or measure the location of floppy sea palms with a transit. One student even scours the tide pools for sea urchin tube feet for something she calls the Urchin Genome Project.
Amid the blitzkrieg of data collection, a woman with short reddish brown hair, green Wellies, and gold sea star earrings hops from rock to rock, passing out organic chocolate, lending a hand or a word of advice when needed. Jane Lubchenco and her husband and colleague, Bruce Menge, both of Oregon State University, have tried to understand this salty world for the past 28 years—and with that gain a greater understanding of the fundamental ecological principles that govern all life on Earth.
"The rocky intertidal area is incredibly good for studying the interactions between land and oceans," says Lubchenco, a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission. "We're trying to understand the linkages and how they're affected by human activity. Nutrient pollution, global warming, fishing, a whole number of things are all coming together right along the littoral zone."
Today, however, the two scientists are trying to wrap their brains around one of the knottiest problems in marine biology: recruitment, or how many young of a species come into a system each year. Unlike land animals, in which the young stay within a population, ocean species tend to spread their little guys to the currents, while receiving others from afar, making it impossible for fisheries managers to know how much of a stock fishermen can sustainably catch each year. After years of trial and error, Menge discovered that plastic pot scrubbers are the perfect media for catching baby mussels, while Plexiglas squares coated with scratchy nonslip paint are the perfect landing spots for baby barnacles. And baby mussels and barnacles act much like baby rockfish and Dungeness crabs, two species worth millions to West Coast fishermen each year.
"It looks clean, and compared with other parts of the world it is," Lubchenco says. "That doesn't mean it's not under threat. Development is rampant here, as is overfishing. One of the largest restricted fishing areas in the world is right off our coast—8,000 square miles (21,000 square kilometers) to protect six rockfish species that were overfished."
Such a concept was unthinkable back in 1969 when Congress appointed the Stratton Commission to prepare the first report on the U.S. coastal zone, which subsequently laid the foundation for current coastal policies. The Stratton commissioners saw the ocean as a source of endless bounty, encouraging the federal government to build up U.S. fishing fleets and drill for oil and gas offshore. Some 40 years later, says Lubchenco, it has become painfully obvious just how finite marine resources are and how great a bite humans have taken out of them: 90 percent of the world's large pelagic fishes, like tuna, marlin, and sharks, gone; three-quarters of the world's major fisheries exploited, overfished, or depleted; and enough oil spilling out of U.S. cars to equal an Exxon Valdez-size spill every eight months. Nearly 150 dead zones now occur around the world, including one off the Oregon coast that first appeared in 2002 and that has recurred twice since. Most ominous of all, Lubchenco says, is that the oceans absorb fully half of all the CO2 released by humans—perhaps one of the greatest services the seas provide. But the vast amount of CO2 entering the oceans today is making them more acidic, which, combined with rising sea temperature, could have devastating consequences for anything with a shell or skeleton, essentially making them slower, thinner, and more susceptible to predation.
The good news is that marine systems can recover to a surprising degree if given the chance. Lubchenco and many of her colleagues are increasingly convinced that a network of marine reserves where sea creatures and habitats are permanently protected would be a powerful tool in restoring fisheries along the U.S. coasts. Studies of reserves in Merritt Island, Florida, an