Author Archives: kightp

About kightp

Pat Kight is the web and digital media specialist for Oregon Sea Grant at Oregon State University.

Fishermen monitor pregnant fish to aid conservation

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Port Orford fishermen are working with scientists to find out whether releasing pregnant rockfish can help conserve the resource – and their way of life.

Research assistant with rockfish

Research assistant with rockfish

Fishermen are working with the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team (POORT) and researcher Selina Heppell, of Oregon State University’s Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, on a project to determine whether releasing “big old fat fecund females” (BOFFFs) can contribute to the species’ reproduction and survival, ultimately sustaining the local fishery.

Their efforts, supported by a grant from Oregon Sea Grant, are focused on the live fishery – a market that began in California and expanded into Oregon in the mid-1990s.

Read more: [.pdf] [HTML]

Former Sea Grant Scholar featured on OSU blog

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Abigail Brown

Abigail Brown

Abby Brown, Oregon Sea Grant’s 2008 Water Resources Fellow, is featured in a recent post in Oregon State University’s “Powered by Orange” blog.

A master’s student in  water resources policy and management with a minor in women’s studies, Brown spent last year as as Sea Grant Water Resources Fellow at the Oregon Water Resources Department. This fall, according to the OSU blog, she’s in Bangalore, India, working with Arghyam, a non-governmental organization dedicated to financing, evaluating and supporting water projects throughout the country.

Brown is chronicling her experiences in her own blog, Water for the Ages.

The water resources fellowship is one of several offered each year through the Sea Grant Scholars  program, which provides graduate and undergraduate students with opportunities to  learn about resource policy and management by working with selected state and federal resource offices.

Sea Grant is accepting applications through Sept. 18 for the Robert E. Malouf Marine Studies Scholarship, which provides financial support for a graduate student working in a marine studies field compatible with the Sea Grant mission. Learn more about this and other Sea Grant Scholars opportunities.

HMSC Visitor Center launches new Web site

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HMSC Visitor Center Web site

HMSC Visitor Center Web site

Planning your next visit to the Central Oregon Coast? Looking for classes you and your children can take to learn more about the ocean and coast? Or maybe you’re just curious about the fascinating creatures that live in the briny deep …

You’ll find all that and more at the brand-new HMSC Visitor Center Web site.

A year in the making, the new site has everything Visitor Center fans might expect – hours of operation, directions, previews of exhibits and programs, a full schedule of Sea Grant marine education programs, classes and camps for kids, families and teachers – and lots more.

You’ll find a new section featuring the popular Oregon Coast Quests adventure activity and a Critter Corner with photos and facts about some of the hundreds of marine animals in our collection. Ask A Scientist gives you a chance to get answers to your questions about the Oregon Coast. And the Fish Health Corner provides a peek behind the scenes at what it takes to keep a world-class aquarium running and its animal residents healthy.

The Visitor Center is managed by Oregon Sea Grant as a central part of the program’s mission to help people understand, rationally use, and conserve marine and coastal resources.

Sea Grant shares in public education grant

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Oregon Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning program will join with the Oregon Coast Aquarium, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, the Maryland Science Center and others in a three-year effort to expand professional development opportunities for museum, aquariums, zoo and park educators in an effort to improve informal science education.

The project, known as the Communicating Ocean Sciences Informal Education Network, is funded through a National Science Foundation initiative aimed at fostering and improving the kind of informal science education that takes place at aquariums, museums and other learning centers.

Leading the team for OSU is Shawn Rowe, Sea Grant marine education and learning specialist and an assistant professor with the OSU Department of Science and Math Education. Rowe heads Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning program, which studies the kind of learning people do outside the classroom.

Rowe’s program uses the Visitor Center at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport as a living lab for studying various approaches to informal science education, how to engage visitors and what kind of information people take away from their aquarium visits.

The Sea Grant program will receive more than $278,000 from the NSF over the next three years to develop training, workshops and curricula for informal science educators, and to continue work the program has already begun to foster a network of informal science educators and scientists who want to communicate their work to the public.

Read more about Sea Grant’s Free-Choice Learning program here.

Coastal forums focus on wave energy

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Three community forums next week will give residents of the central Oregon coast an opportunity to learn about and discuss the prospect of wave energy development in their region.

Co-sponsored by the Lincoln County Commission, Oregon Sea Grant qand the new Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, the meetings will take place:

  • Monday, August 24  at 6 pm at the Yachats Commons, 441 Highway 101, Yachats.
  • Tuesday, August 25 at 6  pm in the Lincoln City Council Chambers, City Hall, 801 SW Hwy 101, Lincoln City.
  • Wednesday, August 26 at 6 pm in the auditorium at the Hatfield Marine Science Center, 2030 Marine Science Drive, South Beach, Newport.

Read more and download the meeting agenda  …

Sea Grant, NOAA offer teacher workshop

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NOAA-OEScience teachers in grades 6-12 are invited to take part in the first of a two-part professional development workshop series based on NOAA’s “Learning Ocean Science through Ocean Exploration” curriculum.

The workshop, presented by NOAA and Oregon Sea Grant, will run from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

This workshop prepares teachers to bring the excitement of current ocean science discoveries to students using the Learning Ocean Science through Ocean Exploration curriculum, CD, and the Ocean Explorer Web site.

The second workshop will be held in spring 2010. Educators who attend both full-day workshops will receive a $100 stipend. Advance registration is required and space is limited. The registration deadline is Oct. 23.

Download registration materials here.

NOAA to move research ships to Newport

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RV Bell M. Shimada

RV Bell M. Shimada

NEWPORT – The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this morning that Newport will be the home of the agency’s Marine Operations Center-Pacific beginning in 2011.

The federal agency chose Newport over bids from Seattle – where four of NOAA’s 10 Pacific research vessels are now based – as well as Bellingham and Port Angeles, WA. The deal awaits signing of a 20-year lease with the Port of Newport.

“This is huge,” Ginny Goblirsch, Port of Newport commissioner and Sea Grant Extension agent emeritus, told the Oregonian. “It means everything. It’s like $400 million over the next 20 years to the community and state. ”

The move is expected bring to Newport approximately 175 NOAA employees, including more than 110 officers and crew assigned to the NOAA ships McArthur II, Miller Freeman, Rainier and Bell M. Shimada, a new fisheries survey vessel expected to join the research fleet in 2010.

The agency went through an extensive public process before deciding where to locate the facility. According to an agency press release, considerations in site selection included NOAA’s infrastructure needs, proximity to maritime industry resources and NOAA labs, quality of life for employees, the ability to meet the desired occupancy date of July 2011, when the agency’s Seattle lease expires.

The federal agency’s vessels are used to conduct research and gather data about the world’s oceans and atmosphere. Newport and OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center are already home to NOAA’s VENTS program, which conducts research on the impacts and consequences of submarine volcanoes and hydrothermal venting on the global ocean.

(NOAA is the parent agency of Sea Grant programs in Oregon, Washington and other coastal and Great Lakes states.)

Read more

Celebrate fisheries at HMSC

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oregon-fisheries-dayThe HMSC Visitor Center and the Oregon Coast Aquarium join forces on Aug. 16 to celebrate Oregon Fishery Day, a chance for visitors to learn more about Oregon’s tuna, salmon and sablefish industries.

See fishing gear, talk to fishermen, try on a survival suit and taste some samples!

The Visitor Center is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and admission is free (although your donations to support our programs are appreciated); admission to the Oregon Coast Aquarium is at the usual ticket prices.

Download a .pdf flyer about the event here.

Looking for a way to beat the heat?

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questforblog

Questing

… and learn a few things in the process? Head over to the central Oregon Coast, pick up an Oregon Coast Quests guidebook and head off in a puzzle-solving search for clues to the region’s natural, cultural and historical treasures.

Now in its third year – with several all-new Quests – Oregon Coast Quests is an all-ages learning adventure. Using the guidebook as your treasure map, find a series of clues that lead to a hidden Quest box – and have fun learning along the way. Once you find the box, sign its guest book, use the hidden rubber stamp to mark your victory, and tuck it all back away for the next adventurers to find.

Questing was born out of the 150-year old “letterboxing” tradition that originated in southwest England. In recent years, a high-tech version called geocaching, which uses GPS units to locate cached treasures, has become popular in the US and elsewhere.

Oregon Coast Quests are simpler, requiring nothing more than the Quest book and good powers of observation.  The 2009-10 Quest book contains 23 Quests scattered all over Lincoln County, including eight brand-new ones and one written in Spanish.

Read more and learn where you can buy the Oregon Coast Quests

Another El Nino year

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El Nino graphicWith last week’s NOAA announcement that El Niño is back, scientists, resource managers and coastal dwellers are preparing for a winter of increasing storm activity and potentially diminished ocean productivity in the Pacific – but a possibly milder-than-average Atlantic hurricane season and potentially beneficial rain in the arid American southwest.

El Niño, or the southern oscillation, is a climate phenomenon that occurs every two to five years and has significant effects on global weather, ocean conditions and marine fisheries. While its relative frequency makes El Niño among the most-studied and better-understood large-scale phenomena among climate scientists, it can be a mystery to the rest of us.

Oregon Sea Grant can help unravel that mystery through its short publication, El Niño. Profusely illustrated and written for lay audiences, the eight-page, color publication explains how ocean currents, wind and weather patterns come together in the Equatorial Pacific to create El Niño conditions that affect weather and fisheries from South America to Alaska.

El Niño can be downloaded free of charge from the Oregon Sea Grant Web site:

For more in-depth information, visit NOAA’s El Niño page.