Kelpscape

Ship Sewage

The Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary proposes to require large vessels -- of 300 tons or more -- not to dump sewage while passing through the sanctuary. The Sanctuary will accept comments through 30 May.

By a geographical coincidence, the primary shipping lanes from Asia to Los Angeles run through the Santa Barbara Channel; it's shorter than the path outside the islands. The shipping lanes transit the northeastern corner of the Sanctuary. About 7,000 vessels pass though each year. 

To me it seems like a good idea: keep sewage from ships out of the Sanctuary.  Sewage from ships is usually not treated much. The Channel is one water mass, inhabited by a lot of marine creatures; so even better would be to dump the sewage further from land, where it is more diluted; or even to treat it before dumping, even though that might increase the cost of shipping stuff from Asia.

Egret on Kelp Raft

Egrets and sometimes blue herons like to stand on rafts of kelp.  The kelp must make fairly mushy footing. It looks like they are waiting for small fish to dart by.

Blue Heron at the Beach

Blue Herons seem like they should be river and lake birds, who perhaps enjoy estuaries.  They often show up along the beach, though, and fish and socialize as if they were at home there too.

Lion's Mane Nudibranch in Midwater

Lion's Mane nudibranchs can occasionally be seen on the kelp, using their hoods to loop down over the kelp surface and capture the small creatures living there.  This one may have been dislodged when the dive boat "Conception" anchored amidst kelp at Santa Rosa Island. 

Kelp at Smuggler's Cove

Kelp at Smuggler's Cove on Santa Cruz Island, from just below the surface. 

Octopus

Octopus hanging under a ledge, surrounded by sea urchins, near Refugio Beach. Octopi have a lot of personality.  I understand that red means that they wish to charm, white means fear or agression.  What do brown and yellow mean?  Can we map our emotions onto a creature that is less closely related to us than, say, a sea cucumber?  Maybe any sentient creature experiences "fear" when it faces a threat.

Geoduck Clam

Geoduck clam off the southeast end of Santa Rosa.  This has always been a great place to dive, the times I've gotten out there.

Shut Down Time for a Couple of Buoys

NOAA is preparing to shut down two of the buoys that monitor weather in the channel: the Point Arguello Buoy and the West Santa Barbara Channel Buoy.  The West SB Channel Buoy in particular is important when traveling to the western Channel Islands.  It's also useful for learning what is coming down the channel; a lot of the time the wind and waves have moderated by the time they reach the East Channel. The buoys are useful and amazingly easy to access on the Web, through the National Buoy Data Center. As with GPS -- or with email or the Web itself -- the buoy pages are so easy to use that it's hard to remember that it takes a big expensive infrastructure and lots of dedicated workers to keep them running.

East End of Santa Rosa and the Potato Patch

The view east along Becher's Bay at sunrise, from near the campground at Santa Cruz.  At far left is Santa Cruz, separated from Santa Rosa by the Potato Patch, so-called perhaps because it is usually rough.  It's also a good spot to see feeding whales, at certain times of year. The east end of Santa Rosa island is the trailing edge of land  right of the Potato Patch.  The good diving is  south of that, behind the hills where the sun is rising.

This Is Not a Shrimp

I've never seen these before, but they were everywhere in the kelp on the southeast end of Santa Cruz.  The tail looks like a shrimp.  They use the last 2 legs to swim, and hold the rest close to their body.  They can move fast.

A biologist very kindly identified this as an isopod.