Despite being called a “cruise,” the people on board The Pelican described the experience on the hypoxia monitoring expedition as very different from the elaborate dinners on a towering vacation ship or booze- and buffet-filled Caribbean itinerary.
Passengers described waves up to five feet high in the Gulf of Mexico, swinging the 116-foot research vessel like a pendulum, plaguing anyone who didn’t have sturdy sea legs with bouts of seasickness. Daytime temperatures in late July soared ever higher as sweat dripped down the backs of hard-hat covered heads.
The guests on board The Pelican weren't seeking pleasure or status. They were unpaid students and researchers who say they weathered the conditions in the name of science itself.
“It's not glamorous, but it is very important,” said Cassandra Glaspie, assistant professor at Louisiana State University and the chief scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual hypoxia cruise.
The 11-day voyage provides vital information on the sealife and environmental conditions within the seasonal low-oxygen zone that develops off the coast of Louisiana. The data the cruise collects informs state and federal efforts to reduce the size of the “dead zone” and sheds light on impacts to those who rely on the water for their livelihoods, like shrimpers and fishermen.
Now, after its 40th year and 38th hypoxia cruise, The Pelican’s annually planned journey faces challenges to stay afloat, potentially undermining decades of research and future plans to get the dead zone under control.
A decades long struggle
Biologists, undergraduate student researchers and crew alike celebrated the cruise’s 40th anniversary aboard The Pelican with a party that had an “old bird” theme, chosen to honor the boat, which has also been sailing for 40 years.
More than just an excuse to eat cake (with rainbow sprinkles), the purpose of the cruise is to capture information snapshots of just how bad conditions get in the dead zone.
“We bring water up to the surface. We have a little chemistry lab … to figure out what the oxygen level is chemically, and then we can validate that against what our sensors are telling us,” Glaspie said.
The low-oxygen area appears annually as nutrients, primarily from agricultural fertilizers from the massive Mississippi River Basin, drain downriver and spur algae overgrowth.
Algae eat, defecate and die, using up the oxygen in the water when they decompose and sink to the bottom. Fish, shrimp and other marine life leave the low oxygen area when they can and suffocate when they can’t, putting pressure on the vital commercial Gulf fishery and the people who rely on it. Exposure to low-oxygen waters can also alter reproduction, growth rates and diet in fish species.
Glaspie took over the work of coastal scientist Nancy Rabalais, who launched the maiden cruise in 1985 and led it for decades after. Every summer begins with a forecast of the zone’s predicted size, estimated by various scientific models and measurements of nitrogen and phosphorus throughout the river basin taken throughout the year.
“A lot of times with pollution, you hear anecdotal evidence of how it might be increasing cancer rates or it might be causing fisheries to fail,” Glaspie said. “Here, we have an actual, measurable impact of nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River watershed.”
The Mississippi River/Gulf of America Hypoxia Task Force, an interagency federal, state and tribal effort to reduce the size of the dead zone, uses data from the cruise to determine whether it is meeting its goals.
In the past five years, the dead zone has been as large as 6,700 square miles, and even larger in previous years, reaching nearly the size of New Jersey.
While still more than two times the size that the Task Force wants, the Gulf dead zone was slightly smaller than forecasted this year, about the size of Connecticut at around 4,400 square miles.
Federal and state officials lauded the limited success of the zone’s smaller size in a July 31 press conference held to discuss the results of the hypoxia cruise’s 2025 findings. They also called for continued work.
“It requires strong collaboration between states, tribes, federal partners and stakeholders,” said Brian Frazer, the EPA’s Office of Wetlands, Oceans and Watersheds director.
Mike Naig, Iowa’s agriculture secretary, said states should be “scaling up” initiatives to reduce nutrient pollution.
Whether or not this will actually happen is uncertain.
Funding cuts
Since the Trump administration took office, funding for nutrient reduction efforts upriver as well as money to operate the cruise itself have been scaled back or cut entirely.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s 319 and 106 funding programs under the Clean Water Act are the main funding mechanisms for states to reduce nutrient pollution throughout the Basin. Those grants aren’t funded in President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget, said Frazer.
The 106 programs have historically doled out $18.5 million annually, according to the EPA, with additional money sometimes allocated from Congress. The 319 program provided $174.3 million in FY 2025.
The cuts to these programs are not yet final. Congress can decide to add in additional funding, and has in past years.
States rely on both funds to reduce and monitor nutrient runoff in their waters, said Matt Rota, senior policy director for Healthy Gulf, a nonprofit research group. Rota has monitored policy changes surrounding the Gulf dead zone for more than 20 years, and he questions whether current reduction strategies can be maintained, let alone efforts redoubled.
“It's always good to see a dead zone that's smaller than what was predicted,” Rota said. “I am not confident that this trend will continue.”
Aside from cuts to reduction efforts, money for The Pelican’s annual cruise is also slipping away. Glaspie said that, ideally, the cruise has 11 days of funding. It costs about $13,000 a day to operate the vessel, she said.
“It's a relatively inexpensive program” with big payoffs for seafood industry workers who rely on the water for their livelihoods, Rota said. “This is baseline stuff that our government should be doing.”
Funding for the hypoxia cruise has been part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual operational budget, making it a more reliable source than grant funding. But with the Trump administration taking a hatchet to government-backed research, there is increasing uncertainty over whether The Pelican and its crew will embark upon future missions.
This year, Glaspie said, NOAA defunded a day of the cruise. The Gulf of America Council, a partnership group to support the Gulf’s economic and environmental health amongst the five bordering states, stepped in to make up the difference. Glaspie said having that additional day was a saving grace for the research.
“This is a fine-tuned machine, and the consequences for cutting it short are really predictable and well-known,” she said. “If I'm asked to create an estimate of the surface area of hypoxia, and we're not able to cap off the end in Texas waters, I'm not really going to be able to give a reliable estimate.”
Even without additional cuts, Glaspie said she already conducts the hypoxia cruise “on a shoestring budget.” Researchers on board don’t get paid, and every person who supports its mission – besides the crew that runs the boat – is a volunteer.
“It's tough for me to not pay people. I mean, they're working solid 12-hour shifts. It is not easy, and they are seasick for a lot of this, and they can't call home,” Glaspie said. “It doesn't sit well with me to not pay people for all this work, but this is what we've had to do because we don't have the money to pay them.”
A rapidly changing Gulf
Defunding research as climate change intensifies – creating extreme heat in the Gulf – could further undermine hypoxia containment efforts and the consistency of decades worth of data collection.
“I think the rising temperatures is a big question,” Rota said.
“We have 40 years of data, which is almost a gold standard,” Glaspie said. “We've just reached that threshold where we can really start to ask some more detailed questions about the impacts of hypoxia, and maybe the future of hypoxia.”
Despite this year’s smaller zone surface area, low oxygen levels went deeper into the water than Glaspie had ever seen before.
“The temperature drops [as the water gets deeper], the salinity increases, and the oxygen just goes basically to zero,” she said.
In some areas, Glaspie’s measurements showed negative oxygen levels.
“Oxygen doesn't go in the negative. It was just so low that the sensor was having trouble with it,” she said. ”It's the first time I've seen it like this.”
The smaller-than-forecasted size of the dead zone surprised researchers on The Pelican who saw just how deep the low oxygen levels went.
“None of us really thought until the estimate came out that it was below average size because we're able to see the three-dimensionality of it. That's not really incorporated into that estimate,” Glaspie said.
She also noticed unusually large amounts of algae on the surface of the water “like ectoplasm in Ghostbusters.” Toxic algae blooms can kill fish and other sea life as well as poison humans.
“If I had to say what would be important for us to monitor in the future, it would be these algal blooms, and making sure that we've got a good handle on which ones have harmful species,” she said.
This is why Glaspie, donned in her sun-protective clothes and work boots, braves the waves, the heat and the journey across the Gulf every year.
“This is our finger on the pulse of our nutrient pollution problem that Louisiana is inheriting from the entire country,” Glaspie said. “We cannot take our finger off that pulse. It is unfair to Louisiana. We have this pollution problem. We need to understand it.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.