NEWPORT, Ore. – Drone footage captured by researchers in Oregon State University’s Marine Mammal Institute is offering new insight into the acrobatics undertaken by gray whales foraging in the waters off the coast of Oregon.
NEWPORT, Ore. – Hours after tagging an endangered basking shark off the coast of Ireland in April, researchers captured what they believe is the first ever video of a shark or any large marine animal being struck by a boat.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Crews later this month will begin installing the power and data cables that are essential to completing construction of a new wave energy testing facility off the Oregon Coast.
CORVALLIS, Ore. — During recent periods of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Alaska, young Pacific cod in near shore safe havens where they typically spend their adolescence did not experience the protective effects those areas typically provide, a new Oregon State University study found.
NEWPORT, Oregon — Gray whales that spend their summers feeding in the shallow waters off the Pacific Northwest coast have undergone a significant decline in body length since around the year 2000, a new Oregon State University study found.
The smaller size could have major consequences for the health and reproductive success of the affected whales, and also raises alarm bells about the state of the food web in which they coexist, researchers say.
NEWPORT, Ore. – A recent boom in the purple sea urchin population off the southern Oregon Coast appears to have had an indirect and negative impact on the gray whales that usually forage in the region, a new study shows.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Today’s rate of atmospheric carbon dioxide increase is 10 times faster than at any other point in the past 50,000 years, researchers have found through a detailed chemical analysis of ancient Antarctic ice.
The findings, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provide important new understanding of abrupt climate change periods in Earth’s past and offer new insight into the potential impacts of climate change today.
NEWPORT, Ore. – Researchers who created “family trees” for nearly 10,000 fish found that first-generation, wild-born descendants of hatchery-origin Chinook salmon in an Oregon river show improved fitness.
The finding, based on data collected over 13 years, is encouraging for Chinook salmon recovery efforts, said Kathleen O’Malley, an associate professor at Oregon State University and the study’s senior author. In this study, fitness is measured by the number of adult offspring a fish produces, with higher fitness leading to more offspring.
CORVALLIS, Ore. – Low oxygen conditions that pose a significant threat to marine life are widespread and increasing in coastal Pacific Northwest ocean waters as the climate warms, a new study shows.
Researchers found that in 2021, more than half the continental shelf off the Pacific Northwest coast experienced the low-oxygen condition known as hypoxia, said the study’s lead author, Jack Barth of Oregon State University.
NEWPORT, Ore. – Marine heat waves in the northeast Pacific Ocean create ongoing and complex disruptions of the ocean food web that may benefit some species but threaten the future of many others, a new study has shown.
The study, just published in the journal Nature Communications, is the first of its kind to examine the impacts of marine heat waves on the entire ocean ecosystem in the northern California Current, the span of waters along the West Coast from Washington to Northern California.
