696 NATIONAL OCEANOGRAPHIC PROGRAM—1965 
students who take course work en route and participate in the first hand experience 
of working at sea. 
We could go on with an itemized list of our Pacific coast marine stations, 
but in so doing it would be easy to lose sight of the essentials. Marine stations 
are where they are for several reasons -- usually the location is the best availa- 
ble one nearest the main base -- be it university or fisheries board -- that shows 
most promise of remaining in a reasonably undisturbed condition. Friday Harbor, 
for example, is a secluded region with many kinds of organisms and several kinds 
of environments - muddy, sandy and rocky bottoms, and not too remote from Seattle. 
It has no open, wave swept shores. Tne laboratories at Charleston Oregon and 
Dillon Beach were located at those localities because of the accessibility of 
Several basic kinds of sea and shore environments. Some laboratories, located 
many years ago, now find themselves surrounded by towns -- these are Hoplins, Cal 
Tech's lab at Corona del Mar and the great Scripps Institution of Oceanography 
at La Jolla. But one way or another all afford scientific access to the sea, 
and to as diversified suite of environments and organisms as possible. 
Let us return to the subject of marine biology. While each station serves 
a slightly differert purpose, depending on the institution that supports it and 
the people that sta it, all have one common aim: to gain a better understanding 
of the organisms and the nrocesses of the sea. It might be remarked that this 
does not sound very different from oceanography, but there are differences. 
Marine biologists at marine stations do not necessarily go to sea, and marine 
biological stations do not depend on large vessels, nor are they involved in major 
expeditions. The line cannot always be clearly drawn between marine biology and 
what some people regard as biological oceanography, nor should it be. But for the 
most part the scientific effort at marine biological stations is related to the 
shore and shallow sea, and to the phenomena of organisms that happen to live in 
the sea. They work from the shore whereas oceanographers work from the sea. 
There is work enough for everyone - or, we should say, questions for all. 
One of the principal questions is how --- and how much do the animals of the sea 
eat? It is not easy to examine this question on ship board, as precise measurements 
have to be made not only of microscopically small amounts of food material, but 
of the amount of oxygen consumed, and carbon dioxide give off, and so on, We 
have a pretty good idea how much grain it takes to produce a hog for market, or 
how much fertilzer we must use to grow corn in Iowa, but we know virtually nothing 
about such matters for the fish, crabs and mollusks of the sea which are major 
contributors to our fisheries, to say nothing of all the diverse inedible or un- 
eaten organisms along the shore. But we must understand these processes if we 
are to get anywhere with increasing our harvest of the sea. In recent years we 
have become aware that our capacity to pollute our environment has increased ten 
or perhaps a hundredfold in the last twenty years, and we have found detergents 
in fish livers at sea and radioactive isotopes in oysters far from the sources 
of the pollution. So we must know much more about how organisms feed in the sea 
and how various kinds of substances are transferred from one organism to another. 
Some of this work is carried on by establishments supported by such organi- 
zations as the United States Fish and Wildlife service, but the economic - or 
practical - orientation of such laboratories often allows little time for the 
study of problems whose immediate application to the economic problem is not 
apparent. It is often from disinterested or uneconomic - if we may use the word 
in that sense - questions that unexpectedly useful knowledge may come. 
