2 B
SIUSLAW NEWS ❚ SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 2017
Scientists say Oregon Coast dodged ‘dead zone’ bullet
CORVALLIS — The Oregon
coast is now facing annual
threats from hypoxia, or low
oxygen, and scientists liken the
phenomenon to the wildfire
season the state faces every
summer and fall.
The oxygen content of
Oregon’s near-shore Pacific
Ocean waters plummeted to
dangerously low levels this
summer before a timely storm
arrived in mid-September to
“flush” the system and ease the
threat to many marine crea-
tures. Hypoxia has become a
seasonal threat.
“We are now living on a
knife edge in terms of hypoxia,
and this year we crossed the
threshold into danger,” said
Francis Chan, an Oregon State
University marine ecologist
and an expert on ocean chem-
istry. “It was one of the worst
Little
from 1B
School athletics, its fans and the
Florence community.
The main reason given from
school administrators was for
player safety.
Back in 1975, I was coaching
for Spray High School at a game
in Heppner, Ore. Before the
game, the opposing coach
explained that 17 of his 19 play-
ers were freshmen. In contrast,
my team of 13 players had eight
juniors and seniors. As a result,
I agreed to make sure not to
pound his team into the ground.
The first quarter score was
27-0 Spray; the final score was
years we have had in a while
and it looked like it was going
to get really bad before that
storm came in.
“This is something that only
happened occasionally in the
20th century, but has been tak-
ing place on a near-yearly basis
for the past 15 years. The lead-
ing hypothesis for why this is
happening is that the ocean is
changing. Warmer water holds
less oxygen, for one, but there
also may be increased stratifi-
cation and other factors.”
Chan said he and his col-
leagues began hearing anecdot-
al reports about abnormal con-
ditions and animal behavior in
July.
Researchers from the Oregon
Department of Fish and
Wildlife collected video of
crabs in a research trap dying
from lack of oxygen. Marine
educators at OSU’s Hatfield
Marine Science Center said
crabs were leaving the ocean to
enter bays and estuaries —
some even burying themselves
in sandy flats exposed to the air
at low tide.
Researchers on survey ships
run by the National Oceanic
a n d A t m o s p h e r i c
Administration told Chan that
when they sampled the ocean
waters off Oregon this summer
for juvenile fish, they caught
almost nothing.
Jack Barth, director of the
Marine Studies Initiative at
Oregon State and a principal
investigator with the National
Science Foundation-funded
Ocean Observatories Initiative,
retrieved data that showed the
level of oxygen in the ocean off
Yaquina Head — in 25 meters
of water — was down to 0.5
milliliters of oxygen per liter of
water. That is classified as
“severe” hypoxia, he noted.
“It lasted from mid-August
to early September,” Barth
said, “which is enough time to
do some damage, but not as bad
as the event in 2006, which
killed thousands of crab and
other marine organisms.
“Oxygen levels were down
to zero that year and it persisted
well into September. We were
lucky this year — we dodged a
bullet.”
When water near the seafloor
reaches hypoxic levels —
below 1.4 milliliters of oxygen
per liter of water — some fish
and other creatures have the
ability to flee the area and find
more
oxygenated
water.
However, some animals don’t
have that ability and those that
do, when the hypoxia is severe
and widespread, may not find a
place to go.
“The good thing is that we
now have a lot of eyes on the
ocean, with more and more
people reporting abnormali-
ties,” Chan said. “We can use
instrumentation from the Ocean
Observatories Initiative,
research ships and gliders to
determine where the levels of
low oxygen are and when they
occur, as well as where there
may be areas of more oxy-
genated water. We are learning
more each year.”
Near-shore hypoxia, which
can lead to the aforementioned
marine “dead zones,” first
came to researchers’ attention
in 2002 when crabbers pulled
up pots of dead crabs, Chan
said.
The Oregon legislature has
recognized the threat and estab-
lished an ocean acidification
and hypoxia council, which
Barth co-chairs. Chan is meet-
ing with fishermen in October
to brief them on the oceano-
graphic data OSU has recorded,
and to get their insights and
observations from up and down
the Oregon coast.
“Every year, things get a lit-
tle weird and though we are
observing more of it, there’s
still a lot to learn,” Chan said.
“This spring, for example, mil-
lions of pyrosomes showed up
in the water — they are a lumi-
nescent, jellyfish-like sea crea-
ture that can grow up to two
feet long — and no one is sure
why, or if they may have con-
tributed to the hypoxia.
“As the ocean changes, and
we experience an annual
hypoxia season, we can expect
more surprises.”
also 27-0.
I have to wonder if any com-
munication took place between
head coaches at Siuslaw and
North Bend prior to the decision
by Siuslaw to forfeit.
Football is a collision sport. I
played football, as do many
other players, to test my physi-
cal and mental toughness. I did
not play for a championship that
would never happen.
My Warrenton High School
football team was a small fish in
a big pond. In fact, all teams in
the Cowapa League were larger,
with some literally three times
the size of our 201-member stu-
dent body.
We played outmanned every
game and got our victories from
within ourselves — and every
now and then we’d upset a supe-
rior opponent.
One team we did not upset
was Rainier. Their mascot was
still doing push-ups after we
showered and were boarding the
bus to travel home.
I did a little digging and dis-
covered we were in the same
classification as Siuslaw High
School while I was playing at
Warrenton. It would not have
been fun to play Siuslaw back
then — but we would have suit-
ed up and given it our best
effort.
One of the reasons given for
Siuslaw’s forfeit was the con-
cern that upperclassmen from
North Bend would dominate
and possibly injure our younger
players.
Just up the road, Mapleton
and many eight man football
teams regularly use freshmen to
fill out their rosters. When a
senior quarterback at Mapleton
was injured in a game two
weeks ago, the Sailors’ back-up
freshman quarterback entered
the game and scored two times
in that game.
In 1976, my Spray Eagles
traveled to take on Crane High
School. Crane was a boarding
school that routinely won our
league. Our 13 players —
including three freshmen and
two sophomores — watched as
48 Crane players lined the
opposite sideline. Their team
had 36 upperclassmen. We bat-
tled and lost by 14 points.
From my perspective, the
players on that small Spray
team deserved to play for the
possibility — however slight —
of winning.
Which they did on the tough-
ness scale.
So what happens now at
Siuslaw? What lessons have
been learned from forfeiting?
The players are the ones who
lost and they cannot get it back
and, in the process, I feel other
football players in the Far West
League have lost respect for
Siuslaw.
Many past Siuslaw football
players are shaking their heads
and asking “Why? For Safety?”
No, not good enough.
Unless you have played foot-
ball, you will never understand
the never-say-die attitude of the
underdog.
In my lifetime, I played 13
years of football and worked no
less than four hazardous jobs
without suffering a serious
injury.
Coincidentally, I slipped on
my front step seven years ago
and broke my ankle.
Maybe I should move to a
house without a front step, just
for safety reasons?
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