Environment - Page 21

By KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL/Oregon Public Broadcasting Back in 2016 Michael Ellis, a former president of the Fred Meyer grocery chain, bought a lot in the Pine Beach development along Tillamook County’s Rockaway Beach. He built a house, but never really considered it oceanfront property. That’s because a stretch of dunes lay between his home and the beach. The dunes were

By STEVE LUNDEBERG/OSU News Service Healthy-looking ochre sea stars have minimal genetic difference from those displaying symptoms of sea star wasting syndrome, say Oregon State University researchers who examined whether genetic variation was the reason some animals went unaffected during an epidemic of the deadly disease. Without genes promoting resistance to wasting syndrome, the iconic Pacific Ocean sea star’s

By KRISTIAN FODEN-VENCIL/Oregon Public Broadcasting Onno Husing, the planning director for Lincoln County, can stand on U.S. Highway 101 and watch bits of tarmac crumble into the ocean, 80 feet below. “It’d be pretty hard to stand here and look at what we’re looking at, and not be concerned,” he said. A couple of miles north of Newport, Highway

By LYNDA V. MAPES/The Seattle Times An international team of more than 60 scientists in four vessels — including one based in Newport — is headed out on winter seas to investigate West Coast and Alaska salmon in the North Pacific. The Bell M. Shimada, a Newport-based flagship research vessel of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, left Port

By NANCY STEINBERG/Oregon State University NEWPORT — The concept is so well-established that it’s almost cliché — the most important thing humans know about ecosystems is that everything in them is connected. Case in point: Gray whales in Oregon’s ocean eat small animals classified as zooplankton. Zooplankton often eat tiny microplastics or other debris from the human environment. That

By DANA TIMS/YachatsNews.com YACHATS — Barring any unexpected hiccups, one of the central Oregon coast’s largest and oldest protected forest sanctuaries will expand significantly by the end of the month. Ten Mile Creek Sanctuary, located just south of Yachats and owned by Portland Audubon, will increase from its current size of 220 acres to 340 acres after a land-acquisition

By STEVE LUNDEBERG/OSU News Service Hatchery-raised steelhead have offspring that are good at gaining size under hatchery conditions but don’t survive as well in streams as steelhead whose parents are wild fish, new research by Oregon State University shows. The results, published in PLOS One, suggest that it may be possible to change rearing methods to produce hatchery fish that

From Oregon Public Broadcasting and OSU News Service NEWPORT — Climate change is weakening communities of colorful creatures in the rocky intertidal zone on the Oregon Coast. Many Oregonians learn about these ecosystems on tidepooling trips to the beach. New research from Oregon State University suggests that the intricate and visually stunning communities of sea stars, anemones, mussels and