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Listening to Their Songs
Discovering Oregon’s Institute of Marine Biology
By Susan Glassow

“ I asked what would help them identify the kind of whale they’d spotted. I had some expectations, like body shape and size. Then, a girl raised her hand and said, ‘I’d listen to their songs.’”

—Laurel Hiebert, Oregon Institute of Marine Biology graduate student and teaching fellow at Madison Elementary in Empire

Storms uncover shipwrecks, skeletons of lives and commerce, castaway on the southern Oregon coast. The wrecks are apt metaphors for an area in visible economic decline even before the national recession. The Oregon Institute of Marine Biology “is a bright spot in a bad economy,” declares Arlene Roblan, principal of Madison Elementary School in Empire, a small town between Coos Bay and Charleston. Roblan used to teach at the now closed Charleston Elementary and remembers its sign: “It takes a fishing village to raise a child.” Now, 81 percent of her students qualify for free or discounted lunches.

Her memory is a poignant reminder of the area’s proud heritage. Timber disappeared first; the ships that filled the Coos Bay harbor, the largest timber shipping port in the world once upon a time, now sail in historic photographic exhibits on the bay boardwalk. Fishing declined. In 2007, Charleston harbor master Don Yost resigned, refusing to impound boats whose owners were delinquent on their slip payments. “There’s a face with every boat,” he said.

As part of a National Science Foundation program, OIMB graduate fellows are teaching children and grandchildren of those loggers, port workers, and fishermen. Pure science and community involvement mix in a helix of hope and intellectual energy.

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Near the end of Boat Basin Road in Charleston, OIMB’s campus nestles between low hills and the South Slough Estuary. Located next to the Pacific Seafood processing plant, the visitors’ parking area smells of fish. Gulls cry and the horn-honking of California sea lions adds an offbeat bass. Fishing boats fill the anchorage. OIMB is a village of one- and two-story Cape Cod–style, wood-shingled buildings that feels like a place you’d want to live.

The University of Oregon first set up camp near Charleston eighty-five years ago. In 1924, two UO biology professors identified eighty-two species at Sunset Bay, and in 1925 enrolled eleven students in summer courses, using tents as dormitories and laboratories. The nearby permanent site was selected in 1929 and put to use for summer field studies. Year-round research programs began in 1966 and year-round educational programs a few years later. In 1999, OIMB built two more research labs and the Loyd and Dorothy Rippey Library. In 2008–9, 106 UO students studied at OIMB and twenty–eight enrolled under the community education option. More than 350 non-OIMB students visited; most were members of groups attending specialized workshops.

OIMB has the only marine biology undergraduate major in the Pacific Northwest. Since 2004, nearly 100 UO biology students have declared the major, which means they are at OIMB full time for three terms. “We’ve identified a demand for basic, rigorous marine biology education,” Director and Professor Craig Young explains. “Soon it will exceed the capacity of the classrooms.”

Young came to OIMB in 2002. He has established one of the few labs in the world that raises the larvae of deep-sea animals and studies their development. He’s worked in the deep sea since 1980. Young and his graduate students have made hundreds of dives in eight different submersibles, collecting and studying animals that live as deep as two miles beneath the surface. They’ve worked at marine laboratories and universities around the world and have sailed on oceanographic ships in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. They will be in the Gulf of Mexico this fall.

“The deep sea contains the largest biotic habitats on Earth, yet only miniscule parts of it have been explored,” Young explains. “Basic processes such as reproduction and development remain totally unknown for the vast majority of species. . . . New species and phenomena are discovered on nearly every cruise.”

Young leads a group of nine stellar faculty members who teach, mentor students, and conduct research. “We are fortunate. They are world class scientists, every one.”

One day last spring, Professor Nora Terwilliger, Ph.D. ’81, appeared in her invertebrate classroom-lab wearing a keyhole limpet hat, its velvet folds mimicking the pleated shell encircling the animal’s air hole. The room was quiet. The soft bubbling of seawater, pumped from the bay into a long water table, could lull a tired body to sleep, but the students were intent on looking through their microscopes and filling lab notebooks. Their day had begun with Terwilliger and coteacher, Richard Emlet, at 7:00 a.m. with an intertidal field trip. Dressed in wet weather gear, including knee-high boots, they’d scrambled down a muddy cliff in heavy rain to an even muddier beach where they collected mollusks. “We show the students how to study by doing,” Terwilliger says. “We get down and crawl on the sand, lift strands of kelp searching for animals.” They also gently pried tiny limpets from their homes on the rocky shore. Back at OIMB, lectures and lab work completed the daylong focus on invertebrate biology.

Recently retired and teaching one course a year, Terwilliger came to OIMB as a faculty wife in 1970, back when there were only a couple of the old Civilian Conservation Corps buildings and two faculty members. She had her master’s in marine biology from the University of Wisconsin and remembers putting her children down for a nap and sprinting across the lawn to the lab so “I could keep my hand in with a little research.”

She earned a Ph.D. and returned to research and teach alongside her then institute director-husband, Robert Terwilliger. And although her research continues to be specialized on invertebrate blood proteins and oxygen absorption, she advocates students studying the whole breadth of biology. One of the strengths of OIMB, she says, is that when students remove themselves from the main campus, “They immerse in marine biology: vocabulary, invertebrate zoology, development, animal behavior, rhythm of the tides.”

Professor Richard Emlet and Terwilliger have cotaught an intensive invertebrate zoology course for years. His research, however, sometimes takes him far from the Oregon shore: “I’ve been to southern Australia many times to study the unusual development of marine invertebrates between Perth and Sydney. Unlike their counterparts in other temperate regions, these sea stars and sea urchins have nonfeeding larvae that are in the plankton for a few days to weeks while elsewhere they are feeding larvae and are in the plankton for weeks to months.”  Emlet says that understanding this one seemingly small scientific anomaly—which he describes as one of his lifelong goals—would give scientists more understanding of the vastly complex web of interconnections in the world’s delicate marine ecosystems.

Another OIMB faculty member, Professor Alan Shanks, studies the dispersal patterns of Dungeness crab larvae. He investigates the links between the seasonal shift of local ocean currents associated with the spring transition in coastal winds and movements of the late larval stage of the crab, which is free swimming. Shanks hypothesized that an early transition could result in greater numbers of the developing crabs returning to shore and growing into harvestable adults. A later transition could lead to fewer adults. His first five-year study found “an almost perfect correlation.”

His work has led to funding from the Oregon Dungeness Crab Commission and further study to explore whether the correlation between the timing of the spring transition and the adult crab population and its potential harvest holds true: “I’m in the glorious position where. . . people are paying me to follow my curiosity. And, if this is done by thousands of us, you come up with amazing things that will affect us all.”

Academic Coordinator and Associate Professor Jan Hodder, Ph.D. ’86, teaches courses on birds and mammals and marine environmental issues. She directs the Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence (COSEE) Pacific Partnerships, which connects marine stations in Oregon, Washington, California, and Hawaii. “Our overarching goal in the Pacific Partnerships project is to increase the availability of new scientific information about the ocean,” she says. “The linking of marine scientists, who are generating this knowledge, with community college faculty, who will use the information in their courses, and volunteers, who help the public understand about the ocean, is the key to the success of our endeavors.”

COSEE’S coastal master naturalist program is currently in a planning stage but, when developed, volunteers with nonprofits and state and federal agencies on the coast will have the opportunity to study and learn more about marine life and ocean processes. “The more people we have who have an understanding of how the ocean works and are scientifically literate,” Hodder says, “the better we will be at making personal and policy decisions that affect our marine world and us—locally, nationally, internationally.”

The newest OIMB faculty member is Assistant Professor Svetlana Maslakova, who at thirty-one is already considered an authority on ribbon worms (nemerteans). These worms are found in all the world’s oceans and some of the 1,400 species can grow to nearly 100 feet in length. Maslakova’s interest in marine biology was stimulated by teachers and mentors at an experimental high school and a university in Russia. “I heard about the ribbon worms. They had unusual musculature and people didn’t know quite where they belonged. There was a mystery to be solved and only one other specialist in the world.”

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Thanks to a National Science Foundation grant secured by Shanks and Hodder more than 3,500 south coast elementary students have had the chance for the past five years to have their curiosity stimulated by graduate teaching fellows from OIMB. The grant pays university tuition and a living stipend for nine graduate students each year. In exchange, the graduate students teach marine biology in elementary schools from Port Orford to Reedsport while learning teaching and communication skills from the classroom teachers. The elementary school teachers can expand their expertise working with the OIMB fellows and through workshops and other professional educational opportunities.

The elementary students study their marine neighborhoods: They “get dirty” on mudflat scavenger hunts. They learn where beach hoppers live by studying high, medium, and low tide lines on the sandy beach. They practice “belly biology,” head down on the edge of harbor docks, studying clouds of jellies or Dungeness crab larvae.

The program, known as GK-12, has forged “a true connection between academia and the community.” Hodder says. “Our students have to take complex marine science and learn how to explain it using basic concepts and processes. They teach children how science is conducted as an active pursuit of knowledge.”

Following a habitat-based curriculum first developed at the University of California at Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science and expanded at OIMB, kindergarteners study ponds, and successive grades investigate rocky shores, sandy beaches, wetlands and estuaries, kelp forests, open ocean, and islands.

The collaboration has been “markedly successful at every level,” Shanks observes, “in training graduate students to be better teachers, in teaching public school teachers how to teach science better, and in increasing science learning opportunities for the elementary children.” OIMB offers summer workshops for public school teachers and the grant also funds study outside Oregon—at marine stations like that at Monterey, California. Each spring a GK-12 open house brings as many as 500 parents and children on the OIMB campus to interact with their teaching fellows and learn about their research.

OIMB graduate students, including past and current teaching fellows, studied and worked onboard Young’s May 2008 research cruise in the Bahamas. And, they didn’t leave their elementary students behind. The website dedicated to the expedition (oimbkids.com) demonstrates how the pure science of Young and coprincipal investigators, Emlet of OIMB and Michelle Wood of the UO Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, connects to grade school students. The site describes the scope of the research, life on a research vessel, and the tasks of the researchers and crews. It also includes the log written by the GK-12 teachers to their young scientists back home (see sidebar).

“OIMB folks are both fantastic scientists and wonderful educators,” says Fred Betz, a science teacher at Blanco School in Langlois. “Sometimes you see science curriculum that’s not as balanced. GK-12 challenges kids across the spectrum of their skills. I think every kid in my sixth grade wants to be a marine biologist when she or he grows up!”

Some scenes from GK-12 classrooms: an eight-year-old responding to a question by saying, “I observe”; two sixth-grade teams competing in a game based on their knowledge of

elephant seal habitats and life cycles, applauding the other team when they ‘get something right’; children as young as five, learning biological taxonomy phrases in Latin, seemingly without problem.

Erin Morgan, a teaching fellow at Lighthouse charter school in North Bend, describes the larger lessons of her fifth-graders experimenting with hydrothermal vents: “This is the process—I see this, I know this, so I test it to see if it works. We’re teaching them to be brave enough to be wrong. We’re teaching scientific process. If they don’t set out to discover, they’ll never know whether their hypothesis works or not.”

The classroom teachers see the long-term effects, too. “If [children] have this empathy and understanding of science at a young age—a true understanding, not just ‘I got out my book and did it’—they will be more informed individuals,” says Nancy James, a teacher at Lighthouse school.

The grant that funds the program ends in 2010. Shanks and Hodder are writing another NSF proposal. If funded, they and their new cadre of GK-12 teaching fellows will write and teach marine science curriculum in grades 7–9. And, thanks to the first grant, many of those students will have had years of training in the scientific process and marine biology.

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Marine stations traditionally welcome students and researchers who need the resources only available in these seaside settings. Young himself attended landlocked universities Brigham Young and Alberta and did marine work at Washington’s Friday Harbor and at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. As a young man, he lived and worked in Italy where one of the first marine labs, Stazione Zoologica di Napoli, opened in 1872. “I’ve come full circle; I’m directing this institute and offering that hospitality to others.”

Young and Hodder have expanded the ways OIMB provides hospitality, offering access to the vast diversity of animals, plants, and habitats (forest, shoreline, and salt marsh) found within OIMB’s 130 acres. Hospitality means providing housing, a dining hall, a state-of-the-art library, as well as laboratory space and classrooms for visiting professors with students. A recent NSF grant paid for the construction of an apartment complex, which allows more visiting scientists to be in residence. This summer OIMB was at capacity, accommodating more than 100 scientists and students.

Last spring, Faculty Institute for Reforming Science Teachers brought twenty-four postdoctoral fellows teaching in colleges and universities across the United States to OIMB. “Because it’s a residential experience,” Hodder explains, “they also have an opportunity to get together informally and form their own learning communities that will continue. . . beyond their experiences at OIMB.”

OIMB’s Charleston Marine Life Center, scheduled to open in August 2010, is under construction. The two-story, 5,000-square-foot display space will include permanent and rotating exhibits, and live video feeds of sea lion colonies, sea bird roosting areas, and underwater habitats. A marine mammal gallery with an orca skeleton and other exhibits, galleries on Oregon fisheries and marine life, and a small aquarium highlighting local ecosystems will be among the displays.

At the end of Boat Basin Road, a ten-minute walk from the new center, the remodeled historic 1914 Coast Guard boathouse serves as campus auditorium. Among other events, it’s home to a weekly seminar series for OIMB faculty and staff members and students. Once each quarter, the local community is invited to hear speakers on various topics, usually drawing an audience of around 100. The spring series included Julia Parrish, University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, who gave a speech titled “Patterns in the Sand: Postbreeding, Winterkill, and Wreck Mortality in West Coast Seabirds” and who then, in the evening’s public lecture, explored the question, “Can Soccer Moms Do Science?”

An inviting photographic exhibit, created by Young, lines the boathouse walls. A glass case houses a collage of OIMB’s history, including a copy of a pamphlet: Summer Camp, 1937. On its cover, students and faculty members crouch on the beach, smiling toward the camera, looking just as excited and interested as their counterparts in 2009.

Susan Glassow, M.A. ’72, lives on the McKenzie River near Blue River.