- NORTHEAST PACIFIC

A large number of environmental scientists and biological oceanographers in institutions bordering the northeast Pacific are studying the interaction between organisms at various trophic levels in the sea and changes in oceanographic conditions, including a major effort by the Coastal Upwelling Ecosystem Analysis (CUEA) program of the International Decade for Ocean Exploration (IDOE) and by a variety of other U S. government supported projects to correlate ocean changes with biological variations. Among these is a NOAA-sponsored remote sensing study from aircraft and satellites using techniques that might be relevant to fishery oceanography. Upwelling events have occupied scientists up and down the margin of the northeast Pacific and correlations with larval fish survival, primary production, recruitment, growth and survival of crabs, and higher levels of the food web surh as the distribution and abundance of migratory fishes have been examined. Historical analysis of variations in peIagic fish populations as far back as 150 years has been a recent area of investigation a t Scripps Institution of Oceanography and correlations with past and present ocean conditions are being attempted. A recent study has shown that tree-ring growth and albacore migration can be tied together. In 1958, an unusual warming look place in the waters off California and recent studies have provided sevcral interpretations of the rause of this phenomenon, the biological and oceanographic consequences of which have been recently docu-mented. These and other aspects of research in the northeast Pacific on ocean variability and its biological effects are reviewed