02/16/03

DENVER -- A prominent Oregon scientist is calling for the nation to overhaul its "hodgepodge" of policies in managing its coastal waters.

Speaking Saturday at an international science meeting, Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist at Oregon State University, said the country's ocean regulations and practices are outdated and have not kept up with advances in scientific understanding.

"Our policies retain the old views that oceans are endlessly bountiful and infinitely resilient, but current scientific knowledge suggests otherwise," said Lubchenco, an OSU distinguished professor of zoology, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The United States has maintained a view of the ocean as "a vast frontier" for the past 30 years, Lubchenco said, with laws and regulations enacted on "a crisis by crisis, sector by sector basis." She said the nation has seriously underinvested in understanding how oceans work, which would pay off with new policies that would better protect coastal ecosystems.

A specialist in intertidal zones, Lubchenco serves on the Pew Oceans Commission, which has been studying the nation's ocean policies for more than two years. The panel will release its recommendations to Congress on April 9 on how the United States can better manage its coastal oceans.

Lubchenco was one of several scientists who reported their findings Saturday in a symposium, "Opening the Black Box: Understanding Ecosystem Dynamics in Coastal Oceans." The scientists are with the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, which consists of researchers from OSU, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California at Santa Cruz and Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station.

Lubchenco serves as principal investigator for the consortium, which studies the biological and chemical processes along the Oregon, Washington and California coasts. It was established three years ago with a $17.7 million grant from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The scientists, who reported the first findings of their research, pointed out that more than half of Americans live on or near coastal areas, which also are home to most marine species. Stephen R. Palumbi, a biology professor at Stanford, reported that the researchers have found that the oceans are not "just one big neighborhood, but are chopped up into smaller ones. In fact, every bit of coastline might be a small neighborhood that we can manage and try to preserve on its own."

For example, barnacle populations vary widely along the West Coast, said Mark W. Denny, a professor of marine sciences at Stanford. "If you put little bare plastic or ceramic plates down in the intertidal zone in Oregon and come back a couple of weeks later, the plates are likely to be covered with barnacles," Denny said. But when the same experiment was done along California's Monterey Bay, only a few barnacles were found.

Palumbi and his colleagues are using genetics to determine whether newborn marine organisms travel long distances or stay close to home. They are examining different populations of Balanus glandula, a common barnacle found along the West Coast, to find out whether barnacles in Oregon, Washington and California might have been born hundreds of miles away.

With DNA analyses, they found that the barnacle larvae stay close to where they were spawned and aren't carried far by the coast's prevailing California Current, a finding that ran counter to what they had assumed was going on.

Palumbi said this and other findings indicate that "if we're going to manage the ocean, it's really going to be on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis" rather than regionally. He added that because the neighborhoods exist, "it's possible for there to be local benefits, and that's one of the things that will make a big difference in getting local communities to begin protecting chunks of the sea."

Margaret McManus, an assistant professor of ocean sciences at UC Santa Cruz, reported on research on the dispersal of rockfish larvae in the open ocean and their eventual return as juveniles to their nearshore habitat. More than 60 species of rockfish live along the West Coast, but little has been known about larvae movements. As many species have declined dramatically in recent years, scientists want to know how rockfish populations are replenished.

Her research team has found that juvenile rockfish return to their nearshore habitats in pulses, the timing of which depends on the species. The scientists found that some species are brought in with the periodic upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich deep water, while others come in when the upwelling subsides. They also found that fish larvae and other plankton are often concentrated in previously undetected thin layers of ocean water that extend for miles and last for days at a time.

Robert R. Warner, a marine biology professor at UC Santa Barbara, discussed how the inner ear of the fish is like a pearl that begins before birth with tiny rings that reflect the composition of the water for each day of the life of the animal. With further study, scientists will be able to use these markers like internal flight recorders to follow the movements of marine animals.

Warner said it's important to study the coastal waters with a variety of technologies, from satellites to genetics. "The coastal seas are changing extremely rapidly, and more and more of us are living near the coast," he said. "The coastal margin is where we interact with the sea, whether it's for recreation or extraction or just inspiration."

The coastal oceans are complex, Warner said, and much more research is required to understand the processes involved. "To manage it correctly, you need to have the correct information."