast. In the future, fishermen will jostle with wave energy parks, marine reserves and aquaculture for space to troll for shrimp, drop crab pots or cast lines for rockfish.

Jeff Feldner knows what’s at stake: individual livelihoods, coastal communities and the resources that support them. The Newport-based Oregon Sea Grant Extension educator bought his first fishing boat in 1973. A few years earlier, on the lookout for a career change (he has a chemical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota), he had come to Newport at the invitation of a salmon fisherman. After a day at sea, he was hooked. “I‘ve been fishing forever,” he says, as though life began the moment he crossed the Yaquina River Bar into the Pacific.

Feldner still fishes part-time, processes his catch in a cooperatively owned South Beach packing plant and tests consumer response to new marketing methods (see how researchers are creating the basis for a sustainable seafood industry at Pacific Fish Trax). He has always kept an eye on the bigger issues that define the industry. Tensions over gear restrictions, by-catch (the non-targeted fish that come up in nets) and closed seasons drove him to serve a nine-year stint on the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission. Now, he is one of 15 Sea Grant specialists and educators from Brookings to Astoria, who work with individuals and with community organizations to address coastal issues through dialog and collaborative science.

“We are the go-between between the seafood industry and fishery science or fishery management,” says Feldner. He and his Sea Grant colleagues Kaety Hildenbrand, Flaxen Conway, Jamie Doyle and others help community groups participate in decision-making processes on topics such as marine reserves and wave energy. In 2010, they helped facilitate a conference among scientists and the fishing industry on another contentious topic, off-shore aquaculture. They are addressing invasive species that upset coastal ecosystems and hazards such as eroding shorelines and tsunami risks.

“Sea Grant Extension distinguishes itself in public engagement,” says Dave Hansen, Extension program leader based in Corvallis. “The marine reserves process is a good example, where, in a pretty hot political and emotional situation, we tried to be the convener that everybody could trust, that didn’t have a secret agenda.”

In 2008, Feldner and former Sea Grant Extension agent Ginny Goblirsch coordinated a series of eight coast-wide “listening and learning” sessions on marine reserves. “When the process ended, the governor changed course,” says Feldner, “slowed down the process,  basically said it was going to take at least another two years, and put in place a process to ensure more community based input – essentially moving more toward a bottom-up process rather than a top-down one.”

Oregon’s tradition of strong community participation in resource management has drawn national attention, says Hansen, who came to Sea Grant in 2010 from Delaware. “There is a tremendous amount of community interest in decisions here. Nothing just slides through,” he adds. “People seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on.”

And new developments in science and technology will continue to fuel that interest. Tomorrow’s fishermen will have access to more accurate information about fish stocks, ocean conditions and markets, says Feldner. They’ll be able to harvest more efficiently, protect threatened species and offer consumers a high-quality local product at the same time. “There’s nothing static in fishing,” he says.

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

Hatfield Marine Science Center, Newport, Oregon

Critical Mass

350 OSU faculty engage in marine research and outreach activities.

120 OSU and 180 state and federal researchers collaborate on ocean science at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

Research Grants

Nearly $100 million in 2008-09, or 37 percent of OSU research expenditures, was directly tied to marine-related issues.

Education

828 M.S. and 381 Ph.D. degrees have been awarded in ocean and coastal sciences since 1959, complementing marine science options for undergraduates.

Hatfield Marine Science Center

On a 49-acre campus, HMSC supports research in a wide range of ocean sciences.
More than 150,000 people view displays and live-animal touch tanks in the Visitor Center annually.

Oregon Sea Grant

Among the nation’s 32 Sea Grant programs, external reviewers consistently rate Oregon Sea Grant as among the top three.

R/V Wecoma, owned by the National Science Foundation, stationed at OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center.

Ocean-Going Research Vessels

R/V Wecoma, 185 feet long, 1,100 long tons in normal operations
R/V Pacific Storm, 85 feet long, 153 tons gross
R/V Elakha, 54 feet long, range of 575 miles

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