The Big Net

It was a chance encounter out here in the cold surging water, half a century ago. Nature’s immutable cycles caught up with some of the most ambitious fishermen of the age.

The sardine disappeared. There was disbelief, as you might imagine, even panic.

Prayers resounded from the pulpits. The state Legislature legislated. News spread in the newspapers. Experts were summoned to investigate just what had cast this shadow on the California dream.

These events have faded in memory now. All except for the inquiry. It has continued for 50 years. The mystery of the sardine led to a greater mystery: What lay behind the cycles of the sea?

Scientists probed and measured; they netted and filtered. By season and by year through the terms of 10 presidents, they plotted the rhythms of undersea creatures and the flows of oceanic currents. It became painstaking science, like trying to make a connect-the-dots drawing--with a mere handful of dots plotted across thousands of square miles of open sea and down hundreds of feet.

One day the scientists realized that their picture, no matter how fuzzy, was unique. No section of an ocean anywhere in the world had been studied so thoroughly for so long as the Pacific offshore of Southern and Central California.

Fleet Flagship of Scripps Institution

It is 8 p.m. on the Roger Revelle, fleet flagship of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 12 days out of San Diego, 50 years after fishermen sounded the alarm.

A shark noses in and out of shadows where work lights dissolve into the empty night. Two black-footed albatrosses have been gliding behind but are swallowed in darkness now. From a steel support overhead, an electrical cable as thick as a thumb and taut with weight slants into the ocean. Slowly, the cable and the heavy array of instruments spool down into the deep. Even more slowly, the cable is reeled back in. One hour, then more.

To find what?

What indeed.

In slickers and rubber boots, the scientists on the noon-to-midnight watch pitch and roll to the beat of a frisky winter sea. Their material world is bounded by the railings of an aft work deck half the size of a basketball court, plus a few fluorescent laboratories amidships, simple reinforced bunks and a mess hall that looks like a junior high lunchroom.

Beneath them, the briny world they explore and ponder is enough to exhaust the imagination:

The Pacific Ocean is the largest geographic feature on Earth. It covers one-third of the planet. It is deeper by 6,800 feet than Mt. Everest is high. It is a primary producer of oxygen and absorbs vast quantities of industrial society’s effluvium. It prepares and delivers our weather. It sustains us with food. It cloaks riches of petroleum and minerals--like the estimated 20 billion tons of ore-grade metallic nodules lying on the ocean floor southeast of Hawaii.

According to genetics, humans are closest to other primates. But by chemical composition, we are not so very far from ordinary seawater, either.

For coastal Californians, the Pacific is a neighbor. It is our playground, sometimes our cesspool, a scenic buffer and gateway for commerce. More than the bygone Gold Rush motto “Eureka” and better than the grizzly bear on the state’s flag, the Pacific Ocean--beach, waves, sunsets--expresses our self-image. It contains a dreamer’s lode of wealth, freedom and adventure.

And enigma too. For below the surface, our home waters are a turbulent realm. A gigantic and unseen river of cold, low-salinity water snakes willy-nilly down from the north at the pace of a gentle walk. Then it bumps into warmer, saltier water from the equator. Other countercurrents, one deep and one along the shore, add complexity to the aqueous ballet. Drawn by movement of water, nutrients well to the surface and sustain an astonishing array of plants and animals.

In this chaotic mixing of cold and warm ocean, of surface and deep water layers, life here is curiously delicate, transitory, cyclic, as the fishermen found out all those years ago.

Owned by the Navy and operated by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution, the Roger Revelle is 3 years old, 275 feet long, displaces 3,300 tons and is designed solely to probe the sea. Named for a former director of Scripps and UCSD founder, the $50-million vessel is one of the newest in the national research fleet. The Revelle carries a crew of 22 and can house 37 scientists. It is capable of steaming to any of the world’s oceans.

Like many modern vessels, it has shed the romantic vestige of the great wheel by which it’s steered. Instead, the bridge is arrayed with swiveling throttles, not unlike those on outboard skiffs. Most of the steering is done by fingering a small knob on the autopilot.

Capt. Thomas J. Desjardins once thought he’d be a Yellowstone park ranger. Then he met a recruiter from the Maritime Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. It took a couple of years until he fully realized what kind of wanderer’s life he was making for himself. Now he spends eight months a year at sea as the senior captain at Scripps.

“Something is wrong with people who go to sea,” he jokes. Or it sounds like he’s joking, anyway. His master’s license reads: Any vessel, any ocean.

‘Cannery Row’ in Monterey

“Cannery Row,” John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel, is set on the gritty waterfront of Monterey during a time when the Central Coast sardine fishery was the largest in the world.

Steinbeck opened his story this way: “In the morning when the sardine fleet has made a catch, the purse-seiners waddle heavily into the bay blowing their whistles. The deep laden boats pull in against the coast. Then cannery whistles scream and all over town men and women scramble into their clothes and come running down to the Row to go to work. The whole street rumbles and groans and screams and rattles while the silver rivers of fish pour in out of the boats.”

Then the sardines vanished.

Suspecting overfishing, state regulators restricted the catch. Fishermen objected, insisting something else must be to blame. It was a bruising fight before the state Legislature, now forgotten except for what proved to be a farsighted agreement among the state, the federal government and the fishing industry to study the sardine and its habitat.

The first research cruise occurred in 1949. Over the years, despite periodic crises of funding, scientists have continued this long-term inquiry. Today, the offshore work is shared chiefly by Scripps and the National Marine Fisheries Service. It is called California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations, or CalCOFI.

From the beginning, it was a pioneering effort. Scientists started with the assumption that a single species of fish could not be understood in isolation from its habitat and food sources as well as other species. Such thinking is commonplace today but was original at the time.

Piece by piece, the story of the sardine was assembled. Today, the population is making a slow comeback. The catch in recent years has been the largest since the days of Steinbeck, although consumer demand for the jumbo Pacific sardine has waned, and more than half the take is sold for bait now.

Scientists and fishermen understand that, for at least 2,000 years, the Pacific sardine, Sardinops sagax, existed in our ocean much as real estate agents do ashore: flourishing in cycles and then periodically crashing. The crisis of the late 1940s occurred when heavy fishing pressure coincided with what appears to have been a normal, cyclical decline in the sardine population. It would be like the real estate business getting hit with a giant earthquake in the middle of a recession. Consequent damage to sardine breeding stock was so extensive that restrictive limits on the fishery continue.

Something else occurred as scientists and fishermen learned more about the turbulent swirls of the coastal Pacific. California’s commercial and sport fishing fleets became among the world’s most flexible and opportunistic, ready to take advantage of quick biological fluctuations because, as it turns out, the local ocean is populated by a constant inflow of life from elsewhere, much like mainland California itself.

For the years 1991 through 1996, for instance, the No. 1 commercial fishery in the state was squid. By the fall of 1997, squid virtually disappeared in local waters, as a result of warmer El Nino water offshore. Fishermen diverted their energies, and the take of mackerel more than doubled.

In a practical sense, the research of CalCOFI has helped establish a map of some of these patterns and how they occur. But oceanographers have greater ambition for their work: They want to know why. Why does the meandering California Current behave as it does?

If they can answer that--and they are inching close--they believe they can find the clues to predict cycles, just as scientists can now forecast El Nino and La Nina.

Perhaps just as valuable, understanding our home waters may provide clues to the effects of industrialization on our planet.

The Work and Wear of Oceanography

Oceanography is science with grimy hands and bashed knuckles. Here you could mistake a PhD for a roustabout, dressed in blue jeans and a ratty T-shirt, with a roll of electrical tape in one pocket and a packet of cable ties in another. For every computer in sight, there is a bolt cutter, pry bar, seizing tool or wire snips.

So how, exactly, do you study a realm you cannot see except for a few feet? Where penetrating is expensive and sometimes dangerous? Where the medium and the creatures who live in it are in perpetual motion? Where life ranges in size from infinitesimal bacteria to the largest creatures ever, animals bigger than any dinosaur, the 150-ton blue whales?

In 1869, British naturalist Wyville Thomson dredged down to 15,000 feet from HMS Porcupine and found life where none was expected. Three years later, he boarded HMS Challenger for a four-year circumnavigation. Again using nets and dredges, naturalists identified 4,417 previously unknown species and gathered data to fill 50 volumes.

Thus oceanography was born.

Today, although technology and knowledge have expanded many-fold, the basic techniques remain similar: Oceanographers set out to sea, drop a net or an instrument over the side, sometimes themselves, and fish for information.

“Boom out!”

An operator standing on the work deck of the Roger Revelle eases a joystick forward. Hiss, clank. An overhead hydraulic arm extends over the starboard side of the ship. A 1,200-pound bundle of cylinders, each resembling an oxygen tank, rises by a winch cable attached to the boom. The package of instruments is eased over the water. Using ropes, other members of the team stabilize the load against the swell and wind. An operator winches the instruments into the sea and then a third of a mile straight down while the ship holds its position.

Following a zigzag grid from San Diego to Monterey and out 300 miles, the Revelle will stop at 66 predetermined locations. And there will be three more repetitive research cruises this year, coinciding with the seasons.

Each time at the same spot, this same bundle of instruments is lowered. The cylinders, one by one, collect seawater at selected depths so technicians can analyze it for microscopic plant life, salinity and dissolved oxygen. An attached thermometer measures temperature at different depths.

The result: charts, something like weather maps, showing variables in the coastal ocean by place, depth and season, year after year, for a half-century.

At each of the 66 stations, a sequence of nets also is lowered from the Revelle to sample drifting fish eggs and measure the concentrations of tiny free-floating animals, the zooplankton, on which nearly all larger oceanic organisms depend, directly or indirectly. All the samples are packed in jars, shot with formaldehyde, labeled as to place, date and year.

Salt mine science, you might call it: the slow, ponderous accumulation of understanding a grain at a time.

Periodically, all the grains get tallied up. Most recently, the results showed that something is awry in the delicate world of the coastal Pacific, maybe horribly awry.

Pessimism and Optimism

Are the scientists on this cruise of the Revelle optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the Pacific?

Mostly, they are both.

Ron Dotson, a seagoing research biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service for nearly 30 years, explains, “I have to be optimistic because if I wasn’t, I’d be wasting my time out here.”

Reasons for their gloom, like overfishing and pollution, are easily identified by hard science. Their grounds for optimism are distinctly human: the everlasting hope that knowledge will make us wise.

Consider a twist on an old riddle: Would a tree create a noise falling in the forest if we did not know the forest existed?

In the last half-century, CalCOFI observed one small patch of the undersea forest, metaphorically speaking--that is, the life-nourishing system of the sea. It also discovered a relentless year-by-year crash of its food supply.

Only because of that long-ago hunt for the sardine do scientists know these things and now can ask the question why. To peer into these waters today, without an inventory of the past, no one could tell of this alarming change.

First a primer: The ocean dynamics of the West Coast begin with the prevailing winds from the north. They pass over the ocean and push surface water along with it. Also, because of the rotation of the Earth, this moving water is nudged slightly to the west, or offshore.

As the surface water pulls away from the coast, cold water from the deep is drawn to the surface to replace it. This upwelled water is rich with the decomposed remains of earlier generations of life.

Tiny, mostly one-celled free-floating plants, called phytoplankton, nourish themselves on these nutrients from below and sunlight from above. In turn, these organisms provide grazing food for more complicated zooplankton, which range from flea-sized herbivores to predators the size of a rice kernel, as well as larvae of many kinds and glutinous, jelly-like creatures, the size of soap bubbles, known as salps.

Upon these vast populations of zooplankton, larger animals feed--crustaceans, birds, sardines and even whales.

In recent years, though, a link in the plankton chain has failed.

In 1995, Scripps oceanographers John McGowan and Dean Roemmich sounded the alarm after reviewing the CalCOFI historical data. They found that coastal zooplankton had declined 70% in the last four decades. The discovery coincided with a shocking decline in seabirds and perhaps other creatures.

It is almost impossible to find a terrestrial analogy for such an occurrence. There are few parallels in science. Imagine an equivalent drop in the supply of food available for Californians onshore.

The two scientists blamed rising water temperature at the surface. Not the intermittent variations associated with El Nino but a gradual 2- to 3-degree warming of temperatures from 1951 to 1993. Higher surface temperatures typically signal fewer nutrients upwelling from below.

The cause remains unknown. Perhaps a natural cycle that will reverse itself. Or maybe global warming induced by human industriousness, which will not. In that event, McGowan concluded, “biological impacts could be devastating.”

In a more recent sampling, CalCOFI scientists confirmed continuing decreases in zooplankton. A 50-year low was measured in 1998.

Surely it is eerie to realize that scientists took so long to come upon this unexplained collapse of the offshore food supply.

More eerie still is the realization that nowhere else could they know. There are no equivalent long-term oceanic studies to compare today with the long-ago yesterday. Not even in the more familiar near-shore waters where the effect of human population growth is greatest.

If trees are falling in other undersea forests, we have not been listening.

Disoriented Storm Petrels

At night, Leach’s storm petrels become disoriented by the work lights and blunder onto the deck. They cower when picked up and put in a cardboard box. Breathing holes have been punched in the box. With a marker pen, it is labeled: “Live birds. Release at sunrise.” They take wing confidently and do not appear to look back.

Sometimes during daylight, spumes of distant whales are sighted and dolphins race over and under the Revelle’s bow wave. “An animal passive and ominous in a cage waiting to show what it can do.” That’s how novelist Graham Greene once described the sea.

For most of the Revelle’s cruise, weather has been favorable. But this is a famously rough place, and the ocean bares its teeth as the ship prepares to turn and head home. Its nose digs into gathering swells. Spray whips across the decks. The horizon disappears into a froth of sea foam. The barometer falls.

Within 12 hours, every loose thing aboard the ship has been strapped down, locked away, taped over. Either that or it is spilled and broken. Loose chairs in laboratories are strung with rope and tied to steel posts. All the watertight hatches are dogged tight. The decks are cleared and placed off limits, lest someone be washed overboard. At nightfall the wind builds to more than 50 mph and the swells rise to 20 feet. To move anywhere requires clapping on with both hands and attempting to aim one’s foot to where the deck is headed next, rather than where it is at the instant. Waves slam into the Revelle with enough force to send hollow thunder reverberating through the steel.

People pass in the gangways, but there is little conversation. Storms tend to be lonely, melancholy experiences, even in tight places. Those susceptible to seasickness are suffering, or afraid they soon will be. Rest is difficult. In the narrow, fixed bunks of the Revelle, people tuck life jackets and spare blankets to wedge themselves into a secure position.

As happens on an amusement ride, there is a weightless instant as the Revelle tops the crest of a swell and your weight rises off the mattress. Then, G-force presses you into the foam mattress as the ship sags into the trough.

Bam! Shudder, rumble. The bow punches into the next swell and begins the climb up.

For the hardy, research on the high sea is not without its rewards, however.

King crab legs and melted butter, fried shrimp, sliders, roast beef, lasagna, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, fresh salads, ice cream, popcorn, video action movies at night.

Sliders?

Navy for hamburgers.

Plus, on Sunday the off-duty watch is rationed one merry cup of wine.

The Revelle is equipped with an exercise room. Also a library with 750 well-thumbed paperbacks and vinyl lounge chairs.

In various ways, many of us conduct our own timeline appraisals of our surroundings. We hear of the vast orchards that gave Orange County its name. We compare that to the subdivisions today. We see the long-ago photograph in a bait shop showing a smiling spear fisherman in Long Beach with a 500-pound black sea bass.

These bygone images we explain and bemoan, as the consequence of progress and population.

The vicissitudes that CalCOFI has documented in the offshore food chain may not be so easily understood, however.

Oceanographers like Thomas L. Hayward suggest that the decline in zooplankton may one day prove as remarkable as its discovery. Some aspects of CalCOFI’s discovery appear to Hayward to defy long-standing theories about the biological workings of the sea--how A is supposed to result from B but really is the consequence of C.

Hayward is a trim 47 with short white-gray hair, a short white-gray beard, a precise manner and seawater on the brain. He began work with the CalCOFI research program as a Scripps graduate student 25 years ago. He now directs the study and is chief scientist on this cruise. He teaches occasionally but devotes himself mostly to biological ocean research at Scripps. He is commonly regarded as a plankton man.

“Today, we can ask questions such as: Are zooplankton abundant where and when phytoplankton are abundant? The answer is, we think they ought to be but they’re not,” Hayward explains.

You could liken the mystery to a car that will not start even with a fresh battery, or a lawn that wilts despite fertilizer and water.

“It’s amazing how little we know of the ocean,” he says.

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An Ocean of Information

Nowhere else has a large section of ocean been studied so intensively and for so long as the offshore waters of California. Scientists have charted the delicate cycles of life for 50 years, and pieced together an historical record of nearly 2,000 years. All this because of a long ago and mysterious disappearance of the sardine in 1949.