Dozens of gray whales once visited Port Orford in Southern Oregon on their way north. But this year, a research team saw only one during its six weeks at the coast.
That near absence has become part of the research.
Since 2015, scientists, including two high school students, have returned to the same stretch of the Southern Oregon coast to study gray whales and the zooplankton they eat and the kelp forests where they feed. The long-running research project is documenting an ecosystem transformed by the loss of sea stars.
Early each morning this summer, the team splits up. Two researchers paddle a kayak to 12 sites around the bay, collecting samples of zooplankton. The other team members watch from a nearby cliff, scanning the water for whales.
Owen Fewell, an undergraduate student at Oregon State University, said the kayak is equipped with a GPS unit and a line used to lower scientific instruments and a zooplankton net into the water. The navigator must keep the boat in one place while the other researcher collects samples.
“Even if you have kayak experience before, it's completely different doing this,” Fewell said. “Each day is different too. The current is moving in different ways. The wind is pushing you in different ways.”
Celest Sorrentino, a master’s student in marine mammal ecology at OSU, is the self-described captain of the program.
“On the cliff team, it's typically three people, so we section it out in terms of, like, one person looking right, middle, left,” Sorrentino said. “It takes a while to build the focus, but by the end of the season, I think that students are really good at maintaining that.”
Back in the lab, Fewell identifies and counts the zooplankton collected from the bay. Some species are more nutritious than others.
“Some of them are much bigger than others, and you can kind of see them with the naked eye,” he said. “But some are really quite small, so you really need to look.”
In previous years, each sample contained as many as 500 zooplankton. This summer, the largest sample was about 25.
Where have the whales gone?
Sea star wasting disease has wiped out most of the sea stars in the area. With fewer predators around, purple sea urchins have multiplied.
“Purple sea urchins love bull kelp,” Sorrentino said. “It’s like their favorite tasty snack.”
When too many sea urchins graze on the kelp, she said, the habitat available to zooplankton shrinks, leaving less food for whales. The kelp forests the gray whales once visited to feed are now rocky, barren wastelands full of sea urchins.
The team saw just one gray whale this summer — called Prop Scar because of its distinctive marking. High school intern Gavin Vierra spotted it while working from the kayak about 150 meters away.
“We saw the blow of the whale, and I could barely see the back of it,” Vierra said. “It was really, really rewarding. It was worth this entire thing just to see that one whale.”
Besides the experience, it also offered a key piece of data. Fewell said the team collected an unusually large number of zooplankton that day.
“So on the one day there happened to be an abnormally high amount of plankton, we saw a gray whale foraging in that site,” he said.
Burgeoning scientists
Vierra and fellow high school student Gavin Cada were among this summer’s researchers.
Leigh Torres, an Oregon State professor and the project’s principal investigator, is running two intertwined programs.
TOPAZ, or Theodolite Overlooking Predators And Zooplankton, is the overarching gray whale foraging monitoring project. And JASPER, short for Journey for Aspiring Students Pursuing Ecological Research, is the part of the program that involves high school and undergraduate students.
“It's about opening that door wide open so people can see the different career paths that you can take to get to different jobs,” Torres said.
Cada moved to Brookings recently and learned about the program through school.
“I was nervous on the first day. I didn't really know what to do,” he said. “But by the end of this program, you can really learn a lot about that stuff.”
The interns also learn how to explain their research to the public. Vierra said he’s learned a lot about the importance of communicating the science they’re doing.
"It's really fun to see the faces light up if they're super interested, or for them to ask more questions,” he said. “Or I've even talked to a few little kids that were really fascinated by whales.”
All of the interns live together at Oregon State’s Port Orford Field Station for six weeks. Sorrentino said it breaks down the traditional barriers in academia.
“It’s scary talking to a professor or master’s student because they feel so far away and they seem like, ‘I’m so much older than you,’” Sorrentino said. “But with this situation where you all live together, that kind of all goes away because we’re seeing each other every day, we’re cooking dinner every night.
The researchers found that the former participants they could track had all gone on to study or work in science-related fields.
Nathan Malamud took part in 2017 and eventually got his master's degree in botany.
“TOPAZ was my crash course,” Malamud said. “Here's what it takes to be a part of science. Here are the logistics, and then here's how you communicate it.”
Torres also involves high school students in her lab at Oregon State’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport. She said other researchers may view working with teens as unnecessary or difficult, but she believes bringing in future scientists is important.
“They can be so motivated and helpful to learn and gain and to contribute to the research,” Torres said.
At the end of the six-week project in Port Orford, the students present their findings to the community.
“It's not so much about how many whales we see out in the water or how many zooplankton we're seeing,” Sorrentino said. “But rather, how much do the students themselves grow as scientists throughout the season?”
The data from the project has also contributed to five published research papers, exploring topics such as the nutrition content in zooplankton and the ecological changes resulting from the loss of sea stars.
Torres said the data students have been gathering is important to understand why the whales have left Port Orford behind.
Other scientists are working to restore sea stars and kelp forests.
“What I'm really curious now is how long it's going to take for this system to recover,” Torres said. “This project is really well placed to document that because we have been using the same methods for over 10 years now.”
Future students in the JASPER/TOPAZ program could eventually document that recovery from the same cliff and kayak.
