By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 18, 2006
MONTEREY, Calif. -- On a sunny mid-October afternoon, Stanford University graduate student Chris Perle was out at sea, searching for a four-inch metallic gray object, resembling a small microphone with an antenna, adrift in the Pacific Ocean.
One day earlier, the device, known as a "pop-up satellite archival tag," had popped off the fin of a female great white shark after 300 days of collecting data as the creature crisscrossed the ocean. Despite having its rough coordinates and $7,000 worth of monitoring equipment in hand, Perle and his colleagues could not find the tag, so he called back to marine sciences professor Barbara Block at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station.
Block checked her computer, rattled off a few new coordinates to Perle via cellphone, and then explained why she and her researchers were going to such lengths to recover "a small thing in a big ocean."
"We're throwing everything we've got at this because it's very important we find this tag" in order not to lose months of valuable data, Block said.
Block is one of several California researchers who devotes much of her work to the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program, a multi-institution project that tracks an array of species across the Pacific. In just three years, they have attached tags to 2,000 predators of 23 different species, including seals, whales, sea birds, blue fin and yellow fin tuna and at least four types of sharks. Some devices are programmed to pop free after a set number of days, while others transmit data to a satellite whenever the creature surfaces so that researchers can know its position in real time.
The work can be grueling: It took Perle almost a week to retrieve the tag that had popped off the great white shark in October, in part because it drifted 25 miles down the coast over the course of a week, coming near shore before floating out again. In the process, he got a serious case of poison oak that landed him in the emergency room.
Their work, along with a slew of other technology-driven studies by others, is transforming the way scientists, policymakers and conservationists understand the sea.
Across the globe, scientists are now deciphering the ocean in an array of new ways.
Felicia Coleman, who directs Florida State University's Coastal and Marine Laboratory, implants "acoustic tags" in grouper in the Gulf of Mexico. The devices make specific sounds picked up by a receiver within a quarter-mile, so that she and her colleagues can track how individual male fish maintain their territory while females move in and out as they fatten up for breeding.
Peter Wiebe, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, analyzes the DNA of zooplankton while at sea to study how these creatures at the base of the ocean food web are faring. And Patrick N. Halpin, a Duke University ecologist, is crunching data collected by government officials, scientists and fishermen to generate computer maps that will help ships avoid striking whales in the North Atlantic. Duke was the first major academic institution in the nation to endow a professor of marine conservation technology, a post it aims to fill next year.
"Things that have been never been known before are not only known, but known with a high degree of precision," said Stanford University marine biologist Stephen Palumbi.
In 2003, Palumbi used DNA sequencing to deduce that before commercial whaling began, several types of whales were three-to-10 times more abundant than anyone had thought. "It's an incredibly powerful source of information for conservation," he said. "These technologies allow us to nail it."
"Because the ocean is vast," said Fred Grassle, who directs Rutgers University's Institute of Marine and Coastal Studies, "biologists sort of threw up their hands." With the new technologies, however, "There's a bit of a cultural change in ocean biology. . . . We really have much more of a global community of biological oceanographers that are taking advantage" of new tools.
"These are capabilities that really didn't exist 10 years ago," said Duke's Halpin, whose database includes 1.1 million entries on 449 marine species collected between 1935 and 2006.
Much of this work is being done through the Census of Marine Life, a 10-year, $650 million project, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, involving 2,000 scientists from the Arctic to the South Pacific. They are relying on four major technologies to do their work: acoustics; tagging and tracking; genetic analysis and optical cameras.
"This is a social revolution of thousands of people around the world cooperating," said Jesse Ausubel, the foundation's program manager for the project.
Now in its sixth year, the census has catalogued 77,000 different marine species and collected 10 million records. It has produced dozens of revelations: In 2006 alone, researchers found a single school of 8 million fish the size of Manhattan off the New Jersey coast as well as the hottest-known hydrothermal vent, which sustains marine life even as it spews liquid from below the sea floor at 765 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wiebe, whose zooplankton research is funded by the census, is developing DNA-based bar codes to allow instant identification of unfamiliar species while at sea.
"The moment we have the Rosetta stone, we're off to the future," he said. "The fundamental question we're asking here is, what lies in the ocean now?"
Even as they document the seas in new ways, researchers say they are seeing it depleted at a rapid rate. "We're concerned that by the time we can see and understand the ocean, there won't be enough of it left to see," Halpin said.
Satellite tags produce some of the most pioneering research: Many use a pressure, temperature and light sensors to determine where creatures are swimming and how long they stay in a given place.
Ausubel joked that as a result, scientists now understand "how cosmopolitan the fish populations are," including "tuna that commute between San Francisco and Tokyo, or Houston and Naples."
Sometimes boaters or beachcombers have found the titanium, seawater-resistant tags after they drifted across vast distances and returned them for a $500 reward. One woman recovered one of Block's tags in Hawaii, and 5-year-old Calvin Wisner found one while walking on the beach with his parents near San Francisco just after Christmas last year.
Sometimes, however, the search exacts a toll. When the locating technology showed that the great white shark's tag had washed ashore, Perle could not locate it at first because the radio signals were bouncing off nearby cliffs. After he finally found it, it took him a month to recover from "the worst case of poison oak in my life."
"It was no small amount of suffering," Perle said, adding that he was happy to discover from the data that the shark in question not only dove into cold water 1,640 feet deep but stayed there for hours.
"Was it worth it? I guess it was worth it. You shouldn't have to get poison oak, though."
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