Researchers Opening Oceans' 'Black Box'

By GAIL GALLESSICH

A group of marine scientists, including key people from UCSB, is putting together a picture of the near-shore ocean environment–what until now has been largely a scientific "black box." At the same time, they are developing a picture of where marine animals live for different parts of their life cycles. The information will be invaluable to marine reserve planners, the fishing industry, and many others.

Previously, the open ocean has been studied the most, and yet the area where most fishing occurs and where humans interact with the ocean has been neglected, partly because it is so complicated, according to Robert R. Warner, UCSB professor of ecology, evolution, and marine biology.

"New Tools for Designing Effective Marine Reserves," to be published in a future edition of the journal Frontiers in Ecology, outlines the state of the art of management of marine reserves. The findings were presented by Warner and other coauthors at a meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science last month.

The authors looked at:

• Remote sensing to provide real-time data about the ocean. The chemical signal of trace metals in growing skeletons provides a tracking device for where larvae and juveniles drift in the sea.
• Genetic differences among populations which can reveal otherwise unseen barriers to dispersal are beginning to be used to measure the scale of dispersal inside and outside reserves.
• Layers of ecosystem information placed in a geographic context by GIS (Global Information Systems) computer mapping, which provides a summary of complex information that can be used by computer search engines to list alternative management solutions.

Warner offered a metaphor for the sea's complexity: "It is as if one is trying to manage a deer population on land, but the does give birth to dandelion puffs and the seeds drift off in the wind," he said. "We haven't known how far they go, or how they get back."

Marine larvae may drift for awhile on a top current and then drop to a lower current going the opposite direction that brings them back close to where they began, said Steve Gaines, coauthor and director of the Marine Science Institute.

Warner said the inner ear, or balancing mechanism, of the fish is like a pearl that begins before birth with tiny rings that reflect the composition of the water for each day of the life of the animal. With further study, scientists will use these markers, like internal flight recorders, to follow the animal's movements in the sea.

Besides Gaines and Warner, the paper on marine reserves was written by biologist S. R. Palumbi of Stanford University and H. Leslie of the Department of Zoology, Oregon State University.