[2] Her laboratories had temperature-controlled aquaria and live specimen wells, and she had a walk-in freezer, a dark room, and an underwater observation chamber in her bow and on her port side for studying fish behavior at sea.

[4] David Starr Jordan's first assignment in January 1966 was to take part in the California Cooperative Fisheries Investigation (CalCOFI), a joint effort by the U.S.

Dolphin population assessment in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean was one of her longstanding missions, and she was an integral part of the marine mammal surveys conducted by the laboratory's Protected Resources Division, including the Stenella Abundance Research Project (STAR), a three-year study of dolphin stocks taken as incidental catch by the yellowfin tuna purse-seine fishery in the eastern tropical Pacific.

[3] She measured and weighed 1,000 sea turtles, took 27,000 photographs using remotely operated vehicles, and conducted 27,000 oceanographic sampling casts, 22,000 plankton tows, and 4,700 fish trawls.

[4] The ashes of the noted fisheries scientist Oscar Elton Sette (1900–1972) were scattered at sea in the Pacific Ocean from the deck of David Starr Jordan on 7 September 1972.

[3] Stabbert Marine of Seattle, Washington, purchased the ship, renovated her, and placed her in service as the privately owned research vessel R/V Ocean Starr.

[7] She has temperature-controlled aquaria, live specimen wells, a walk-in freezer, a dark room, a data processing laboratory, and an underwater observation chamber in her bow and on her port side that allows embarked personnel to study the behavior of fish at sea.

[11] On July 23, 2015, with the lead oceanographer for The Ocean Cleanup and 15 researchers and citizen scientists on board, she departed San Francisco, California, to operate as one of approximately 30 vessels that took part in the Mega Expedition, in which the vessels cruised in parallel across the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covering 3,500,000 square kilometers (1,400,000 square miles) of the Pacific Ocean in an effort to collect more plastic samples in three weeks than had been collected in the previous 40 years combined.

[13] In July 2017, United States Geological Survey scientists spent 21 days aboard Ocean Starr collecting imagery of the Queen Charlotte-Fairweather Fault System off southeastern Alaska.