A good farmer makes it his business to know all about soil.

A good mariculturist is no less interested in understanding the local waters.

Marine scientist Burt Jones and his students at the USC Wrigley Institute were investigating just that when one of the submersible “gliders” they use to monitor water quality came up for air off Dana Point last summer.

The torpedo-like gliders swim around the South Coast for weeks at a time, letting the current do the work and using a small battery pack to steer, dive and rise. Every now and then, they surface and transmit their data to Jones’ lab via satellite link. Then they dive again.

Except this time a glider did not obey the dive command. Instead, the automatic tracking system showed it moving unusually fast.

It occurred to Jones that the glider’s speed was similar to a fishing boat’s.

Hours later, a full swordfish boat sailing into Catalina was met by the harbor master, who in the name of science repossessed the bright yellow glider lying on the deck. Thinking it disabled, the fishermen had picked it up.

“I think they were a little bit surprised when they found out we were following them all day,” Jones recalls with a laugh. “I don’t think they like to reveal where they were fishing.” Adding to the crew’s disappointment was their dashed hope for a reward.

Memo to South Coast fishermen: Throw back the glider and make room for another swordfish. You’ll make money and help science.

Barring future abductions, Jones and his students plan to continue measuring key indicators in coastal waters – such as temperature, salinity, chlorophyll, suspended particles and nutrient levels – both with the gliders and with several buoys and moorings.

One of their top priorities is early detection of algal blooms. Some of these have made news in recent years because they produced a deadly toxin – domoic acid – that causes disorientation and death in sea lions and other marine animals.

“A bloom may not be apparent at the surface,” Jones says. “It may be that the glider will see it but a satellite wouldn’t.  We use all these resources because they all give us different pieces of information.”

USC College’s David Caron is the best-known California authority on algal blooms.

“We pretty much know that the number of these blooms is increasing, and the severity of some of them also appears to be increasing,” he says, citing nutrients from sewage and urban runoff as two prime suspects.

Caron cautions that the causes of algal blooms remain unclear: “It’s not one specific thing that gets into the water and, ‘boom,’ you’ve got a bloom,” he says. What he knows with certainty, though, is that “we can no longer think of the ocean as our great dumping ground.”

– C.M.