Last summer when Oregon State University researchers announced the development of a new strain of seaweed tasting remarkably like bacon when cooked, the news caught the attention of foodies everywhere. It was hailed as the holy grail of good eating — a nutrition-packed marine plant as yummy as a fat-loaded meat product.
Oregon State University Press offers an enticing range of books that tell stories of the oceans and the organisms (humans included) that depend on their depths, their shallows and their shores.
“The ocean remains a wonder to me. As an ecologist, I have worked on land, but I understand that the ocean — like forests, wetlands and grasslands — is vulnerable to disruptions and that we are just starting to understand its complexity and dynamics.”
Music student Ryan Zubieta listened to the sounds around him — water running over stones, branches clicking together, wind rattling the canopy — then recorded and edited them, finally converting them into a haunting piece of music that, he says, “retains the organic quality” of the original woodland sounds.
“The commercial Dungeness fishing fleet, which operates along the coast of Oregon, Washington and Northern California, is a vital economic commodity,” says OSU researcher Laurel Kincl, an expert in environmental and occupational health and safety in the College of Public Health and Human Sciences.
A fly-fishing line arcs above a river. The hand-tied fly — chosen to match whichever aquatic insect has hatched that morning — settles on the water. In casting that line, a fly fisherman enters into the life of the river, intuitively, intellectually, intimately.