LUMCON benefits economy, too

The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium not only stands out on La. Highway 56 in the small fishing village of Cocodrie (35 road miles south of Houma), it is one of the most respected institutions of its kind in the world.

Established by state legislation in 1979, the original mission of LUMCON, at that time housed in a number of portable trailers, was to increase awareness of the cultural, economic, environmental and industrial value of Louisiana’s coastal waterways.

Since then, LUMCON has grown into a major center for marine life and environmental research and education, and brought recognition to the economic impact those working with this and similar facilities have on the nation’s economy.

LUMCON’s main campus is the W.J. DeFelice Marine Center. Built in 1986, it is a 75,000-square-foot complex housing laboratory research, instructional classrooms, student housing, and support facilities.

Eight of the Marine Center’s laboratories are equipped with running sea water so samples can be tested and studied in as close to their natural environments as possible. Six additional laboratories are reserved for dry applications and instrumentation and are used for both research and teaching.

The Marine Center additionally houses geologimeteorological facilities and is filled with an array of plant and wildlife displays as well as a coastal art exhibits.

One wing of the Marine Center contains five dormitory-style apartments to provide housing for up to 80 students, visiting researchers and dignitaries, and instructors. A cafeteria and general meeting room is situated in the center of the complex. There are also conference rooms equipped with telecommuting and meeting technology. A 99-seat auditorium enhances teaching activities, presentations, seminars, and conferences.

LUMCON also operates a laboratory in Port Fourchon, approximately 75 road miles, 26 miles straight across both Terrebonne Bay and Timbalier Bay, southeast of the W.J. DeFelice Marine Center. The Port Fourchon site provides field access to salt and brackish marshes and barrier islands. Unlike the Marine Center, the Port Fourchon laboratory is not open to public tours.

A significant tool for LUMCON is the 116-foot oceanographic research vessel RV Pelican. The Pelican, which operated is under sponsorship of the National Science Foundation, features four laboratories for 16 scientists and can be dispatched to sea for up to three weeks at a time. This vessel is part of the U.S. academic fleet and the only member of that fleet stationed in the Gulf of Mexico.

Following the April 20, 2010 explosion and oil release at the BP Deepwater Horizon site, the RV Pelican was one of the first scientific vessels to arrive at the scene to investigate the extent and consequences that disaster had on the environment.

A fleet of smaller boats are used by LUMCON for offshore research

“We have a lot of really good people that make what we do happen,” LUMCON Executive Director and professor Dr. Nancy Rabalais said during a personal tour of the Marine Facility.

“We’re basically marine science research and education here,” Rabalais said. “We teach undergraduate and graduate students from member universities. We try to focus mostly on the coast.”

Areas of research and teaching covered by LUMCON include fisheries ecology, continental shelf ecology, coastal sedimentology, coral reef ecology, and vegetation genetics and ecology.

LUMCON operates on a budget of less than $9 million annually with less than $3 million having come from the state. Much of the financial support is generated by research grants and academic awards.

Rabalais confirmed that work conducted at LUMCON and other marine research facilities should not be viewed as a taxpayer’s cash hole benefiting only academic professionals.

According to the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policies, marine research ultimately contributes to the creation of approximately 2 million jobs in fields including tourism, transportation, fishing, ship building, and offshore petroleum exploration.

Marine research is also linked to generating more than $120 billion in Gross Domestic Product.

When it was first opened LUMCOM received full financial support from the state. Since then it has had to adjust for loss in funding by charging for such things as the use of their vessels.

“I think it is always a [tension] that keeps [industrial and environmental interests] working together,” Rabalais said. “We have solved many problems and we have still have many problems to work through. Since I came here one of the things I’ve worked on was oil field produced water discharges in the estuaries and offshore. I did studies on it funded by oil companies and as a result it provided some of the measures [that have been taken for environmentally sound oil exploration]. Some of the more isolated canals are now much healthier than they use to be.”

LUMCON scientists have become well recognized for their work and the results that offer practical application as well as generating public awareness.

One honor arrived with a telephone during the first week of September, when Rabalais was offered the $100,000 Heinz Award for her work identifying and characterizing of low oxygen levels in the Gulf of Mexico.

Describing her award-winning research, Rabalais said she does not like to use the phrase “dead zone,” which has been labeled on oxygen depleted areas by popular culture. “It is not the best [phrase] but it is what people understand,” she said. “It is called a dead zone because if you put a hook on the bottom and the oxygen value is 2 milligrams per liter parts per million, there are no fish, there are no shrimp. So if the value level is below 2 mpl everything moves out and things that can’t move will die.”

A healthy oxygen level at sea bottom is a value of 5 to 6 mpl, according to Rabalias. “On the surface water it is more along the lines of 6 to 7,” she said.

The depleted oxygen issue is tracked from the mouth of the Mississippi River where water layers have fresh water separated and resting on top of salt water. Oxygen in surface waters cannot drop to the bottom because of elements in the fresh water layer that block oxygen movement while plankton grows to the extent that is upsets the overall ecological process.

Ultimately, Rabalais explained, if plankton blocks oxygen from getting to the sea floor and bacteria consumes carbon that contains oxygen, then microscopic organisms that require oxygen would die. In turn, creatures that eat those microscopic organisms would die for lack of food, then the oysters and shrimp that eat those creatures would die and the trend would advance up the food chain.

It is a natural process, but researchers contend it has gotten worse since the 1950s. Nutrients intended for crops, artificial fertilizers and other pollutants enter the water table as far away as the upper Mississippi River and the upper Ohio River and roll downstream to eventually be deposited into the Gulf of Mexico. Rabalias said in most instances the nutrients are good, but too many of them add to an imbalance in the ecosystem.

“The data only goes back to the early 1970s, and consistent mapping only goes back to 1985,” Rabalais said. “People say it has always been there. There is some lower oxygen much deeper in the open Gulf [than oxygen depleted areas along the Louisiana and part of the Texas coast], but that is natural. What we have on the Continental Shelf is not natural. It has been aggravated by human activities.”

Researchers making use of cores and tracers use C-14 dating on sediment to determine chemical content comparisons back decades. “You can look at those sediments either chemically or biologically and see the change over time. What those sediment cores tell us is there is more plankton being formed on the surface, the ratio of some of the chemicals have changed, but the main [element] is that single cell microscopic animals that do not tolerate low oxygen are no longer present.”

Rabalias said that completely stopping the use of materials that have led to offshore oxygen depletion would only result in economic disaster and doubts that such a radical move would be worth the price.

“An example of this, if you completely stop it, that is what happened in Russia in the early 1990s,” Rabalais said. “The Soviet Union had subsidized a lot industry and agriculture. When the Soviet Union disbanded, the subsidies stopped, nitrogen phosphorus stopped getting into the [2,872-mile Danube] River. The [ecological system] recovered, but it came with and economic disaster. So I am not recommending that.”

Changes in land and water management are the most feasible ways to address depleted water oxygen according to Rabalias. She equates this needed lesson to what was learned during the 20th century regarding crop rotation, and practices such as planting winter rye rather than letting farmland lay fallow. She also advocates changes in waste water treatment practices.

“It is not just the low oxygen in the Gulf. That is a symptom of poor water quality in the watershed,” Rabalais said.

Asked about her intended use of the Heinz Award money, Rabalais said she would not be seen riding around in a new car or sailing a new boat.

“I have gotten awards before that carried money with them and I signed them over to foundations or charity,” Rabalais said. “The Heinz Family Foundation requires I take this one. So I’ll use it for things my grants don’t cover.”

An additional award issued to LUMCON this month is a three-year, $13 million grant, to be shared with LSU and 10 other participating institutions, from BP to investigate the impact of the Mocando (Deepwater Horizon) oil release on coastal ecosystems.

“B.P. promised [money] for hands-off research on the oil spill,” Rabalais said. “There were probably 70 to 80 proposals going after this award and LUMCON was one of the two [awarded].”

“I talk to the Board of Regents and it is a constant process to try and keep LUMCON in the public eye,” Rabalais said. “We’ve had between six and eight faculty members for a long time and we need more. Our state budget has been going down. We went from more than $3 million [received from the state] in fiscal year 2008 to $2.6 million for fiscal year 2012. During that same time, universities got a lot of [federal] stimulus money that we did not, but we are all being cut the same. We are taking a proportionally bigger cut than the universities. The universities are making up their funds with tuition and fees and we can’t do that.”

LUMCON has to reduce its operating budget by not filling positions, implementing furloughs and freezing salaries. “It’s been hard,” Rabalais said. “But we bring in close to $4 million in external grants every year to run research and support the institution. We bring in a huge number of university students that come through here and we have a very productive K-12 educational program, about 12,000 students during the last three years. They come from all over the state. And we are involved in a lot of other activities.”

LUMCON has just completed repairs from damage inflicted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 and Gustav in 2008.

Rabalais said she would like to have at least 10 full-time faculty members at LUMCON within the next five years, and secure subscriptions and materials needed to help the people coming to LUMCON conduct their research with the best tools available.

“I want to help us be better known in the state, but all of this takes money,” Rabalais said. “One of our Regents said about LUMCON, ‘You’re doing more with less while others are doing less with more.'”

Rabalias confirmed one complaint marine researchers have as being public perception influenced by special interest groups with concepts and judgments that do not match sound and complete science.

The state-of-the-art LUMCON facility stands out among the nearby raised wooden structures of Cocodrie. It is positioned as part of the coastal landscape between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers with research programs that span coastal marine systems from the freshwater end of Barataria Bay, across the open Gulf of Mexico and into oceans around the globe.

If all goes as planned, LUMCON will continue to be a standout in the field of marine research and an influential part of the regional culture as well as its environmental, industrial and economic future.

The Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium campus not only stands out in the small community of Cocodrie, the research and education facility is a standout when it comes to national and global marine and coastal science. MIKE NIXON