A common chemistry

     Humans are linked to the ocean by a common chemistry. Our blood, the life-sustaining fluid of our bodies, bears a similar chemical composition to seawater - the life-sustaining fluid of the Earth.
     The bond between people and the sea goes beyond the physiological similarity. The sea touches our lives - all of our lives - every day, whether we realize it or not.
     At the most basic level, the ocean provides humans with food and water - much of the freshwater that falls in the form of rain comes from evaporated seawater (see: Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne for dramatic evidence of the water cycle). Beyond the simple needs, humans extract a variety of different, commercially valuable materials (oil and natural gas readily come to mind) from the sea and then use it as a watery highway to deliver the goods around the globe.
     It is also the single largest source of biological diversity on the planet. The ocean is home to far more species of plants and animals than is the land, making it a prime location to discover new pharmaceuticals and other chemical compounds.
     "Humans are connected to the ocean," says Dr. Allen Dearry, associate director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). "We depend upon it for our livelihood, for recreation, for our climate and for biological cycles that take place around the world."
     We gladly reap the benefits of the ocean without giving much in return. Humans repay their bounty through increased pollution — mostly in the nearshore zone — accelerating coastal development and over-consumption of marine products.
     Our relationship with the ocean is more parasitic than symbiotic. We have paid the price in the form of contaminated waters, degraded coastal ecosystems and declining natural resources — a situation that has given rise to a relatively new scientific focus known by the catch phrase "oceans and human health."
     Interest in oceans and human health has come to the forefront, says Dearry, because "we have become more aware of the need to examine the interface between marine processes and human populations."
     It is an interface that seems to have been forgotten or ignored over time as human populations moved away from tribal cultures to become more technologically advanced — more "civilized." Many people today either do not see themselves as part of the surrounding ecosystem or choose to ignore that fact. Instead, they see themselves living outside the ecosystem as passive spectators instead of being active participants whose actions have consequences for the rest of their environment.
     In essence, people have become "ecoblivious."
     The federal government believes the field is important enough that several of its agencies are spending millions of dollars exploring the relationship between the world ocean and human health. In one example, the NIEHS and the National Science Foundation (NSF) have combined to spend $25 million over the next five years to fund four Centers for Oceans and Human Health (COHH).
     The centers are located at the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and the University of Miami. The COHH will bring together experts in biomedical and oceanographic sciences for the first time to study the effects of harmful algal blooms, marine pathogens and the ocean’s vast potential as a source for new drugs.
     Historically, NSF invests money in researching the basic science of the ocean — its biology, chemistry and physics — while the NIEHS usually funds research on health-related marine issues, like harmful algal blooms.
     "What has not taken place previously was the idea of integrating the two fields — how can you bring oceanographers and biomedical scientists together to examine the entire scope of oceans and human health, from what is responsible for the transport of pathogens through the development of better detection systems for them, on up to the epidemiology and exposure assessment that is associated with examining their harmful health effect," says Dearry
     The COHH will provide an interdisciplinary approach that Dearry believes will make their research "more synergistic and focused as a whole than it would be as separate efforts by the two agencies. Both agencies view the centers as a good first step. They will provide a nucleus to grow that field and the research effort."
     The magnitude of human-ocean interaction is so large that even volumes of work could not fully explain the intricacies involved. What follows is a look at a few of the ways humans affect the ocean’s health, and vice versa.

Cry a chemical river

     Dr. John Jacob admits that his quick take on the relationship between humans, their health and the ocean is simplistic, probably overstated and definitely a bit extreme.
     "We pollute the fish, we eat them and we die," he says tongue-in-cheek.
     But the environmental quality specialist with the Texas Marine Advisory Service believes his catchy sound bite captures the gist of human potential for contaminating the marine environment — and eventually harming ourselves — by contaminating freshwater tributaries.
     Through known and unknown sources, or point and non-point sources as they are called, man-made water pollution is one of the oldest and most fundamental ways humans have impacted marine ecosystems.
     According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, one out of every three lakes and nearly one-quarter of the rivers in this nation contain enough pollution that people should limit or avoid eating fish caught by recreational and sport anglers.
     Pollutants like mercury, dioxins, PCBs, pesticides, arsenic, copper and lead have been found in the nation’s lakes and rivers for many years and their health risks to animals, both terrestrial and aquatic, are well documented.
     Scientists have also found a new and somewhat surprising class of contaminants in our freshwater supplies. Prescription drugs like Prozac®, Viagra®, antibiotics and painkillers, all most likely excreted by users through urine or flushed as pills into the sewage system, are passing through wastewater treatment plants and on downstream to the marine environment.
     So far the drugs have been found in small concentrations — less than therapeutic levels. What, if any, effect the drugs have on fish and other aquatic life is the focus of current research.
     For many years the Houston Ship Channel was Texas’ poster child for polluted waterways. A popular (but unconfirmed) story goes that an unidentified state official struck a match and threw it into the ship channel’s waters in the early 1970s, and the resulting flames proved his contention that it was one of the most polluted bodies of water in the world.
     As far back as the 1940s and 1950s, riders on the Lynchburg Ferry, which crosses the ship channel near the San Jacinto Monument, were not allowed to smoke during the ride for fear an errant match or cigarette might start a blaze on the water. There are also credible accounts from the 1960s and 1970s of fires erupting in the heavily industrialized portion of the ship channel. One incident, in 1966, took the life of a shipyard worker.
     The good news is that the situation has drastically improved. As Jacob puts it, "The Houston Ship Channel may not be fishable or swimmable, but at least it’s no longer flammable."
     The state, and in particular the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), has gone a long way toward lessening industrial pollution by switching from site-based management to watershed management, even though it makes the permitting process a little more difficult for the agency. Under the old system, TCEQ focused on individual discharges from a particular site. While that site might be able to meet its permitted discharge standards, the cumulative impact from all of the individual sites in a watershed might be high enough to hurt the bay or estuary at the end of a watershed. Watershed management gives regulators a way to look at the total discharges into a watershed.
     With industrial pollution somewhat in check, regulators and environmentalists are turning more of their attention to runoff pollution, or non-point source pollution. Jacob prefers the term runoff pollution because it is much more descriptive of the problem. Runoff pollution is the result of human activity on land being washed into tributaries with the runoff water from storms. It is now one of the primary cause of water pollution, according to the final report recently issued by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy
     The Exxon Valdez spilled about 35,000 tons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. The Ocean Project study estimates that 15 times more oil than the Exxon Valdez spilled finds its way into the sea annually from street runoff and individual dumping into municipal storm drains nationwide. The study doesn’t include the tons of fertilizer, pesticides and animal waste that ends up in the nation’s rivers from commercial agriculture operations and from Joe Average Citizen trying to maintain a healthy lawn.
     Another study showed that more than half of the runoff pollution in the Mississippi River comes from agricultural land north of where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi. Scientists blame the high nutrient load in the Mississippi for causing the hypoxic zone, better known as the "Dead Zone," around the mouth of the Mississippi and stretching into Texas waters during peak occurrences.
     Now add in the runoff from urban areas, where a rule of thumb is that homeowners use 10 times more fertilizer per acre than do farmers. Human waste ultimately ends up in the rivers as well.
     An increasing population moving into the coastal zone only makes matters worse. More people mean more development and more paved surfaces that are impervious to rain, thus creating more runoff. More people means more lawns are fertilized and more toilets are flushed.
     Compounding the problem is the fact that in Texas one agency regulates the agricultural community while another regulates water quality and still a third regulates wastewater coming from oil and gas rigs.
     Education is the basis for any long-term reduction in runoff pollution. Humans need to learn that "what you do is connected to the water, what you spray on the ground will come back to get you," chides Jacob. "It comes back to you through what you eat, through decreased fishing stocks and decreased productivity in the bays."
     The average landowner may not think the scant amount of fertilizer or other synthetic chemicals he spreads makes much of a difference. That, says Jacob, is a common misperception.
     "Your little landscape is a piece of the big puzzle, it is a piece of the watershed. Your contribution may be a little bitty one, but it is not just you," explains Jacob. "Everybody on your street is contributing. Everybody in your neighborhood and everybody in your development is contributing, and you start multiplying that across the entire city and pretty soon you are going from milligrams of a contaminant to pounds to tons."
     Synthetic chemicals, sometimes referred to as xenocompounds, have caused a number of severe problems in wildlife across the country and more than a bit of controversy — in the form of substances called endocrine disruptors — as far as human health goes. Writer Rachel Carson first brought widespread public attention to the dangers of xenocompounds — in particular the insecticide DDT — in her groundbreaking 1962 book Silent Spring.
     DDT was hailed as a wonder chemical when it was developed in 1939. Unlike most of its contemporaries, which were each effective against just a few types of insects, DDT was powerful enough to kill hundreds of species at once. It was used extensively during World War II to rid South Pacific Islands of malaria-carrying mosquitoes and to kill disease-causing lice in Europe.
     DDT became available for civilian use in 1945 and quickly became one of the most popular insecticides for large-scale agricultural use.
     In Silent Spring, Carson described how DDT entered the food chain and ultimately accumulated in the fatty tissues of animals, including human beings. The book’s title was a reference to the devastating toll the pesticide took on birds and a warning that the nation could be heading for a springtime void of avian songs.
     DDT possessed chemical qualities that mimicked hormones in the birds, altering their reproductive systems. The pesticide did not kill the birds outright. Instead, it caused them to lay eggs with extremely thin shells. The shells cracked in the nest because they could not support the weight of the embryo inside.
     DDT is just one of a laundry list of compounds with the ability to fool an animal’s endocrine system, leading them to be dubbed endocrine disruptors. The most studied types of endocrine disrupters are chemicals that imitate and affect estrogen function.
     Estrogen is produced by both males and females, but is far more abundant in females and is critical to their development, particularly their reproductive systems. Estrogen and estrogen like — or estrogenic — substances come from both natural and synthetic sources. There are estrogenic compounds in virtually every type of plant. Soy and clover, for instance, contain high concentrations of natural estrogens.
     Animals, primarily livestock, introduce the natural estrogens into the watershed by eating the plants and then excreting the estrogen in their waste. Female animals produce their own estrogens, which are also excreted through their waste.
     Synthetic estrogens, also called xenoestrogens, are found in a number of compounds commonly used by humans. For example, the chemical bisphenol A is produced in huge quantities for use in manufacturing plastics. It finds its way into the environment as a contaminant after leaching out of the plastic.
     Once in the environment, estrogenic compounds pose a great danger to some wildlife species.
     British scientists conducted a study to find out what was causing feminization of male fish in several of the country’s rivers. Feminization means exactly what it sounds like — making male fish physiology (and in some cases behavior) more like a female’s. Without two distinct sexes, the fish cannot reproduce.
     Scientists suspected that nonylphenol, a xenoestrogen used in plastics, cleaning products and personal care products, was entering the rivers through sewage outflows and affecting the fish.
     What they found was that the damage was being done by estrogens commonly used in birth control pills and those produced naturally by livestock.
     "It turns out the main problem in many British Rivers was women and animals going to the bathroom and natural estrogens were getting into the rivers," says Dr. Stephen Safe, distinguished professor of toxicology at Texas A&M University.
     A decade ago, endocrine disruptors were seen as THE looming environmental threat to human health based on the havoc they wreaked in wildlife. "A lot of people took the wildlife populations as sentinels for what might happen in humans," says Safe, who has done extensive research on endocrine disruptors.
     Scientists and the general public alike blamed endocrine disruptors for increasing breast cancer in women and decreasing sperm counts in men.
     Safe says he has never questioned the damage endocrine disruptors cause to wildlife, but the danger cannot be extrapolated to humans.
     "Humans are exposed to huge quantities of estrogens in our diet. They are natural. They occur in fruits and nuts and vegetables. They induce estrogenic responses, just like the synthetic ones, and they are in far higher concentrations than any trace contaminant in food," says Safe. "My question was, how can these trace amounts of xenoestrogens overcome the huge natural intake of estrogens that we get everyday?"
     To support his view, Safe points to several studies done in the past 10 years that found huge differences in sperm counts between geographic locations in the same country. For instance, one study showed that sperm counts in California were almost half what they were in New York. A Canadian study found up to a three-fold difference in counts between locations.
     Yet estrogenic contaminant levels are fairly constant across the study areas, says Safe.
     The evidence is even more compelling that estrogenic contaminants do not cause increased incidences of breast cancer, says Safe.
     Japan, one of the most heavily contaminated countries in the world, has a very low incidence of breast cancer. "If you take women from low-incidence countries like Japan and move them to Europe or (the United States), within a generation or two they have the same incidence of breast cancer that we do, so it is something about our lifestyle, not contaminants," says Safe.
     Since Carson first sounded her alarm in the early 1960s, DDT and some other proven xenoestrogens have been banned in the United States and the residual contaminant levels are decreasing in nature. However, humans have not stopped making plastics or pesticides.
     "If we are using a chemical and ban it, like we did with DDT, we replace it with something that is presumably better or more environmentally acceptable," says Safe. "That doesn’t mean it won’t come back to bite us, too."

The smallest factors

     In July 2004, two fishermen waded into Texas’ coastal waters not far from Port O’Conner on nearly the same day in nearly the same place, and each had an open wound. Both men ran into a particularly nasty type of bacteria common in saltwater and paid a price for giving it easy entry to their bodies.
     One man lost a lot of tissue between his knee and his foot — tissue that had to be removed due to infection.
     The other man lost portions of both of his legs to amputation, and ultimately lost his life.
     Human health in the coastal zone is sometimes impacted by the smallest aquatic organisms, like pathogens and harmful phytoplankton.
     All manner of infectious microorganisms — diphtheria, cholera, legionnaires disease and botulism to name a few — use water as a convenient way to spread.
     "Propagation of human infection by contact with water has been the single founding problem for the field of sanitary engineering," says Dr. George Ward, associate director of the Center for Research in Water Resources at The University of Texas. "That was the original concern of sanitary engineers, if we turn back the clock 100 years. It is probably worth observing that the ocean becomes a mediator in this process only for those circumstances in which the people, the source of the pollutants, or the receptors of the pollutants are close to land in estuaries and the coastal zone.
     "The exposure of people in the open ocean is very small, limited to sailors and the lot," Ward continues. "In the open ocean people are far enough from the sources of contamination that generally those contaminants are diluted or processed."
     The two fishermen noted above — and an average of 34 others each year in Texas— run into what is arguably the nastiest bug in the water. Vibrio vulnificus is a bacterium belonging to the same family as those that cause cholera. It lives in warm brackish seawater and is part of a group of Vibrios that are called "halophilic" because they require salt to live.
     Temperature, and not humans, seems to be responsible for the population of the bacteria at a given time. The level of Vibrio vulnificus reaches its peak during the summer months. Human actions do not appear to influence the amount of Vibrio vulnificus present in coastal waters.
     In about half of the 36 cases of Vibrio vulnificus infection reported to the Texas Department of Health (TDH) each year, the bacteria enter through an open wound. The other 18 or so people are infected by eating raw contaminated seafood, particularly oysters.
     Oysters are filter feeders that strain their home waters for food. Bacteria are also ingested and get stored in the oyster’s tissues.
     Vibrio vulnificus is not a commonly attributed source of infection, but it is believed to be underreported. Healthy people infected with the bacteria through contaminated seafood may suffer from vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain — symptoms often confused with other gastrointestinal disorders. Many of the victims do not seek medical help.
     Vibrio vulnificus is most dangerous to immunocompromised people, including those with chronic liver disease, diabetes or whose immune systems have been compromised by cancer treatments. In these people, the bug can infect the bloodstream, causing severe fever, decreased blood pressure, blistering skin lesions and death in about half the cases.
     In Texas, Vibrio kills three to six people each year, primarily those who ingested the bacteria. Deaths caused by Vibrio infection through the skin are much more rare, says Dr. Linda Gaul, an epidemiologist with the TDH.
     Most Vibrio infections can be avoided if people use common sense. Coastal waters are full of bacteria, not just Vibrio vulnificus, so people who have open wounds should not go swimming or otherwise expose the wounds to water. A wound, says Gaul, means more than just a scratch, but there is no hard and fast rule for how deep it must be before it is in danger of a vibrio infection.
     Anyone who suffers a wound while in the water should get out and wash it with fresh water and soap. If an infection sets in, seek medical care.
     "People tend to ignore it and think it will go away," says Gaul. "We’re not talking about people who get a scratch in the morning and are dead by noon. We’re talking about a condition that becomes invasive and life threatening when someone should have gone to seek medical care sooner."
     The best way to prevent the food-borne form of Vibrio infection is to avoid eating raw shellfish. Cooking or freezing kills the bacteria, according to Gaul.
     Harmful algal blooms (HABs) carry with them their own threat to human health that is not so easily avoided. HABs sicken people through toxins that are not affected by cooking or freezing.
     Each year there are about 60,000 reported cases of illness blamed on HABs in the United States but, like Vibrio-related sickness, the incidences are severely underreported. Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control estimate that the reported cases of HAB exposure represent about 5 percent to 10 percent of the actual episodes.
     "People have an acute short-term experience of digestive or respiratory distress and don’t bother to follow up with their physicians, so a lot of those cases are undetected," says NIEHS’ Dr. Allen Dearry.
     In contrast to Vibrio vulnificus, HABs are greatly influenced by human actions. Scientists have gathered an impressive amount of evidence showing human activities that result in higher levels of nutrients in the water have an effect on determining which species of phytoplankton tend to bloom and where, says Dr. Ed Buskey, a zooplankton ecologist at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas.
     "The most convincing evidence of human impacts is the increasing frequency of red tides," he says. "It is well documented that the numbers of HABs, particularly toxic dinoflagellate blooms, have increased in the past few decades. Most of the other (non-harmful) species of phytoplankton are rarely documented on a routine basis. There really aren’t that many monitoring programs for any of the other species. The only ones we really keep track of are the ones that cause fish kills, shellfish area closures and things like that."
     Of the hundreds of species of phytoplankton in the Gulf of Mexico, only a dozen or so cause problems, says Buskey. The best known species — or most feared, depending on your point of view — is the red tide-causing Karenia brevis.
     Red tides have been known to humans at least since biblical times. With a simple touch of Aaron’s walking stick, the waters of the mighty Nile River turned blood red, as the Bible story goes. A passage from Exodus describes how fish died and the water became undrinkable. The scene made for dramatic theater in the epic film The Ten Commandments. A wave of bright red swept across the water as God, through Moses and Aaron, sent the first of ten plagues across Egypt in an effort to convince Pharaoh to free the Israelites from slavery.
     Less biblically, some people believe the story is the earliest written description of a red tide.
     "There are reports that the Pacific Northwest Indians knew it was unsafe to eat shellfish when they spotted discoloration in the water," Buskey adds. "That was at a time when man’s impact would have been small."
     Among the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, Florida is most often hit by red tide. There it is almost an annual occurrence. If a bloom occurs in Texas’ waters, it is usually between August and February. The most significant Texas red tide in recent years spread 300 miles, from Sabine Pass to Mexico, between August and December 2000. It eventually made its way far into Galveston Bay, forcing the TDH for the first time in history to ban oyster harvesting there due to an HAB.
     The 2000 red tide also scared tourists away from the coast and prompted many people to stop eating seafood. Galveston alone is estimated to have lost $18 million in revenues from the HAB.
     Red tides would occur naturally without help from human impacts, but the blooms would not happen as frequently, says Buskey, adding that the trend toward increasing HABs is more than just a case of better detection methods or more people looking for signs of a red tide.
     "When we look at indicators of red tide, like fish kills, there are some good records," Buskey explains. "In Texas, there was a red tide bloom that caused a massive fish kill in 1935. There was a smaller fish kill in the 1960s and another big one in 1986. We’ve had three or four in the last 10 years. It is a small data set, but there seems to be a trend of increasing frequency."
     The toxin produced by Texas red tides causes humans harm in a couple of ways — both non-fatal. Most people who get too close to a red tide experience breathing problems and stinging eyes associated with the algae’s toxin being released into the air. K. brevis is a relatively fragile organism. Churning water and wave action common in the surf zone near beaches causes the algae to rupture and release its toxin, which wafts toward shore with the sea breeze.
     The aerosol can affect anyone but seems to cause the most problems for the elderly and people who already suffer from respiratory ailments. In some extreme cases, the most susceptible victims must be hospitalized.
     People can also consume the toxin through contaminated seafood, usually oysters, resulting in neurotoxic shellfish poisoning. Symptoms can include numbness, tingling in the mouth, arms and legs, and upset stomach.
     Human impacts on the phytoplankton community do not extend much past the coastal zone, says Buskey, and certainly not out into the deep sea. But these impacts, in the form of excess nitrogen, phosphorous and other nutrients, are blamed for inducing annual blooms of otherwise non-harmful algal species — resulting in one of the more famous marine phenomenon.
     The hypoxic zone, which appears in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi River Delta each summer, is an area of extremely low dissolved oxygen that is incapable of supporting most marine life. Depending on weather, sea state and the level of nutrients in the water, the so-called "Dead Zone" can stretch as far as the Texas coast. At its historic zenith in 2001 and 2002, the hypoxic zone exceeded 22,000 square kilometers — an area larger than the state of Massachusetts.
     Animals caught in the hypoxic zone either get out or die.
     Excess nutrients, particularly nitrogen, are believed to wash into the Mississippi River mainly from large commercial agricultural operations in the Midwest. When they reach the Gulf of Mexico, the nutrients feed naturally occurring phytoplankton and prompt them to reproduce.
     Normally, wind churns the Gulf’s waters, mixing saltwater with freshwater from the Mississippi River. This churning action serves to continually replenish dissolved oxygen in the water.
     During the summer, however, the weather is usually warm and dry, and the water tends to be calm. Without the mixing action of the wind, the lighter freshwater floats on the surface of the Gulf creating a condition called stratification.
     Saltwater trapped beneath the freshwater layer is cut off from getting an atmospheric re-supply of oxygen, so the dissolved oxygen level in the water drops. Meanwhile, algae in the bloom begin to die and sink to the Gulf floor, where much of the remaining oxygen is used as the algae decompose, creating the hypoxic zone.
     The condition continues until something stirs up the water column again — usually autumn winds or storms.
     Now consider for a moment storms, or climate in general. Do humans impact weather? If so, how does it affect the ocean and ultimately human health?
     Popular thinking, backed by increasing scientific research, suggests human activities increase the level of so-called greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, resulting in global warming.
     "The ocean is one of the biggest buffers for carbon dioxide," says Ward. "The huge concentrations of phytoplankton distributed around the world ocean absorb enormous amounts of CO2 and anything that affects those phytoplankton concentrations, whether positively or negatively, has the potential of impacting the CO2 in the atmosphere.
     "Consider the high latitude waters in both the Arctic and Antarctic regions that support massive blooms of phytoplankton in the austral and boreal summers; in fact, that’s where the bulk of a lot of the oceanic production takes place. So the changes that are being monitored in the Arctic and the Antarctic — loss of sea ice, exposure of a lot of regions that used to be frozen and are now not — have the potential for influencing the locations and species of these phytoplankton."
     Carrying his thinking a little further, Ward speculates that "if, in fact global warming is occurring, then one of the cauldrons of disease, namely the tropics, is going to expand. Presumably, we will see more people in traditionally higher latitudes being exposed to tropical diseases.
     "There have been a number of diseases that have flourished in tropical or near-tropical climes in coastal environments. The vector may be a mosquito, which is essentially terrestrial, or it could be some other sort of tropical bug that needs access to water," he continues. "Look at yellow fever and malaria, which have been plagues in tropical areas for years. If that climate encroaches even a few degrees farther north, we could see outbreaks of those diseases in latitudes that have normally been immune to them. I don’t think we’re going to see Norway succumbing to a yellow fever outbreak, but we could certainly see it further north and south than has historically been the case.
     "If we interpret human health broadly, then marine hazards should be considered — things like hurricanes, floods and the like. Do people affect these?" Ward wonders. "If they do, could it increase the frequency of storms in general and tropical storms in particular? It is an answer that will affect humans."
     Some people argue that global warming will raise the temperature of the ocean as well as the air, creating more fuel for hurricanes, which are often described as heat engines. Logically, hurricanes will become more frequent and intense.
     "Welcome to a world of more extreme tropical events," Ward laughs slightly. "If that argument is true, then that establishes a direct connection between impacts of global warming and impacts upon human health. Forget about sea level rise. Think about having several of these (Hurricane) Franceses or Charleys every year pounding one part of the coast or the other."

Get out of the way

     More than a million people were warned to flee the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and the Florida panhandle in early September as Hurricane Ivan — dubbed "Ivan the Terrible" — churned toward the Mississippi-Alabama border with winds reaching 135 miles an hour.
     Meanwhile, weary and water-logged residents of the Florida peninsula breathed a sigh of relief that Hurricane Ivan, the third large tropical cyclone to hit the southeastern United States in less than a month, did not follow Hurricanes Charley and Frances across the heart of the state.
     All three hurricanes were Category 4 (wind speeds 131-155 miles per hour) storms on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale when they made landfall. The Saffir-Simpson Scale goes only to Category 5 (wind speeds greater than 155 miles per hour) and any hurricane above Category 3 (wind speeds 111-130 miles per hour) is considered a major storm.
     Ivan is estimated to have caused $15 billion in damage in the United States and, if true, makes him the second costliest hurricane in the country’s history (trailing only Category 5 Hurricane Andrew, who in 1992 caused $26.5 million in damage).
     Let’s not forget Hurricane Jeanne, who killed more than 1,000 people when she battered Haiti, and Hurricane Karl, another Category 4 storm that disrupted only shipping lanes in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
     A total of eight tropical cyclones reached at least tropical storm strength in August, breaking the previous record of seven set in 1933 and 1995. The 12 named storms that have formed so far in 2004 as of press time is three times the normal number for the same time period during an average year.
     This kind of frenzied storm activity must be proof that some factor, like global warming, is changing tropical weather patterns, right?
     "It may seem an unusual cycle to most folks because we have come out of a couple of decades of relatively inactive hurricane seasons in the 1970s and 1980s," says Dr. Naomi Surgi, Advanced Hurricane Project leader with the National Weather Service’s Environmental Modeling Center. "But if you go back to the 1940s, 50s and 60s, those were decades of very active seasons. The 1990s were back to being very active again, and such with the current decade as well, so we may be in the middle of a couple of decades with a lot of activity."
     During the 1940s and 1950s, Florida was hit by 15 hurricanes, adds Dr. Kerry Emanuel, professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "From 1970 to 1989, only four hurricanes hit the state."
     Florida pays for its highly desirable sunshine and moderate climate by lying in the middle of a path favored by hurricanes. Between 1900 and 1996, Florida was struck by more hurricanes — 57 of the 158 storms that made landfall in the United States — than any other state. Of the 158 storms, 64 were Category 3 or higher, and 24 of those hit Florida.
     Texas was second on the list, registering hits by 36 storms, 15 of those major.
     Surgi believes decadal peaks of active and inactive storm activity are controlled by very large-scale circulation patterns in the ocean that affect the atmosphere. "They are part of the natural variability, they have nothing to do with human influences," she says.
     Whether humans have any impact at all on severe storm frequency and intensity remains to be seen. There is a relatively small community of researchers who have broken the topic into three manageable pieces: average and peak hurricane intensity; hurricane frequency; and the average track taken by the storms.
     Average and peak hurricane intensity is determined by a storm’s wind speed. On this issue, scientists have reached a consensus, says Emanuel, one of the nation’s leading hurricane researchers.
     "One does expect the average and peak intensity of hurricanes to increase with tropical ocean temperature," he says. "Of course, that opens the question of whether the tropical ocean temperature rises due to global warming. If you had a 2 degree centigrade mean temperature increase of tropical oceans, there would be a noticeable increase in wind speeds in hurricanes. Not a huge increase, but one that is noticeable and measurable.
     "It has to be said that so far, until this time, there has not been enough change in the ocean temperature in the tropics to detect such a signal. It is something that we probably have to wait another 50 years at least to see."
     The topic of human impacts on storm frequency is "still wide open," says Emanuel. "We don’t really understand what controls the frequency of hurricanes in the present climate. My sense is that there will be a lot of progress on this topic in the next five years. I think we are starting to close in on the causes."
     There has been almost no research on the paths that hurricanes travel, he says, because that is the kind of information that existing large-scale climate models should be able to determine.
     Hurricanes move more or less with the prevailing wind currents around and above them, "just like a cork in a stream," says Emanuel. "Climate models theoretically predict those kinds of winds and so they should be able to say something about hurricane tracks, but you have to believe the climate models, which is a big IF."
     Since 1900, Atlantic hurricanes have cut a swath of destruction across the Western Hemisphere, causing billions of dollars in damage and more than 71,000 deaths, according to figures published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
     These monster storms batter coastlines, destroy buildings, cause massive flooding and generally tear up the landscape with their incredible power, which NOAA scientists say can equal the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs during the life of just one storm.
     Despite the size and power of hurricanes (and in an amazing show of hubris), people devise schemes every year for diverting or destroying the storms. Many of the plans have been suggested to NOAA officials repeatedly and include:
     •   Seeding the storms with silver iodide.
     •   Placing a substance on the ocean surface to prevent evaporation.
     •   Cooling the surface waters with icebergs or deep ocean water.
     •   Nuking them.
     Many of the ideas focus on weakening a storm’s eye wall, the circular boundary around the hurricane’s eye featuring the highest surface winds, causing the storm to become disorganized and eventually break apart.
     It is worth looking at a few of the ideas because they tell us a couple of things about humans: We fail to appreciate the size and power of tropical cyclones, and our ecoblivion prevents us from considering the effect these plans will have on marine ecosystems.
     For a couple of decades, NOAA carried out Project Stormfury, an attempt to weaken hurricanes by dropping silver iodide into the rainbands of a storm. Silver iodide has been used for years to try to coax rain out of clouds in drought-parched areas of the world. When used on a hurricane, the theory was that silver iodide would help the thunderstorms in the rainbands to grow at the expense of the eye wall.
     In practice the cloud seeding did not work or, if it did work, the results were so insignificant that they could not be seen or measured.
     Researchers tried to develop a liquid that could be spread over the ocean surface and prevent evaporation. Again, this is an interesting idea theoretically because it would rob the hurricane of the massive amounts of water it needs to fuel itself.
     The idea died when no one could find a substance that would stay together in the rough seas of a tropical cyclone.
     Since hurricanes run on heat drawn from warm water, the common sense thing to do is cool the ocean around a storm and take its fuel. Ideas along this line proposed towing icebergs from the arctic zone or pumping cold water from the ocean’s depths to its surface.
     Without going into too much detail, the idea fails on scale alone. By NOAA’s calculations, we would have to cool about 24,000 square miles of ocean during any given 24-hour period to cover every potential track a storm might take, and that does not take into account the lead time we would need to find the icebergs and tow them into place.
     The pumping plan is an even larger undertaking. To make it work, we would have to pre-position sufficient numbers of pumps in a grid comprising all possible storm tracks. For the mainland United States alone (from Cape Hatteras, N.C., to Brownsville) the grid would have to cover 528,000 square miles.
     Now consider what the plan would mean to the marine ecosystem. Suddenly cooling the surface of the ocean would most likely kill much of the sea life in the affected area.
     By far the most outlandish proposal, and one of the most frequently submitted to NOAA by some of the more eccentric members of the general public, calls for using a nuclear warhead to simply blow a hurricane apart. Forget for a moment that the plan calls for using a weapon of mass destruction. The main difficulty with using any explosive to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. Hurricanes already release enough energy per hour to supply the world’s electrical needs for one hour.
     One nuclear warhead might not even cause a hurricane to flinch, let alone disappear. On top of that, the fallout would spread quickly along with the tradewinds and contaminate large areas of land and ocean, causing untold environmental damage.
     Hurricanes are bad enough without being radioactive, too.
     The aforementioned plans notwithstanding, diverting a hurricane may not be entirely out of the question in the near future, says Emanuel, "although it sounds very far fetched."
     The idea, set forth by atmospheric researcher Ross Hoffman in a February 2002 article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, takes advantage of the theory that the atmosphere is a chaotic place and, as such, may be sensitive to small disturbances.
     If scientists are able to develop sufficiently precise models, it might be possible to introduce a series of man-made atmospheric disturbances to achieve a desired effect, like changing wind currents in a way that steer a hurricane out to sea.
     "It is an intriguing notion which in principle should work," Emanuel believes.
     Having the ability to control hurricanes leads to the inevitable ethical question: Should we control hurricanes?
     "In recent years we’ve come to appreciate that hurricanes may play a very critical role in the whole climate system in their capacity for mixing up the upper 100 meters or 200 meters of the ocean," says Emanuel. "We look at this modification problem not so much as a routine weather modification as we do disaster aversion. Most hurricanes don’t get very strong and most stay at sea, so you wouldn’t be threatened by them.
     "Another way to look at it is you wouldn’t go out and shoot all of the bears in the woods," he says. "You’d only shoot the one that was about to pounce on you."

Watery drug store

     It is easy to dwell on the pessimistic aspects of oceans and human health — pollution, disease, coastal hazards — but Dearry believes discussion on the subject must include the positive aspects of the issue, most notably the sea’s vast potential as a source of new therapeutic drugs.
     "The oceans have a greater biodiversity than is found on land, but it has been virtually untapped in terms of exploration for pharmaceuticals or biologically active compound discovery," he says. "The seas are an incredible source of potentially beneficial compounds for applications to human health that we are just now beginning to examine."
     Whether on land or in the sea, species diversity equals potential when it comes to new pharmaceutical discoveries. The greater the number of species, the greater the chance that one of them will yield a viable new drug to fight cancer or other malady.
     Around a coral reef alone there are sometimes 1,000 or so different species in a square meter.
     "Species and abundance of unique, genetic life forms translates at the molecular level to the ability of those life forms to produce novel organic molecules that somehow make them better adapted to survive," says Dr. Bill Fenical, director of the Center for Marine Biotechnology and Biomedicine at the University of California-San Diego. "Most of those molecules are defensive agents and things that cause predators to swim away.
     "What we basically know is that life in the sea and life on land have to adapt to survive in a hostile environment, or they will be eaten. They do so partly by using chemical means," he continues. "You know if you go out in an onion field, all you smell are sulfur compounds and there is nothing eating those onions. They are highly protected by their chemical compounds. The same thing is true in the ocean. We know all of these compounds are being produced, but we don’t know how to use them. What we tend to do is to ask questions about what is the societal need? What kinds of chemical substances could we discover that would be effective against cancer? What are our societal needs? Cancer has never gone away, it is of huge importance and it is killing millions of people every year and we don’t have a good arsenal of drugs to treat it."
     People have looked to natural products — derived mainly from plants — for therapeutic substances for at least 4,000 years.
     "As you come up to more modern times, up to the late 19th century, for the first time morphine was extracted and purified as a white powder and sold as a drug," Fenical explains. "That was really how the pharmaceutical industry started. They extracted materials from nature in the beginning, found out there were things they could use and sell, and the pharmaceutical industry had its crude beginnings in the early 20th century."
     The pivotal event in the history of the pharmaceutical industry was probably the discovery of penicillin.
     "Prior to that time, it was quite common to perish from simple pneumonia or one of a number of infectious diseases that plagued society for millennia," says Fenical. "With the discovery of penicillin, for the first time physicians were able to treat infectious diseases with drugs and cure these diseases."
     Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident in 1928 while he was studying infectious bacteria. Like other researches of his day, Fleming grew the bacteria on culture plates. At the time it was not unusual for the plates to become contaminated with fungi. Fungi produced spores that became airborne and settled on most surfaces in the laboratory.
     One of Fleming’s culture plates was contaminated with the fungi Penicilliumnotatum. Fleming noticed that the bacteria would not grow around the penicillium. By sheer luck, he had discovered that the fungi excreted a substance as a defensive mechanism that killed bacteria.
     Fleming proved the old research adage that the four most important words heard in a laboratory are not, "Eureka, I’ve found it," but, "My, isn’t that strange."
     By 1940 the pharmaceutical industry had taken hold in the United States and researchers were discovering and developing drugs derived mainly from microscopic organisms living in the soil. The discoveries included the antibiotics actinomycin and streptomycin.
     For a period of time, drugs derived from chemicals produced by microbes were the most prolific source of new pharmaceutical products, says Fenical. The industry expanded when researchers turned their attention to the historic ethnomedical source of therapeutic substances — plants — to find cancer-fighting drugs.
     Research into marine-derived pharmaceuticals began in earnest during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Pioneers in the field began to recognize that the ocean and its inhabitants possessed biologically important properties and produced compounds that were very different from those found in terrestrial organisms.
     "These were certainly chemically exciting new discoveries," Fenical says.
     In retrospect, people should have been exploring the ocean’s vast biodiversity for new therapeutic compounds all along, says Fenical, but he understands why they did not.
     "Obviously, people lived in the terrestrial environment and they knew it the best," he says. "Most early societies were frightened to death of the ocean. People today are frightened to death of the ocean. Examining the ocean is not as simple as wandering through a nice rain forest with a little basket putting leaves in it. There is risk from diving accidents and hostile marine animals. People, therefore, are frightened of that. It is less facilitating to get into the marine discovery area."
     Between the mid-1980s and 1990, the potential for marine pharmaceuticals had captured the attention of many of the world’s academically based researchers. At the same time, however, pharmaceutical companies began to switch their attention from natural products to synthetic compounds, which could be produced economically in bulk, says Fenical.
     "The industry still is not very effective at developing natural products," he says. "They’ve lost that ability because they’ve changed direction and went to things like synthetic chemistry, making thousands of compounds at one time. They felt they could do that better. However, natural products are really a proven source of drugs. About half of all the drugs today are natural products or derived from natural products by making some modifications."
     About 85 percent or 90 percent of antibiotics are natural products, says Fenical, and there are a large number of natural products now undergoing clinical trials to treat cancer and other diseases. The success of these compounds is causing pharmaceutical companies to realize that natural products in general and those from the ocean in particular are an undeveloped resource for new therapeutic drugs.
     Mirroring earlier research on land, much of the research on marine pharmaceuticals focuses on microbes living in the muddy sediments on the seafloor, particularly those in deep water.
     "There are now about 120 drugs out there produced by (terrestrial) soil microbes, so we know that microbes produce drugs," says Fenical. "The ocean is far more interesting than the land when it comes to potential for finding beneficial microbes in the mud."
     Most, if not all, of the microbes found in nearshore waters strongly resemble microbes found on land because they were most likely washed into the sea, explains Fenical. "We know very little about the microbial communities living in the ocean bottoms way offshore. As you go out deeper, in excess of 100 meters to 2,000 meters, we see microbes living in the muddy sediments that have never been seen before. These are the kinds of microbes that on land produce the antibiotics."
     Toiling in the mud is very unglamorous compared to studying corals and other marine-related research, says Fenical. "But if you want to talk about resources on this planet, the mud of the ocean is greater in every measure of mass, biodiversity or whatever you want to use, the mud is enormously important for us, we just don’t know anything about it.
     "There are chemically prolific microorganisms living in ocean mud that are completely unrelated to anything on land," he continues. "Because they have a separate evolutionary history, they are producing new molecules with a great deal of potential."
     The Gulf of Mexico, with its expansive muddy bottom, could be an incredible source of new pharmaceutical discoveries, he says.
     "There are a billion bacterial cells in a cubic centimeter of bottom sediment. The questions are what are they, how do we get them out and grow them properly, how do we discover what they are producing, how are we going to develop the resource?" he asks. "You could study the Gulf alone for 20 years and not cover it all."
     Other discoveries could come from more surprising sources, like red tide.
     "Harmful algal blooms are only harmful because the algae occur in quantities larger than we would like," says Fenical. "One of the drugs we use today to treat heart disease is strychnine, a very potent toxin. But at sub-lethal doses, it is a heart drug. HAB toxins, at sub-lethal levels, are very likely to have beneficial effects, but no work has been done yet to find out how they function and what they do, and then capitalize on that biology to develop something that can be used therapeutically."
     There are also researchers looking at a variety of marine plants and animals for potential pharmaceuticals. One of those scientists, Dr. Margo Haygood, says serendipity led her into the field and allowed her to help develop one of the most promising cancer drugs now being tested in human clinical trials.
     Bryostatin-1 is derived from what is considered a nuisance species of tiny bryozoan called Bugula neritina. Bryozoans are referred to as moss animals because they look much like mossy plants or algae.
     B. neritina is usually cursed more than commended because it fouls the bottoms of boats off the west coast of the United States. But the animals carry inside them (and transfer to their larvae) symbiotic and chemically active bacteria that are the source of Bryostatin-1.
     Most anti-cancer drugs work by killing any rapidly dividing cell — the hallmark of a cancer. However, a healthy human body has several different types of rapidly dividing cells, like those in hair and in the intestinal tract, that also succumb to anti-cancer drugs. The result is side effects like hair loss and gastrointestinal problems.
     Bryostatin-1 works differently. It affects the chemicalsignals that tell cancer cells how to operate. The drug was first tested against leukemia, where immature white blood cells continue to divide rapidly instead of developing into mature white blood cells. "It’s like they are perpetual teenagers, but they are reproducing very rapidly," Haygood explains.
     Bryostatin-1 interacts with a chemical switch in the cells that tells them to stop dividing and develop into mature cells.
     Since its initial use, Bryostatin-1 has also been tested against cancers of the ovary, breast, esophagus, liver, and pancreas and "pretty much every cancer that does not have a great treatment yet," says Haygood.
     Bryostatin-1 also tends to reverse multi-drug resistance, which can arise when a cancer recurs. Often the cells that come back are ones that are resistant to the drug or drugs that were first used. Bryostatin-1 reverses that resistance in some cases. It can also amplify the effects of some drugs, so patients can use lower doses to achieve the same results as a higher dose taken without Bryostatin-1.
     Haygood, professor of marine biology at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, joined the search for marine pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s, when a former graduate school classmate asked her for help on a research project involving marine invertebrates for use in pharmaceuticals.
     The classmate handed Haygood a paper written by a Harvard professor who, in 1981, was studying B. neritina. The professor had looked at a developing larvae of the bryozoan under an electron microscope and found a bacteria living in a very specialized structure within the larvae.
     Haygood’s classmate felt that the bacteria might be important to B. neritina because it appeared that the two organisms had a symbiotic relationship, so she sought the help of Haygood, a microbiologist who specialized in symbiotic relationships.
     "I’m a dyed-in-the-wool microbial chauvinist, which means I believe that microbes make the world go around and anything interesting is done by microbes," Haygood says. "I figured that if there was an interesting compound in the larvae, then there was no doubt that the bacteria were making it. From that knee-jerk reaction, I began working on the idea."
     The bacteria caught Haygood’s eye because "It looked like they were designed to be there, it did not look like an infection. That said to me that these are being deliberately transferred to the next generation. It’s like a college fund for your kids — you don’t want to send your children out into the world unprepared. (B. neritina) are sending their larvae out into the world with these bacteria, which means these bacteria are doing something important."
     The "something important" was producing bryostatins, a group of 20 chemical compounds with very similar structures and properties. Haygood found that the mature bryozoans passed the bacteria on to their larvae as a defense mechanism against being eaten by fish.
     "The fish don’t like the bryozoans because they taste bad," says Haygood. "The bryostatins do that."
     She reasoned that if B. neritina used bryostatins for defense, the chemical compound might possess properties that would make it an effective drug.
     "If we put the effort into it, we will get a whole treasury of new drugs from marine sources within the next few decades that will be able to do things that the drugs we have today cannot do," Haygood believes. "There are a number of other drugs that are potentially interesting and far more potent that the bryostatins that are not being developed because of limited access to the organism."
     The biggest barrier to developing marine pharmaceuticals is the "supply problem." A company will not try to develop a naturally derived therapeutic drug unless it can be sure that every year it can obtain enough of the raw material to make the drug in sufficient quantities.
     "There are many cases where there are spectacular molecules out there, but you can’t assure an adequate supply for a pharmaceutical company to develop," she says.
     Bryostatin-1 ostensibly falls into the category of hard-to-come-by resources because it is present only in a limited population of B. neritina. The bryozoan is found all over the world, but Bryostatin-1 occurs only in the populations that live at depths greater than 30 feet off the West Coast.
     Divers collected about 17,000 kilograms of B. neritina in order to extract enough Bryostatin-1 for the research project. Collecting was done at one of the best sites for the animals, located off the coast of Los Angeles, and after they had finished it took between two and three years before the population there recovered its numbers, says Haygood.
     The best long-term solution to the supply problem is to clone the genes in the bacteria that are responsible for producing Bryostatin-1 and use them to manufacture the drug in large quantities — a technology Haygood believes is about two years away from becoming reality.
     The ocean is teeming with chemical compounds like Bryostatin-1 waiting to be discovered. All it takes is money.
     "I certainly think that there is an imbalance between the amount of money we are spending on space research versus marine research," says Haygood.
     Space research and exploration is romantic and exciting, she realizes, but "there is the same level of excitement present in the ocean. It is just as unknown and it is of far more immediate importance to us."

The seventh generation

     Human and ocean health are inextricably linked — the former being more dependent on the latter than vice versa. Where the ocean’s health goes, human health will surely follow.
     The question, then, is where is the ocean’s health going?
     "I don’t think we’ve gone so far down the road toward harming the ocean environment that it can’t be improved," believes Dearry. "There are areas where some coral beds that were harmed have been reconstituted. There are ways the oceans can be improved and provide a better environment. Some of that is a recognition that there is a relationship between human activity and the health of the oceans, and we need to be aware of that link and be able to think more in terms of an ecosystem as a whole. I believe there is a growing awareness among people and governments that all of these elements, from oceans to atmosphere to human health, are related."
     People cannot eliminate their ecological footprint on the Earth — no creature can. Life leaves a mark. The key to ocean health, says Jacob, is the size of the footprint.
     "Ecologically, right now we’re stepping deep and we’re stepping wide, and we’re mashing and thrashing the ecosystem," he says. "We are not stepping gently, yet we could. It would require a different attitude. It would require my neighbor to recognize that he is part of the stream of water that ends up in the ocean and comes back to him. He does not stand outside that ecosystem."
     The best next ecological step, says Jacob, is for humans to adopt the Native American philosophy behind the "seven generations test":
     "What impact will my actions have in seven generations?"

Coastal Legend: Dr. William Fife A LIFE UNDER PRESSURE

BY JIM HINEY

     The faint sounds of rushing air and humming machinery come from two metal-and-clear-acrylic tubes - each large enough to hold a man - at the Texas Wound and Lymphedema Center in College Station, Texas.
     In fact, each tube is occupied by a man whose focus is on his own television set mounted to the wall at the foot of the temporary shadow boxes.
     Although the tubes are in the middle of a treatment room, the men might as well be 33 feet beneath the sea. That is the equivalent pressure exerted on their bodies during 90-minute sessions in these hyperbaric, or decompression, chambers, which force oxygen into their tissues to aid in treating any one of a number of medical conditions.
     Off to one side of the room a lone figure - another man - sits quietly in a chair, his hands resting atop a cane between his legs. He might go completely unnoticed if not for the enthusiastic attention he draws from passing office staff.
     They greet him warmly and with respect bordering on reverence.
     "Did you know of Dr. Fife before you met him?" The question is directed at a technician busily working on a nearby computer.
     "Yes, I'd read about him and his work," the tech replies, stopping to look at the serene, unassuming figure seated 10 feet away. "He's pretty famous in the world of hyperbaric medicine."
     Fame found Bill Fife, not the other way around. Celebrity is contradictory to his reserved personality. He never sought widespread notoriety, so his reputation is confined to the relatively small scientific community whose field of expertise is the effect of oxygen and other gases on the human body under pressure.
     Fife, 86, developed some of the earliest decompression tables for diving with a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, referred to as "hydrox," discovered that human fetuses can suffer from the deadly decompression illness called the bends even when their diving mothers show no symptoms and championed the use of decompression chambers to treat illnesses like Lyme disease and post-polio syndrome.
     He has received the Duke of Edinburgh's Prize for underwater research, headed Texas A&M University's Biology Department three times, served as assistant dean of the university's College of Science for two years, spent time as Texas A&M's interim vice-president for academic affairs and mentored scores of students.
     He did all of the above during his second career — the one he had in academia after spending nearly three decades in the military (much of that as a spy. Shhhhhh.).
     Throughout both careers, and still today, there is one constant that defines Fife.
     "He is a gentleman," says Mickey Stratton, who was a graduate student when he first met Fife in the early 1970s. "When I think of the word ‘gentleman' I think of a person of principle who makes everybody feel comfortable. Dr. Fife is very much a gentleman. I never knew anyone who had any dealings with Bill Fife who didn't have the utmost respect for him.
     "He is also a person who grabs life but he is very controlled, he very much knows who he is. He is just a fine man."
     During his working days, Fife dressed very much the part of a gentleman. He seldom left his home wearing anything other than a coat and tie. In retirement, Fife still often shows up for social appointments dressed to the nines.
     "I always go first class," he laughs when asked about his choice of clothing.
     Even in the tropical paradise of the Bahamas, where Fife traveled frequently with students to conduct research in the Hydrolab undersea habitat, he managed to wear a bow tie to the habitat's land-based research lab, although he forfeited his jacket to the island's heat and humidity.
     Hydrolab was a 16-foot long, 8-foot diameter metal cylinder that was equivalent to a cabin for undersea camping in 45 feet of water off the coast of the Bahamas. It hosted thousands of research divers until its retirement to the Smithsonian Institution in 1985.
     Dick Clarke was assistant director of Hydrolab when he first met Fife in 1972. Fife arrived with several graduate students from Texas A&M who lived in the habitat while Fife oversaw their studies from land. Clarke knew nothing of Fife before they met, but more than 30 years later the impression Fife made during that trip remains vivid in Clarke's memory.
     "He was the most phenomenal educator I've ever had the privilege to come across," says Clarke, president of National Baromedical Services and director of the Baromedical Research Foundation.
     Clarke credits Fife's tutelage with opening his eyes to his own potential.
     "He spent countless hours with me," says Clark. "I was a peon who had a great thirst for knowledge. I left school when I was 15 and joined the British Military and realized when I came out of the military 10 years later that there were serious delinquencies in my education. I didn't really know how to learn because I had never learned how to learn. Bill Fife spent many hours at night in the Hydrolab's operational center teaching me how to learn, teaching me how to find resources and how to find things out. I would ask him questions and he would ask me where I thought I could find the answer.
     "When Bill would ask me questions, I'd try to answer but invariably I got them wrong," Clarke recalls. "His reply, almost without exception, was, ‘Dick, that is essentially it.' When he explained to me what the ‘it' was, I realized I hadn't gotten it at all, but he had such a nice way of making me feel that I had almost gotten it. If he had said to me, ‘You blithering idiot, that's not correct,' I would have dried up and not asked him another question. He knew that.
     "Years later, I felt badly that I had pinned him down so much, but he never, ever indicated that what I was doing was invasive of his personal time or below where he stood in life in terms of being a Ph.D. and having all of these great graduate students to work with. I was someone with an eighth- or ninth-grade education. Now I run a large corporation, I provide medical services all around the world and one of the reasons I am able to do this is because of Bill Fife.
     "He's a very unique guy," Clarke says. "For me he was a great mentor and he provided the platform for me to have this company and do this work and do this research, all of the things I do now. I'm in an enviable position, but I really shouldn't be here. I should be plowing the land in England. He started me off."
     William Paul Fife was born Nov. 23, 1917, in Plymouth, Ind., the son of a Christian minister and his wife. The family moved to Ventura, Calif., when he was less than a year old, and he attended elementary school there.
     His father's calling took the family from California to Bellingham, Wash., where Fife first indulged his passion for diving. A self-described adventurous child who "was always trying to invent something," Fife enlisted the help of a friend — both were in high school at the time — to test a homemade rig in the waters of Puget Sound.
     "I made my own outfit and went diving in a helmet that I made out of an old hot water tank," he remembers. "I took the tank on my bicycle and had a (welder) cut out the thing for me. It was hand pumped. The helmet went down over my shoulders but it wasn't sealed, so the water would come up in the helmet. When the water got up to my nose, I couldn't go any deeper. I got about 20 feet out of it, depending on how hard the guy on the surface pumped. It used an old tire pump."
     Fife stayed in the state for college, graduating with a bachelor's degree in anatomy from the University of Washington before pursuing his ambition to become a physician — a dream he'd had since he was 6.
     The outbreak of World War II interrupted his medical studies after just one year. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and was a paratrooper for two years before joining the Army Air Corps (later the U.S. Air Force), where he served in communications and military intelligence for the next quarter century.
     "I decided to go in and do my bit," says Fife of his decision to leave school. "That seemed more important than getting my medical degree at the time."
     He never returned to finish medical school.
     Fife saw extensive action in the Pacific Theater during the war, including a memorable battle in New Guinea that left him with an aversion to flies that haunts him to this day.
     "I was in the paratroops and we came upon a place where we could see over an area on the coast occupied by the Japanese," Fife remembers. "Every time we shot down there, smoke flew up. I didn't understand that. When we got down there we discovered the Japanese had piled the bodies on top of the parapets and there were flies on them. Every time we took a shot and hit those bodies, the flies flew up and then would settle down again. I've disliked flies ever since."
     Fife was a member of the Air Corps' ground forces near the end of the war in the Pacific. He was assigned to the invasion force destined for Japan when the United States dropped Fat Man and Little Boy, the atomic bombs that forced Japan's surrender. The bombs most likely saved Fife's life.
     "I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for us dropping the bombs," Fife believes. "I was posted to Japan after the war and I went down to the place that I would have landed (during the invasion). Looking at it, I decided that I would have never made it ashore."
     The military usually transferred troops out of their combat theaters for post-war duty, and Fife believed he was headed for Europe. Instead, he was ordered to remain in Japan, where he was forced to confront an inner demon. Years later, his experience became a life lesson for his younger daughter, Caroline Fife, now a physician in Houston specializing in hyperbaric medicine.
     "I always hated math," she says. "In college I had to retake a calculus course in order to get into medical school. I called my father complaining that I would almost rather forego medical school than retake the class. He told me that after WWII he hated Japanese people so badly that he couldn't stand to look at them. He said he felt there was no way he could do his job because he hated the people so much. He had seen many Japanese atrocities that he still doesn't talk about.
     "But he joined a judo club full of former Japanese officers. He made friends with them and got over his hatred," she says. "He developed a genuine respect and affection for Japanese people and culture. Some years later I dated a guy who was part Japanese. After that, my father said. ‘If I hadn't been sent to Japan, and you had brought him home, I would have been furious. But because I was forced to deal with my hatred and I got over it, it's okay now.'
     "He had to face his hatred and it ended up freeing him from something that still haunts other veterans," Caroline says. "Suddenly, I felt ashamed of my feeling for calculus."
     Fife's military career shaped much of who he is today and his outlook on life.
     Caroline recalls a conversation she had with her father shortly before he underwent a heart bypass operation. As the pair waited together in the hospital, Caroline asked her father if he was nervous.
     "He said, ‘After people have been shooting at you, it puts everything else in perspective.' He was sitting there, waiting for them to take him to the operating room. He didn't want any pre-op medicine and he actually dozed off calmly waiting for them to come get him for what could have been his last day on Earth."
     Fife served in Japan until 1947 and then came back to the United States before being stationed in Korea from 1950 to 1953. Shortly after World War II ended, Fife married Anna Hoss in Johnson City, Tenn., and the couple welcomed daughter Julia in 1950.
     His most notable posting came in 1954, when he, Anna and Julia moved to the United States Embassy in Moscow. His official title at the embassy was assistant air attaché, which sounds like a euphemism for spy.
     "I guess it is, to be honest," he laughs now.
     His official duty was to head up security for Air Force operations in Moscow. His unofficial duties were a bit shadier, but he likes to tell the story about how he found a Russian listening device planted right under the ambassador's nose Ö or more precisely, under a beak.
     The Russian government of Nikita Khruschev gave the American ambassador a wooden carving of an eagle, which the ambassador proudly hung on a wall in his office. Fife noticed that under the bird's beak were some small holes and behind the holes was a listening device.
     The device did not have a power supply of its own. To turn it on, the Russians had to transmit microwaves from across the street, consequently irradiating the entire embassy and its staff.
     "After my wife and daughter and I returned to the United States, we had to have frequent blood tests to see if we had picked up any radioactivity."
     The Americans disabled the listening device and never complained about it to the Russians. They also never used the device to spread misinformation to their hosts.
     "We had all sorts of gadgets to send out false information, so we didn't need to use the wood carving."
     He carried top secret or higher security clearance throughout most of his military career, so other than a story here and there, Fife talks little about his spy days. It is a trait he exhibited during his academic career as well.
     "He would disappear for days and then he would show up again. We never knew where he had been, he never said and my mother never asked. She is an amazing woman," says Caroline. "The problem with that is that he was always so closed mouthed about what he was doing. One day he was in the local newspaper in College Station about his hydrogen work. It was the front page of the paper. My mother brought the paper in to him and said, ‘You know, Bill, if it can be in the paper, you can probably start telling us what you do for a living.' That was the first time he realized he could start talking at home about what he did."
     Still, Caroline did not fully understand her father's role in the military until about three years ago.
     "I wasn't born at that time he was in Russia, but I remember as a little girl hearing him talk about the KGB chasing him around and their rooms being bugged," she says. "I remember thinking, ‘Why would the KGB be chasing my sweet little daddy?'
     "About three years ago, he was in the hospital for some major surgery and I was in the waiting room with him watching television when news came on about Afghanistan," she recalls. "He turned to me and said, ‘It feels really weird to get your information by watching the news.' I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘I used to know it first.' I'm 42 years old at that time and the penny finally dropped. I asked, ‘What did you do before they sent you to Russia?' He said, ‘I worked at the Pentagon.' I asked, ‘What did you do after you came back from Russia?' He said, ‘I worked at the Pentagon.' I thought to myself, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm such an idiot. I've been living with the man all of my life ...'"
     Fife and his family left Russia in 1956 and he spent the remaining 11 years of his military career in the United States, most of that time in Texas.
     Throughout his military career, Fife held on to his dream of becoming a physician. He applied to and was accepted to medical school, but the Air Force would not give him leave to pursue his degree.
     "I had taken a regular commission and they wouldn't let me out because I had learned the Russian language in the meantime and the Cold War was on," he says. In other words, the Federal government felt he was more important to the country as a spy than he was as a doctor.
     Since he could not get a medical degree, Fife did what he considered the next best thing — he convinced his superiors to let him get a doctorate in physiology from The Ohio State University.
     He indulged his fascination for the working of the human body under pressure (or the lack thereof), at the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, located at Brooks Air Force Base in San Antonio. Among his duties, Fife oversaw the centrifuge and primate programs that were part of the country's push to put a man on the moon.
     "I remember when I was in first grade they went around and asked all of the children what their daddies did," says Caroline. "I said my daddy fed the monkeys at the School of Aerospace Medicine. They thought he was a janitor."
     A little more than two years before Neil Armstrong took a giant step for mankind, Fife retired from the Air Force as a colonel — his last posting was as head of the School of Aerospace Medicine.
     He entertained an offer from Stanford University before choosing to begin his academic career at Texas A&M. When he came to College Station, Fife was interested in reviving the concept of using a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen that would allow divers to go deeper than on a conventional mixture, or even on a mixture of helium and oxygen.
     Humans require oxygen to live, but it can be toxic to them if it is present at levels greater than the 21 percent they breath on land. It takes a smaller percentage of oxygen in a compressed mixture and breathed under pressure to equal the same amount of oxygen in a sea level atmosphere.
     At a depth of 1,000 feet, 1 percent oxygen in a breathing mixture is equivalent to 21 percent oxygen on land. A conventional gas mixture, like that in the normal atmosphere, is safe for divers to breath until they reach a depth of about 200 feet. Once divers go deeper than 200 feet, they must breath a mixture of inert gas and oxygen.
     Helium and oxygen, or heliox, produce a suitable breathing mixture, but only until the diver reaches about 500 feet. After that, the helium can produce a narcotic effect, known as "helium tremors."
     Fife successfully conducted simulated hydrox dives in a decompression chamber to a depth of 1,000 feet. In the ultimate show of faith in his work, Fife subjected himself to deep dives using hydrox and at one point he held the world's record for a hydrox dive at 425 feet.
     In 1976, Fife began developing the first hydrox diving tables in a project funded by the Texas Sea Grant College Program. Diving tables set out the amount of decompression time a diver needs based on the depth he reached and the amount of time he stayed at that depth. Fife's initial tables were good for dives up to 30 minutes at 300 feet.
     Despite Fife's work, hydrox diving is little used today.
     Fife expanded his hyperbaric work at Texas A&M to include the effects of diving and decompression on women, an interest he says was an extension of his work with female astronauts in the Air Force. He found that because a fetus does not circulate its blood through the lungs, it is not able to filter out decompression bubbles like an adult can, and it could develop the bends when its mother developed no symptoms of the condition at all.
     His work resulted in a standard warning now given to all female divers about the dangers of diving while pregnant, but at the time he published a paper on the topic his work generated some very nasty phone calls from women calling him a male chauvinist who wanted to keep them out of the water.
     "Fortunately, he is a very kind and gracious guy, but I was shocked and appalled," says Caroline, herself a member of the Women's Diving Hall of Fame. "Anybody who knew him would never have said that.
     "When I was a kid, he always gave me the impression that I could do anything I wanted to do. It never crossed my mind that I would ever have any limitations because, for instance, I was female. He treated me like every other person and I assumed that I could do anything I wanted to do. It wasn't until much later in life that I realized that there were certain prejudices in life that I was going to have to overcome. At the time I went to medical school there were more women than there had been in the past, but it wasn't quite as common as it is now. He made me feel that I would only be limited by my own initiative."
     Growing up in the Fife household was not like growing up in other households, says Caroline, who remembers when a junior high classmate mentioned her family's summer vacation.
     "I marveled that her parents took off work and they traveled just for fun," she says. "I had never heard of the idea of a family vacation. We never had one. The only time we ever went anywhere was if Daddy was working."
     Fife's occasional disappearances while he was in the military, and later his time consuming-passion for his research, did not undermine his children's family life, believes Caroline.
     "I didn't know any better and my mother is a trooper. Mother always talked in the most glowing terms about Daddy," she says. "I think one of the reasons Daddy took me to the lab so often was so we could spend time together."
     The pair formed a special bond that is readily evident in the enthusiasm with which they talk about each other, and they share a love of medicine that led Caroline to fulfill the dream her father could not.
     "I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a doctor and I'm sure that was due to his influence," she says.
     Caroline did more than keep her father company during their excursions to his lab. She assisted in his research projects, "even if it was just sweeping the floors," she says. At Caroline's request, Fife took his daughter on a simulated dive in a decompression chamber when she was about 12 years old. Shortly thereafter, he began sending her into the chamber with young patients who were anxious about being alone.
     About two years later, Fife took Caroline on her first dive to Hydrolab. On a beautiful Bahamian night, father and daughter descended toward a distant glow while Anna waited anxiously on the boat.
     "The Hydrolab emitted this wonderful halo of light around it and you could see it a long way off, like a beautiful moon had been sunk in the water," Caroline says.
     The enthusiastic teen explored every nook and cranny she could find, sometimes getting herself wedged so tightly that her father had to pull her out.
     "It was constant wonderment from one moment to the next," she remembers. "I'll never forget that night as long as I live. It was like a whole new door had opened up for me, and my dad was showing it to me."
     Throughout his academic career, Fife's dedication to his students was just as great as his dedication to his work, as exemplified by his decision to decline an invitation by a French company to be present when its divers broke Fife's world record for hydrox diving.
     Fife was scheduled to give his students a final exam at the same time and felt his students needed him more.
     In return, "He demanded of his students great commitment to what they were doing," says Clarke. "When they were living in the seabed habitat, after being in the water for several hours, they would get in there and think they could relax and put their feet up. It might be 9 p.m. and he'd say, ‘Dick, we're going to the habitat. I've got a few questions for my students.' He wouldn't ask them on the radio. He would just arrive. He would swim down and go into the habitat totally unannounced and start quizzing them right out of the blue. It totally took them by surprise. In the end, they feared the propeller sounds of a boat in the middle of the night because they knew it was going to be Dr. Fife and he had a new quiz for them, or he had given them a quiz and was coming for the answers. He was going to challenge them in some way academically at a moment's notice no matter what time of the day or night it was. He said they were the ambassadors of his program at Texas A&M and they were going to be the best."
     "He used to say, ‘I'm the last of the benevolent despots,'" Caroline adds with a laugh.
     Fife officially retired from Texas A&M in 1984, but he continued his research through the Texas A&M Medical School's hyperbaric medicine program until 1998, at the age of 80.
     During those 14 years he pioneered the use of hyperbaric chambers for ailments — primarily post-polio syndrome and Lyme disease — that could be treated by increasing oxygen saturation in tissues.
     Post-polio syndrome is marked by a return in the muscle weakness polio sufferers experienced years after the disease initially passed. Forcing oxygen into the body's tissues minimizes the effect of post-polio syndrome by encouraging greater nerve function to the muscles.
     Lyme disease is caused by a bacteria transferred to humans through the bite of the deer tick. The disease can cause chronic muscle and/or joint pain, fever, swollen lymph glands near the bite, fatigue, headaches and even migraines.
     Antibiotics are the standard form of treatment but they offer only limited success because "the organism gets into the cells and gets sequestered there, and the cell protects the organism against antibiotics," says Fife. "I realized in a hyperbaric chamber you could increase the oxygen far enough that you could kill the organism and the oxygen would get into all of the cells of the body."
     Hyperbaric medicine has also shown great success in treating hard-to-heal wounds. Fife believes it could help in some stroke cases, but he has never gotten the chance to explore his theory in the laboratory.
     He occupies his time now reading (he fancies Louis L'Amore) and fielding questions from people about how hyperbaric medicine can help them treat their Lyme disease or post-polio syndrome. He also gets occasional calls from veterinarians asking if hyperbaric treatment will work on animals whose wounds have become septic.
     "I admit I am completely biased, but I feel he is the great American hero," says Caroline proudly. "He's had so many lives. He's been a soldier, diplomat and a scientist. He is a man of honor, something I believe we are losing in this country today. He was honorable in the way he carried out his work and he is a devoted husband and dad.
     "People don't know who he is because he wasn't interested in looking after his reputation," she says. "He was more interested in taking care of his students and doing a good job with his work." ■

Conference prompts discussion of Gulf needs

     COLLEGE STATION — About 130 representatives from marine industry, academia and government met in College Station July 7 and 8 to plan the next steps for the Gulf of Mexico in response to recommendations from the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.
     It was the first regional meeting convened in the wake of the commission's report.
     At the "Next Steps in the Gulf of Mexico" conference, co-hosted by the Texas Sea Grant College Program, participants discussed research priorities, funding sources, administration and management, and ecosystem-based and regional approaches in the context of the oceans and human health; biodiversity; watersheds and sediment management; human impacts; and policy, economics and social science.
     "The United States is an ocean nation," Scott Rayder, Chief of Staff to the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, reminded conference participants. "Our coastal zone is the largest in the world.
     "By promoting a ‘regionalization' approach, the commission recognizes the unique challenges and pressures that are faced by each one," he said. "The Gulf of Mexico faces some of the most difficult challenges and pressures of any of the regions defined by the commission."
     Many of the speakers described the importance of ocean education at all levels.
     "All across the report we talk about the need to increase the awareness of the public to coastal issues," said Paul L. Kelly, Senior Vice President of Rowan Companies and a member of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.
     Other priorities cited in the conference discussions were improving science education, including ocean science, in the public schools; increasing the number of students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate science programs; and adult continuing education efforts.
     The need for science education is tied to another of the report's emphases: the strengthening of infrastructure for data collection and management, including the implementation of a national ocean observing system, all supporting a scientific basis for administrative decision-making. The report also recommends the creation of a White House-level National Ocean Council.
     Mandated by the Oceans Act of 2000, authorized by Congress and appointed by the President, the 16-member commission began its study in 2001. The preliminary report, which was released to state governors for comment in April, calls for the President and Congress to establish a new national ocean policy that balances use with sustainability, is based on sound science and educational excellence, and moves toward an ecosystem-based management approach.
     Recommendations in the report are expected to influence the national direction of marine research, outreach and education for years, possibly decades, to come. The last comprehensive review of the nation's ocean policy was conducted 35 years ago by the Stratton Commission.
     Robert Stickney, director of Texas Sea Grant, said the recommendations from the Gulf of Mexico conference will be communicated to NOAA and the members of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy.
     "We should have called this (conference) ‘First Steps,' because there are many more to come," he said.
     Other recommendations from the two-day meeting included the creation of an ocean science "trust fund" and an agreement among the five state governors to implement Gulf-wide ecosystem management practices.
     Also as a result of the conference, two workshops are being planned for 2005, one focusing on oceans and human health in the Gulf of Mexico and another that will bring together scientists and managers to discuss Gulf policy, economics and social sciences.
     "Next Steps" was co-sponsored by the Texas A&M University College of Geosciences, Department of Oceanography, College of Engineering, Geochemical and Environmental Research Group, George Bush School of Government and Public Service, the Provost's Office and the Office of the Vice President for Research.
     - Cindie Powell

Texas leads nation in Clean Marina participation

     COLLEGE STATION — The number of the state's marinas certified through the Clean Texas Marina Program has reached an all-time high this year.
     A total of 42 marinas have been certified, and an additional 33 are on the program's pledge list.
     "Roughly 20 percent of the marinas in Texas are participating in the program, which is the highest participation of any state program in the country," says Dewayne Hollin, marine business management specialist at the Texas Sea Grant College Program and director of the Clean Texas Marina Program. "We're seeing a lot more interest.
     "The Clean Texas Marina Program is an excellent way for marinas to reach out to recreational boaters and demonstrate how their clean boating practices can help minimize the impacts of recreational boating on the marine environment," he says. "Reducing pollution is a team effort between the marina and the boaters who use the marina. Working together they can promote clean water in all Texas waterways."
     The Clean Texas Marina Program is a collaborative project of the Texas Sea Grant College Program, Marina Association of Texas, Texas General Land Office and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. It is part of a nationwide clean marina initiative.
     Marina operators that pledge to participate conduct a self-assessment of their property using the Clean Texas Marina Checklist and Clean Texas Marina Guidebook. Once the marina operator feels the marina meets the standards, he or she schedules a confirmation visit that includes an on-site inspection to verify the items on the checklist.
     Individual boaters can participate in the affiliated Clean Texas Boater Program by pledging to follow a set of Clean Boating Tips.
     A list of participating marinas is available online at www.cleanmarinas.org. Additional information about the Clean Texas Marina Program and the Clean Texas Boater Program is available at the Texas Sea Grant College Program by calling 979-845-3857 or sending an e-mail to Hollin at dhollin@tamu.edu

Otoliths may be key to tracking nursery grounds of adult red drum

by Cindie Powell

     It's hard to tell where a fish has been – it doesn't leave fingerprints. But some-times where the fish has been leaves fingerprints on the fish.
     A team led by Dr. Jay Rooker of Texas A&M University at Galveston (TAMUG) is conducting research to try to pinpoint where adult red drum (Sciaenops ocellatus) were while they were young – and determine if any of the nursery areas are more critical than others for this important sport fish.
     "We're trying to identify the essential nursery habitats or bay systems that contribute the most to the adult population," Rooker says. "If we find that the bay systems are all contributing equally, that's a good thing as well and may indicate the stock is more resilient to environmental change. But if there are just a few bay systems that are contributing, it could be a problem."
     The plan for the study, funded by the Texas Sea Grant College Program, is to use the chemical signatures in the otoliths of red drum to determine the nursery grounds of adults. Fish have pairs of otoliths, also called earstones, that are located in the ear canal and are used by the fish for hearing and balance. Otoliths are made up of aragonite, a form of calcium carbonate, with small amounts of protein and other elements, and are similar in composition to ocean coral.
     "The otoliths accrete material as the individual grows," Rooker says. "They put on a new layer of material every day. Think of it as a new skin each day."
     Cutting an otolith into cross sections reveals the life history of the fish in a series of rings like the rings of a tree, which is why otoliths are frequently used for aging studies.
     "The otolith microstructure tells you where you are in the life history, essentially providing a reference point or time stamp on the otolith. At the first growth annulus or growth increment, we know the otolith material deposited during the first year of life.
     "Next, we can look at the composition of this otolith, which is influenced primarily by environmental conditions such as water chemistry and salinity," he says. "If salinity is higher in one nursery habitat than another, we would expect to see differences in otolith composition of individuals from these two areas. This occurs because as the otolith accretes material each day, what gets incorporated into the otolith is basically a function of what's in the water. If there is a lot of lead or magnesium in the water, it's going to get integrated into the otolith matrix.
     "Once this material is deposited in the otolith, it's not remobilized – it's essentially a permanent marker. That's why I refer to it as an ‘environmental CD-ROM,' because once it's laid down, it's basically a record of what happened."
     The first step in the research was to determine if different nursery areas left detectable differences on the red drum's otolith – a usable signature or "fingerprint."
     The red drum, also known as redfish or channel bass, is an important sport fish in Texas. It is found from New England to Key West, Fla., and around the Gulf Coast as far as Tuxpan, Mexico. Most have a large black spot on the upper part of the caudal fin or tail, but some have multiple spots and others have none. The typical color is reddish bronze, but red drum can also range in color from a dark copper to nearly silver.
     Along the Texas coast, adult red drum spawn in the tidal passes from mid-August to mid-October. The eggs hatch in about 24 hours, and after two or three weeks the larvae are carried by the currents into the bays and estuaries.
     In the southern parts of the state, such as Port Aransas, Redfish Bay and the Lower Laguna Madre, the nursery grounds are seagrass, shoal grass and turtlegrass beds. In the northern parts of the state, few bay systems have stands of seagrass, so the fish use Spartina alterniflora, or saltmarsh cordgrass, as their nursery grounds.
     At 25 to 30 days old, the larval fish settle into their new habitats, where they will remain for the next two to three years, while environmental conditions are "recorded" in their otoliths.
     Several nursery areas were selected for the study: Sabine, East Galveston Bay, West Galveston Bay, Matagorda Bay, Aransas Bay including all of the Port Aransas/Copano Bay area, and the Lower Laguna Madre.
     The researchers, including Scott Holt at The University of Texas Marine Science Institute, Dr. Thomas Minello at NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service laboratory in Galveston, and Dr. Greg Stunz at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, collected juvenile fish ranging in age from 8 to 12 months, or from 20 to 30 centimeters in length, from the different bay systems.
     Back in the laboratory, the otolith samples were crushed to a powder or dissolved, depending on the test being run, and the team examined the samples to determine stable isotope and trace element composition.
     Stable isotopes are non-radioactive variants of the elements. In Rooker's tests, the researchers focused on the proportions of concentrations of isotopes of oxygen and carbon. The analysis was conducted at laboratories at the University of Maryland and The University of Texas at Austin.
     "We've used stable isotopes for other projects and found that they were excellent indicators of stock structure, so we applied stable isotopes to the red drum study and found that they do a very good job of separating red drum from the different nursery areas in Texas," he says. "Oxygen alone was quite useful in discriminating red drum from different bays. The oxygen signature is essentially linked to salinity and temperature and not influenced by biological factors like diet."
     He found that concentrations of the stable oxygen isotope values were lower (more depleted) in northern Texas, where freshwater input is relatively high. Values were higher (more enriched) in the higher salinity environments in the south, where evaporation is high, because the lighter oxygen isotope (oxygen-16) evaporates more readily than the heavier oxygen isotope (oxygen-18). As a result, values of red drum from areas such as the hypersaline Lower Laguna Madre are heavy compared to areas such as Sabine Lake or Galveston Bay. The salinity was so influential that it overcame the impact of temperature, which would typically show the opposite results.
     The carbon isotopes allowed the researchers to refine the analysis even further.
     "Carbon is influenced by metabolic rate – by feeding, by what the diet looks like," Rooker says. "When you look at this profile, you see that in the south the stable carbon isotope values tend to be a lot more enriched, and in the north, more depleted. And when you go down south you find that it's mostly seagrass, and seagrass is going to be more enriched than Spartina (marsh), so it appears to fit the expected pattern."
     For one year's samples of juvenile red drum, the oxygen and carbon isotope analysis allowed the researchers to divide the samples into four regions or bay systems of origin with a 90 percent success rate. Additionally, even though the stable isotope results show some overlap between bays – Galveston and Matagorda, for example, or Aransas and the Lower Laguna Madre – the extremes are clearly delineated.
     "If you have a Port Isabel signature, it is not going to look like anything in the north or anything in Matagorda," he says. "In an adjacent bay, there may be some overlap, but if you're getting fish in Port Isabel with a Galveston Bay signature, they came from Galveston Bay."
     The researchers collected samples of 10-month-old red drum (age zero) during three years – 2001, 2002 and 2003 – for testing to determine if the properties of the otoliths are consistent over time.
     "That's a big problem, because environmental conditions are changing," Rooker says. "If you just go and sample one year class, you may have wonderful resolution – you can discriminate them with good success from the different bays. Then you go out there the next year and conditions have changed, and now your signature in Galveston Bay doesn't quite look like it used to.
     "We have three years' worth of otolith elemental fingerprints in our library. Now if we were to go out this year and collect a 3-year-old fish, we could match it up to our 2001 age zero fingerprint to make our predictions.
     "That is going to work really well for our 3- and 4-year-old fish, but we have fish that are 10 years old in our sample. That's why we want to determine how well these fingerprints hold up over time – to see if it is reasonable to use a composite signature over three years to say, ‘This is what an otolith elemental signature of a red drum from Galveston Bay should look like,'" he says.
     Analysis is ongoing on the otoliths collected from young red drum in the later years, but preliminary results show an 85 percent differentiation between bay systems in stable isotope tests over two years of samples, compared to 90 percent for the single year study.
     The chemical signatures from the different bays are expected to be further separated by analyzing trace elements in the otoliths.
     "The hope is that we're going to tease them apart even more," Rooker says. "By adding the trace element chemistry we've bumped it up in terms of our ability to discriminate."
     The trace element chemistry tests are being conducted by Dr. Gary Gill, also of TAMUG, using Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS). Gill and Rooker are experimenting with different elements to determine which ones will give them the most conclusive results.
     "At this point it's somewhat exploratory to determine which of these elements are going to give us signatures in a similar fashion to the signatures that Jay is getting from the stable isotopes," Gill says. "We're not doing anything unique with the otoliths that other researchers in other areas are not utilizing – what we're trying to find out is what are the key elements that will give us the best signature here."
     He says results of tests with the alkaline earth elements strontium and barium are very encouraging, while the data so far from the trace metals is too preliminary so far to draw any conclusions.
     "We don't know which ones are going to be the most illuminating, but we are going to try iron, manganese, nickel and copper for sure," Gill says, adding that the researchers decided what elements to try based on previous research by Rooker and others.
     "It's based partly on what elements have worked in previous studies, and what we know about how elements behave in general in coastal environments," he says.
     "Jay has had a lot more experience, that's how we knew strontium was going to work – and has – and that barium will work. Beyond that we were looking for elements that might have variations, not necessarily from a perspective of what the fish are doing but rather just how these elements behave in the Gulf Coast. We're looking for elements that, if you were to go east-west or north-south along the Gulf Coast, one would see a variation in the elements' content. If we choose the right ones, there will be a gradient of some kind that we could see that would then be reflected in the otoliths of the fish."
     The final phase of the study is the analysis of otoliths from adult fish, ranging in age from 3 to 10 years. The first step is to isolate the portion of the otoliths that the fish "recorded" in its first year, so the analysis is being done on the signature of the fish's location during that time, while it was still in the bay.
     The researchers slice a thin cross-section of the adult otolith through its core. Using a cross-section from a young fish as a model, they use a special computerized drill called a micromill that is programmed to section out the part of the otolith that corresponds to the first 10 to 12 months of life – essentially trimming off everywhere the fish has been since just before its first birthday. The micromill makes cuts in 40-micron-deep increments along four sides until it is less than a millimeter from the bottom of the otolith section, and then the portion needed for analysis pops out easily. Chemical analysis of the adult otoliths is now under way with the same techniques used on those from the young fish.
     "We extract the core of an otolith from an adult red drum and match it up to our library of signatures and say, ‘Did it come from the same nursery ground, did it come from up the coast, down the coast?'" Rooker says.
     He says his research has been aided by the red drum's life cycle, particularly their pattern of remaining in the bays and estuaries during the first few years of life.
     "We want to get the young fish's otolith signature before they move from the nursery. If they were moving in and out of tidal passes during the first year, it would be more difficult to investigate the contribution and mixing rates of different bay systems," he says. "At about age 3, they start moving out of the tidal inlets and into some of these coastal areas and start participating in the spawning."
     Where do the fish go from there? That's another one of the mysteries Rooker and his colleagues hope to solve with this study.