Scott Baker was featured in "The Cove"

In the seaside village of Taiji, Japan, there’s a jarring juxtaposition: Jolly-looking tour buses shaped like happy dolphins putter up and down the streets by day, while by night fishermen secretly slaughter hundreds of panic-stricken dolphins in a nearby inlet and sell them as meat.

This sinister irony permeates the Academy Award-winning movie, The Cove, produced by the Ocean Preservation Society. Scientific adviser and cast member Scott Baker is delighted by the accolades, not because they widen his fame outside science circles but because recognition from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the Sundance Film Festival means broader exposure for the movie, which critics have characterized as an “eco-thriller.” That, in turn, means more international pressure to end the carnage.

“There has been tremendous resistance to the movie in Japan,” says Baker, a leader in international efforts to uncover black-market trade in products from protected species of whales and dolphins. “The Tokyo International Film Festival initially turned down the film, but under pressure from American actors like Ben Stiller, they agreed to allow one showing outside the formal festival. The international press was relegated to the back of the auditorium.”

Baker, associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, acts as the film’s scientific voice on dolphin biology and the health risks to humans who eat dolphin meat, which is high in mercury (mercury levels are concentrated in organisms that are, like dolphins, high up in the food chain). As the world’s first scientist to use DNA to identify whale species being butchered for human consumption, Baker appears in the movie both as an expert “talking head” and as a DNA detective, hunkered over a portable genetics lab in a Tokyo hotel testing samples purchased, covertly, in Japanese fish markets.

“We spent days filming in that hotel room — a room not much bigger than my office,” recalls Baker. He describes director Louie Psihoyos as “visionary but meticulous,” shooting “tons of film” to tell the story of the annual killing of more than 1,200 dolphins in Taiji.

Baker’s science-based scenes of DNA identification and his comments on the threat of mercury contamination in dolphin meat are a counterpoint to the movie’s main storyline: An intrepid team of cinematographers and activists (including the dolphin trainer of the 1960s TV series Flipper), wearing camouflage and night-vision goggles, risk arrest and even death to capture video and underwater acoustics during the slaughter.

Besides being a gripping piece of filmmaking, the movie highlights a heartbreaking issue of massive proportions: the international black market in wildlife. From elephant tusks and rhino horns to bighorn sheep antlers and panther pelts, the illegal trade in endangered animals is worth an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion a year worldwide. Cetaceans are lucrative commodities in that grisly enterprise. In Japan or Korea, for instance, a whale killed in coastal fishing nets can sell for more than $100,000 wholesale. Dolphins, too, bring in fat cash: Aquariums pay $150,000 for a live animal.

But it’s the dead ones that most worry Baker, a longtime delegate to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Despite the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on whaling, Japan, Korea, Iceland and Norway continue the hunt, either under the guise of science or under an “objection” (basically, a rejection of the commission’s authority to regulate whaling). Loopholes in the commission’s 1986 moratorium, it turns out, are big enough for a whale to swim through — and die in. A “scientific whaling” loophole allows a limited number of whales to be killed for research and the remains to be sold. A “bycatch whaling” loophole allows fishermen to sell whales and dolphins that become entangled in fishing nets. Hundreds of protected animals die unreported each year because of the laxity of IWC rules and regs, Baker says. “The continued sale of ‘legal’ whale products acts as a cover for other illegal, unreported and undocumented hunting,” he argues.

Still, whales are afforded at least some measure of protection by the IWC. Dolphins, on the other hand, have none at all from the IWC or other international conventions (although many individual nations have outlawed dolphin killing).

Forensic genetics is a potent weapon in the fight to save wildlife. Baker’s technique — a method of quickly amplifying segments of DNA called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is the same one used by crime-scene investigators to match “perps” to body fluids, hair and other tissue they leave behind. PCR is used for all sorts of investigations, from nabbing moose poachers to detecting cystic fibrosis in eight-celled human embryos. Indeed, Baker and his Ph.D. student Merel Dalebout were using PCR in 2002 when they discovered a new species of beaked whale, the first new whale species in 15 years and the first to be described primarily by DNA.

Now, with help from the fishing industry, hydrographic contractors (David Evans and Associates and Fugro), the State of Oregon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chris Goldfinger is leading a $7.3 million mapping project that will pinpoint rocky reefs, depressions and navigational hazards. The Oregon State University associate professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences says the new images will help fishermen, scientists and coastal managers who need to manage marine habitats and to develop better tsunami models.

Over the next two years, two vessels out of Newport — OSU’s Pacific Storm, captained by Bob Pedro, and the Michele Ann, captained by Bob Eder and Geogon Lapham — will help researchers collect detailed images over more than 34 percent of the seafloor out to the state’s three-mile limit. The project will expand existing coverage with a half-meter resolution, including 75 percent of rocky reefs, depressions and boulders.

Goldfinger led an earlier effort to map Oregon’s territorial sea, using existing data on seafloor habitats identified in thousands of bottom samples and soundings. The map and many other marine spatial layers are available online. New products from this project will be distributed through the same Web site.

For more about the mapping project, see this OSU news release:

New Funds Will Help Create Oregon’s Most  Accurate Seafloor Mapping System, August 12, 2009

To support ocean research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to lower average winter precipitation in Northwestern Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

You can’t just walk into the data center in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). The sign on the door says you need a pass card. There should be another sign too: Caution, planetary experiments in progress. Inside, computer clusters churn 24/7, spinning out information about ocean currents, winds, air temperatures, ice sheets and flows of energy. Lights blink and fans drone as they cool the machines that run calculations on command from scientists who may be just down the hall or on another continent. In this case, proximity doesn’t matter.

Andreas Schmittner‘s office is a 30-second walk from the data center, but the CEOAS assistant professor doesn’t have to go there to check on his experiments. From his desk, he logs on to his Linux computer cluster at the center and reviews the status of 20 or more projects that he may have running simultaneously.

Schmittner is an oceanographer who devotes himself to climate models, those mathematical descriptions of the real world that allow scientists to envision possible sea levels, ice sheets and temperature and precipitation patterns on a warmer planet. Grounded in physics and tested against real data from the past, climate models range from the simple to the complex. Think of them as alternative futures.

“Models should be regarded as 
tools to understand the climate system better and to address research questions,” says Schmittner. “Depending on the research question you have, you use different tools. Just like in your workshop, if you need to screw something down, you don’t need a wrench. You use a screwdriver.”

In short, models have become the high-tech workhorses of climate science. Scientists rely on them to consider how coastal communities, food and water supplies, forests and weather would fare on a changing Earth.

More than 20 years ago, OSU researchers created models to study global atmospheric circulation and the Pacific Ocean system known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Today’s models are more sophisticated and the goals more ambitious: to make them more realistic (aligned with actual climate data), to incorporate all significant processes and to identify the uncertainties that inevitably affect modeling outcomes.

With better models come results that illuminate how the world may change in coming decades. In a report published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles that generated headlines in 2008, Schmittner showed that even if greenhouse gas emissions increase gradually until 2100 and are then virtually eliminated by 2300, the planet would continue to warm for the next 200 years or more.

In 2005, he and colleagues in Europe and North America reported that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (now about 35 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution) could affect the North Atlantic with steep plankton declines and a 25 percent slowdown in currents that carry heat toward Europe. Actual observations based on water temperature and salinity suggest that currents may actually be slowing, but scientists are still debating what the data mean. “We have to get more observational data and improve our models,” Schmittner told the BBC.

An Uncertain Future

Moderate increases in average winter temperatures occur in Washington and Oregon when carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Future scenarios amount to potential conditions in a changing world, not to firm predictions. “We can’t say exactly how much warmer the climate is going to be in 50 years,” says Karen Shell, an assistant professor in CEOAS. “Part of that is uncertainty in the science and how we translate the science into the models. You can’t take every single cloud and put it into a model. We don’t have the computational resources to do that.”

Shell came to OSU in 2008 from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. She studies variations among the two dozen or so global circulation models used by the international climate science community. In the course of her work, she downloads so much data that she has generated calls from OSU network technicians. “They were concerned that my computer had been infected by a virus,” she says.

Data from modeling runs and from the field (including satellites, ocean buoys and monitoring stations on the polar ice sheets) are a modeler’s bread and butter. They contain clues about what drives the climate system over long periods of time. Shell and her colleagues analyze how models treat factors such as solar energy flows at the top of the atmosphere (how energy is absorbed and reflected) and the distribution of atmospheric water vapor from the equator to the poles.

“If you can figure out what’s causing the spread (among model results) and link that to satellite data, you can get clues about cause and effect,” says Shell. “That’s how you make progress. It’s slow progress, but it has to be done.

“I love what I do,” she adds, noting that model results provide important information for responding to the likely consequences of climate change.

Bringing It Home

Less summer precipitation in Eastern Washington and parts of Oregon could occur if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Over the past two decades, models have improved in both scope (how many physical and biological processes they incorporate) and resolution (the grid or spatial density of a region). They enable researchers to look at what might be in store for Klamath Basin water supplies or for forest fire risks in the western United States. Hydrologist Steve Hostetler has worked on such regional issues for about 20 years for the U.S. Geological Survey. The courtesy professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences continues to work on current and past climate conditions with colleagues at the USGS, OSU and the University of Oregon.

“It’s very collaborative with lots of different ways of looking at things, lots of different types of expertise. I seldom do things on my own,” he says.

In 2006, the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program supported this network with five-year grants totaling $3.3 million to OSU and partners at UO and the University of Minnesota. The goal is to develop a detailed picture of climate change from ocean records, ice core samples, terrestrial cave formations and global climate models.

In the late 1980s, Hostetler was doing fieldwork for the USGS when he became interested in paleoclimate, focusing on trends over the last 50,000 years. Since then, he has used the results of global and regional atmospheric models to estimate how climate influences water balances and fire frequency in the West.

For the Klamath Basin, modeling can improve the accuracy of multi-year evaporation estimates, Hostetler has reported. Evaporation is critical for determining how much water is available from year to year. Under a changing climate, accurate predictions will be necessary for resolving the region’s legendary water disputes.

In 2006, Hostetler and two USGS scientists co-authored the Atlas of Climatic Controls of Wildfire in the Western United States. For the period 1980-2000, their maps show how fires were closely linked with monthly water and energy balances in eight ecoregions, including the coastal and interior Pacific Northwest. Their report could lead to better predictions of wildfire risk.

“A lot of modeling is really mundane, boring stuff. But when you complete something and can look at the results and interpret what’s going on, that’s the payoff. These maps are the payoff,” Hostetler says.

Mining the Data

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased summer temperatures across Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Behind the doors at the CEOAS data center are the information systems that make such results possible. “We have the networking, computational and storage infrastructure to move large amounts of data,” says manager Chuck Sears, who salts conversation with talk of “terabytes” (one terabyte equals a million million data points) and “arrays” (large tables of data).

Models aren’t the center’s only source of data. Continuous streams of information from satellites, ocean buoys and other monitoring systems flow into the center’s databanks, enabling scientists to test and to refine their models. And since maps and other visual displays enhance communication among scientific teams and with the public, the center offers state-of-the-art visualization systems as well.

“We’ve created a production studio,” says Sears, “and we’ve enabled 2,000 different devices to be connected outside the center, as if they were in the center. These devices range from desktop computers to handheld devices such as iPhones.”

Increasingly, collaborative climate science is being done in remote offices and at meetings and other locations, not on the premises of computing centers. “Ultimately you have to get all of those data out for real work,” says Mark Abbott, dean of CEOAS and member of the National Science Board. “It’s going to be personalized and local. You’ll be able to get to it everywhere. The key is the balance between what’s in the center and what’s out on your desktop, your PDA (personal desktop assistant) or what you have in your home.”

Access to a variety of such devices allows scientists at CEOAS to act like symphony conductors, Abbott adds, orchestrating the different tools they need. “If you’re a real woodwinds expert, you just use that, but if you really want to use some other instruments, you can do that too.

“Supercomputer centers do great things,” he adds, “but the excitement is out on the edges,” where scientific teams are sharpening our views of a changing planet.

For more about climate modeling at OSU:

Philip Mote to Lead Oregon’s New Climate Research Institute, January 6, 2009

New Study: Long-Term Global Warming May be Tough to Reverse, February 25, 2008

Research Team to Explore Past Climate by Looking for Triggers to Rapid Change, June 28, 2006

Atlantic Current Shutdown Could Disrupt Global Ocean Food Chain, April 5, 2005

To support research in the College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

The rockfish tank captivates Newport first-grader and oceanography buff Noah Goodwin-Rice during a visit to the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (Photo: Jim Folts)

From their oceanfront timeshare in Newport, Oregon, Jerry and Diane Plante were enjoying the view one September morning when they spotted an unusual vessel. Peering seaward through their high-powered binoculars, the retirees could make out a black trawler named Pacific Storm. Tethered to it was a yellow, donut-shaped buoy. Poking out of the buoy was some kind of cylindrical shaft.

Intrigued, the Plantes watched and wondered as the boat and buoy bobbed on the distant swells for four days. “We couldn’t figure out what they were doing,” says Jerry, a former fraud investigator from Sherwood, Oregon. Adds Diane, a retired schoolteacher: “I don’t know why we thought the boat was so fascinating, but we did.”

Then, soon after the mysterious boat and buoy disappeared from their picture window, they happened to spot the Pacific Storm tied up near the Yaquina Bay Bridge. Excited, they buttonholed a man working on the dock behind a sign reading “authorized personnel only.” He told them they had been armchair witnesses to a floating wave-energy experiment conducted by OSU researchers. He was a member of the science team and suggested they could learn more at the nearby Hatfield Marine Science Center. And that’s how the curious couple wound up in the Visitor Center raptly studying an exhibit about OSU’s pioneering work in wave energy, oblivious to crowds of school kids jostling around them.

Jerry and Diane Plante are what social scientists these days call “free-choice learners.”

Choosing To Learn

“Much of what we learn, we learn because we want to, because events in our lives intrinsically motivate us to find out more,” explain Lynn Dierking and John Falk, Oregon Sea Grant professors in OSU’s Science and Mathematics Education Department in the College of Science. “Under these conditions, we learn not only what we want, but also where, when, and with whom we want. This is free-choice learning, learning that is guided by learners’ needs and interests – the learning that people engage in throughout their lives to find out more about what is useful, compelling, or just plain interesting to them. The Plantes are great examples of free-choice learners in action.”

Free-choice learning, a term coined a decade ago by Falk and Dierking, is a new addition to OSU’s graduate degree programs and research agenda in science and math education. The initiative launched by Sea Grant and the College of Science is designed both to teach and to study how people learn – particularly about science and math – outside formal school settings. Such learning is “incremental” (gathered in bits and pieces, here and there) and “idiosyncratic” (filtered through the learner’s one-of-a-kind lens), research tells us. Driven by intellectual curiosities and practical needs for information, most science and math learning happens not as we sit in a classroom, but as we explore the world around us.

Unique in the United States, OSU’s Free-Choice Science and Mathematics Learning program gives graduate students a theoretical grounding in the cultural, social and physical contexts that influence learning. Kids and adults alike build knowledge actively using their highly individualized prior knowledge and experience, the scholars say. With this “constructivist” theory as a foundation, the researchers are designing ways to enhance free-choice learning environments such as museums, science centers and Boys and Girls clubs. Along the way, they hope to forge stronger links among the myriad players in education’s “invisible free-choice learning infrastructure,” a web of institutions and information sources that includes zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, national parks, natural history museums, Web sites, TV shows and after-school programs. Other research is delving into how this infrastructure intersects with schools, universities and workplaces.

“Research strongly suggests that the more the separate influential spheres of family, school, work and elective learning overlap in people’s lives, the more likely people are to become successful lifelong learners,” note Falk and Dierking, international leaders in this new discipline. In short, it’s the synergy among spheres that counts.

Before coming to Oregon State, Falk founded and directed the Institute for Learning Innovation in Annapolis, Maryland, a private, nonprofit organization devoted to understanding and facilitating free-choice learning. Dierking was the institute’s associate director.

I’ve been fortunate to work with a group of cetacean scientists for five years and have seen quite a few mysteries explained, but each explanation gives instant rise to at least one new question, and usually more. That’s one of the greatest frustrations, and the greatest pleasures, of working in a scientific field.

And there’s another great pleasure as well: sharing knowledge with others. This one, I believe, is the true end goal of science. It’s not just about discovery; it’s about dissemination. Knowledge is nothing if it’s not communicated.

The Marine Mammal Program’s annual Baja Expedition is about all these things: discovery, understanding, sharing. It’s a rare opportunity for people of all backgrounds to learn, answer questions and ask new ones. Our passengers can see elephant seal pups roll over each other and teach themselves to swim, watch juvenile California sea lions make a beeline toward a boat because they’re curious about us and touch a whale because that whale chooses to be touched. As a staff member of these expeditions, I find it just as much fun to watch others make these discoveries as it was to make them myself.

One of the questions I’m often asked on this trip is, do I ever get jaded? Am I tired of it yet, seeing the same things each year? The quick answer is, no way. The longer answer takes the form of a short story.

Our time in San Ignacio Lagoon includes a trip to a particular beach that I adore. It’s located at the north entrance to the lagoon and is literally covered in places with shells and bones. Most of our passengers take great delight in beachcombing this area and quickly spread out as they wander in pursuit of that next interesting or beautiful thing. But I usually sit. Because if we can get to this beach at the right time of day, an amazing thing happens: the wind dies down, the lagoon calms and sound carries. So if I can find a quiet spot to just sit and listen, I can hear whales breathing. I hear them all over the lagoon. Some are close to me; others can be over a mile away — far enough that I see the blow a half second before I hear it.

There’s only one word to describe what it’s like to sit in the sun, on a spectacular beach in a pristine environment, and listen to whales breathe. Magic.

Their project could lead to an early warning system for coastal managers, health officials and commercial and recreational fishers. At present, shellfish closures are based on regular testing by the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Peter Strutton of the OSU College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and Michelle Wood of the University of Oregon Department of Biology are leading the project with funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Oceans and Human Health Initiative.

They believe that certain areas, including Heceta Bank off the central Oregon coast, may act as “incubators” for generating the blooms of Pseudonitzschia, a phytoplankton species that produces toxic domoic acid. Shellfish that feed on the plankton accumulate the toxin in their tissues.

“Every spring there is an algal bloom in the Pacific from San Diego, Calif., to Vancouver, B.C.,” Strutton says. “Often one species of phytoplankton will dominate, and we need to identify when it is Pseudonitzschia so we can create an early warning system.”

Key to the project is understanding Pseudonitzschia’s response to changing ocean conditions and how those conditions can be detected by satellites. The researchers have combed through data over the last 10 years from the Oregon shellfish monitoring program. They are comparing recorded levels of toxicity in razor clams, mussels and other shellfish with archival satellite data showing sea surface temperatures and “ocean color” — chlorophyll levels and rates of fluorescence.

They hope to find a combination of physical and optical signatures for potential blooms. During the next two years they will sample those areas at peak times to measure phytoplankton abundance and toxicity levels.

Wood is also affiliated with the OSU Cooperative Institute for Oceanographic Satellite Studies.

Bruce Mate, OSU Professor of Fisheries and Wildlife, Oceanography
Hatfield Marine Science Center

He was a Midwest kid, a self-described “technical nerd” who hung out with ham-radio buffs and fell in love with a girl who played flute to his percussion in the school band. Before he headed to Oregon with his bride, Mary Lou, to become a marine biologist, Bruce Mate had never laid eyes on an ocean. He had, however, seen a pickled sea urchin. That’s because a gifted biology teacher named Mr. Barker, hell-bent on hooking his skeptical sophomores, would order exotic marine specimens from Carolina Biological Supply. Another of Mate’s role models was ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau.

Mate’s interest in intertidal invertebrates quickly got eclipsed, however, during his first graduate seminar when UCLA marine mammal expert George Bartholomew revealed that the migratory habits of sea lions were a mystery. Mate headed straight to the library to find out for himself. After scouring the literature, he was astonished to learn it was true. The indefatigable graduate student took this knowledge gap as a personal challenge. Armed with a pre-doctoral fellowship from the National Science Foundation, he made marine mammal history by figuring out the sea lions’ migration patterns.

After finishing his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Oregon, he secured funds from the newly formed U.S. Marine Mammal Commission to do the first range-wide survey of pinnipeds on the West Coast. Every month for a year, Mate would fly a single-engine Cessna with his left hand, while holding a camera out the window with his right. (The single-lens-reflex Canon F-1, with its telephoto lens, bulk film pack and motor drive, weighed 12 pounds.) Back in Newport, he processed the film and “counted the nose of every seal and sea lion” from British Columbia to Mazatlan, Mexico.

That was 30 years ago. He’s been tracking the movements of pinnipeds and cetaceans (with Mary Lou at his side) ever since joining the OSU faculty in 1973. Today, he holds the directorship and endowed chair of the Marine Mammal Program. Here are a few highlights of a career that has earned him international acclaim:

General Research Interests

Marine mammals:

• Critical habitat identification for endangered whales, population assessment, behavior (mating, feeding), seasonal migration
• Marine mammal competition with fisheries and aquaculture
• Development of high-tech research tools including satellite-monitored radio tags

Selected Scientific Committees and Professional Services

• Scientific adviser to U.S. Marine Mammal Commission (10 years, most recently 1995-2000)
• International Whaling Commission, (invited expert five years, most recently 2006) Union for the Conservation of Nature, Species Survival Commission
• Member of International Scientific Advisory Committee to Mexican Minister for the Environment on Industrial Development Proposals for Gray Whale winter reproductive habitat (1996-2000)
• Society for Marine Mammalogy, founding Secretary (1982-1988) and founding Treasurer (1982-1992)

Recent Research

Identification of migratory routes and habitats of large whales:

• Right whales in the North Atlantic(2000) and South Atlantic (2001)
• Sperm whales in the Gulf of Mexico (2001-present)
• Blue whales off southern California (1998-01, 2004-5), Mexico (2001-2), and Chile (2004)
• Humpback whales off Hawaii (1995-2000), Southeast Alaska (1997), Gabon, Africa (2002), Mexico (2003) and California (2004-5)
• Fin whales in the Sea of Cortez (2001), Mediterranean Sea (2003, 2005) and California (2004)
• Gray whales off Mexico, tracked to Russian high Arctic (2005)

Awards

• Marine Mammal Investigator of the Year, Office of Naval Research, 2001
• Marine Conservationist of the Year, Long Beach Aquarium, 2000