Newport campus adding Marine Mammal Institute.

Byline: Winston Ross The Register-Guard

NEWPORT - Thanks to Bruce Mate's satellite tracking of North Atlantic right whales, ships now take a different route through the Bay of Fundy near Nova Scotia.

Thanks to the public's growing interest in the marine ecosystem, Mate is getting some new partners at Oregon State University's Hatfield Marine Science Center. The college announced a new Marine Mammal Institute on Wednesday, which will result in the largest facility on the center's 40-year-old Newport campus.

The OSU Foundation hopes to raise enough money to double the institute's $7 million endowment in the coming years and build a 28,000-square-foot building.

The program has already added two new researchers with a support staff of 17 people. By the time it's finished, Mate plans on the group quadrupling to 80 to 90 people, including a dozen new faculty members.

"This group is going to start looking at the ecology of marine mammals in a whole different way," Mate said Wednesday. "Most universities have a department of marine mammals that looks at a single species in a single area. This work will include physical oceanography, biological oceanography, veterinary medicine and help from the college of engineering to discover how these animals make a living."

There were only about 350 right whales left when Mate became the first scientist to use satellite tracking technology to keep tabs on movements of the sensitive species, half of whose deaths have been linked to collisions with vessels in recent years.

"Using the data, we convinced shipping companies that the shipping lanes needed to be moved four miles," Mate said. "That reduced the probability they'd hit a whale by 80 percent."

Better research can help avoid "spotted owl issues," Mate said, where a species' fate is so bleak that options for recovering it are few and costs are high. Hatfield researchers are now working with oil and gas companies to study the effects of seismic surveys on whales, to find ways to conduct feasibility tests without harming marine mammals.

Scott Baker, a cetacean geneticist at the institute, came from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, about a year ago. He's used advances in molecular genetics to collect samples of whale meat sold in international markets and track their source, to find out if the animal was caught in violation of treaties.

"It's an ecosystem we're realizing we know little about and may be under threat, either from direct interactions and exploitations or from indirect sources such as global warming, and climate change," Baker said.

More research on marine mammals could also bring new focus to conflict, including fishermen's battles with salmon-hungry sea lions along the west coast, Baker added.

"Maybe there are ways to mitigate these problems we haven't thought of," Baker said.

Winston Ross can be reached at [phone] or [e-mail].