For the time of year, it wasn't at all what Annie Douglas expected to see.

The leader of a marine mammal survey team from Cascadia Research, Douglas had observed hundreds of dolphins off the California coast during a November 2004 research cruise aboard the Scripps research vessel Roger Revelle. But off the starboard bow observers had alerted her to a humpback whale arching as it surfaced south of Ventura.

That a humpback whale had appeared at all was noteworthy. Surveyors from Cascadia, a nonprofit research organization based in Olympia, Washington, have seen a sharp drop in humpback sightings here since the El Niño season of 1997—98. Douglas's whale should have been headed to Mexico by now for breeding season. Yet by the end of the cruise, 14 such humpback sightings would take place.

"It's November and they're still feeding," Douglas noted with wonder.

Perhaps the aberration she saw from R/V Revelle's deck was to be explained in a laboratory two levels down, where a Scripps research team was estimating the abundance of the krill that humpbacks eat in the area. Maybe an answer was to be found in the water-temperature readings and current measurements being made during this cruise, the first for a program taking an unprecedented look at the relationship between the forces of nature and the food web in the California Current, one of the most economically important ocean regions in the world.

The expedition was the result of Scripps becoming the newest member of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network, a collection of 26 field-study sites across the country and in Antarctica. California's marine ecosystem joined surveys taking place in forests, grasslands, estuaries, and other representative habitats, mostly located in the United States. At all the LTER sites, intensive studies are aiming to tease apart the slowly evolving dynamics of nature. The benefits of this research will extend well beyond the network to non-LTER observational groups like Cascadia (one of several unrelated research teams sharing space on this Revelle cruise) and a host of other end-users worldwide.

The Scripps group, which includes scientists from five other research institutions, received nearly $5 million to carry out experiments in the California Current, a predominantly southward flow of water from the Washington–Oregon border to Baja California.

This maiden Scripps LTER cruise had a symbolic as well as practical significance, piggybacking on the 56-year-old California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program. The November voyage was a regularly scheduled survey of basic physical and biological conditions off southern California conducted by CalCOFI. The cruises take place four times a year and include the CalCOFI regulars-the plankton counters, fish-egg surveyors, nutrient quantifiers, and oxygen measurers whose consistent measurements have made the ocean off California the most intensely studied ocean region in the world.