Eugene native contributed to ocean report.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

It was diving in the Caribbean that reawakened Ben Halpern's interest in the ocean ecosystem.

The 1991 South Eugene High School graduate was studying the coral reefs and mango forests in the U.S. Virgin Islands - a rough assignment, to be sure.

But while most visitors marveled at the brightly colored fish that navigated those tropical waters, Halpern saw things that bothered him. Degrading reefs and declining fish populations hinted at a troubled ecosystem.

Years later, Halpern and 13 other scientists found out just how troubled the marine ecosystem is, not just in the Caribbean but around the world. On Thursday, the group published an article in the journal Science that predicts the end of wild seafood by the year 2048 if the decline of marine species continues at the current rate.

Using a technique called "meta-analysis," the team gathered data from scientists around the world, and produced what Halpern calls the first such evidence that the Earth is in as bad a shape as many have suspected.

Two recent reports, one by the Bush administration-appointed U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and another by the Pew Oceans Commission, have drawn similar conclusions, but with less comprehensive data.

Halpern hopes the latest study will give those reports new steam.

"A lot of people appreciate and understand that when you lose a species you eat, you can't eat it anymore," Halpern said. "But there are a lot of species out there people just don't think about, know about - that they certainly don't eat. Recognizing and knowing those species have an impact on what we get out of the ocean is quite surprising to a lot of people."

The son of a high school biology teacher and a University of Oregon professor of special education, Halpern was born and raised in Eugene before leaving for Minnesota to study biology at Carlton College.

After graduation, he decided to take a break from science and accepted a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in computer network administration. In his spare time, he volunteered at the Boston Aquarium, teaching tidepool classes to elementary school students.

Three years later, he decided he wasn't interested in computer networks. But he was interested in ocean life.

In 1998, Halpern started graduate school at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Five years later, he graduated with a Ph.D in biology and got a job at the university's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

His research focused on marine reserves, also known as marine protected areas, where the government declares swaths of the ocean off limits not just to fishing but to all potential impacts on marine life.

Halpern's work in that field prompted the lead investigator of the report released Thursday to ask him to join the study. The work was broken into four pieces, three of which examined what happens to a marine ecosystem when species die. The fourth, Halpern's area, looked at how such a system can bounce back when life is reintroduced.

"We found consistently, when you increase biodiversity, you have a dramatic impact on the services that we as humans take from the ocean: the food and fish we eat, but also the stability of that food resource, and the quality of the water in our coastal estuaries and nearshore areas," Halpern said. "Human happiness and health are affected by the number of species you have in the ocean."

Halpern's work makes his father proud. "It's receiving worldwide attention right now," Andy Halpern said.

Winston Ross can be reached at [phone] or rgcoast@ oregonfast.net.