Kelpscape

Surfy Day at Refugio

Despite occasional high sets at the surf zone, the visibility was excellent at Refugio above 25' depth today. The water is now 69F at 30 ft depth, a little off the high of 72F to 75F before winds stirred it up. What little giant kelp is left on the West side is seething with senorita wrasse, with lots of schools of little purple-and-yellow blacksmith and some of the blueish bigger ones. Purple-and-orange juvenile garibaldi and brick-red young sheepshead were hiding under the ledges. A couple of schools of more than 50 pacific barracuda cruised through, and sardines came through in clouds and streams.

Acid Kelp At Refugio Beach

There's quite a bit of acid kelp at Refugio Beach right now.  The dark purple color does soak up light so that any particles in the water show up like a sore thumb.  On the other hand, the color is lovely and little nooks often harbor juvenile rockfish.  I understand that it clears out areas that other living things can populate.

Refugio After the Oil Spill

Refugio Beach has now reopened after the oil spill -- and lots of people have gotten the news.  It's in good shape underwater, with some good patches of kelp; and lots of fish. It's possible that an oil spill that closes the beach may be better for wildlife than a lot of traffic by beachgoers. It reminds me of a story told to me by a health physicist who'd participated in the work to clean up Bikini Atoll. He said that there were lumps of plutonium on the beach from unexploded nuclear test devices; but that if you went into the lagoon with a net to gather a sample of fish, you needed a buddy to beat off the sharks with a baseball bat.  

Bryozoans on a Kelp Frond

Bryozoans make a great pattern on a kelp frond. They don't appear to harm it, and they provide sustenance for some of the other small animals that live on kelp.

Online Underwater Field Guide

Christine Donahue, and collaborators Clint Nelson, Dan Reed and Shannon Harrer, have come up with a great field guide to locally common plants and animals. To me, the best aspects of this guide are the algae and inverts.  It resolved a lot of the doubts and questions I have about those plants and animals that you see everywhere on the bottom, and seem to take a few different forms that may be related. Like, what are those big single-bladed algae that look like laminaria, but are completely smooth and have a central rib?  (They are young sea palms). It distinguishes between coastal and island environments: which are pof course retty different.  And, it's free for the downloading:
http://sbcdata.lternet.edu/external/Documents/Publications/FieldGuide.pdf

Venus's Girdle in a Wave

These don't look much like the 50's-style girdles but might be like the decorative belts called girdles, worn by gods and goddesses and style-conscious mortals, in a translation of the Odyssey I once read.

Alternative Universe of the Inverted Kelp

Tasmania has kelp indistinguishable from ours in Southern California -- but populated by boxfish, puffers, and sea dragons. It's sort of an alternative underwater universe:  upside-down, with kelp growing away from our northern-hemisphere ocean surface, but mirroring it in many ways.

When I first visited Australia over 10 years ago, I wondered: Did this strange place, the world's lowest, geologically quietest continent, represent the future of our planet, or its past? After Antarctica (which seems scarcely to count), it's the worlds least fertile, driest, and least populated continent. With extinct volcanoes, nearly-extinct exotic mammals but overabundant cane toads and rabbits, downtrodden aborigines safeguarding Earth's oldest culture, a nation with 1/3 the population of California and 5 excellent newspapers: is this where our planet is going, or a quaint remnant of the prehistoric past?

On my first dive into the Tasmanian kelp forests at Fortescue Bay, just south of Eaglehawk Neck, I realized: this land is a parable, from which we can learn.  The kelp forests contain abalone not too different from ours, although much more plentiful; and sea urchins, including an invasive species that is moving southward along the coast, leaving urchin barrens behind. They have many species of wrasse, where we have just 3; but they have no rockfish, and we found no scuplins. 

Sadly, the Tasmanian kelp forest is nearly gone, replaced by urchin barrens and smaller algae. Just a small patch is left.  It's clearly overfished, even relative to California.  Grab-all nets, basically floating gillnets 50 meters long, catch every creature that tangles in them. A recreational fishing license to set one costs A$50~US$32. On our third day of diving we came across a graball net that had lost its mooring buoys, and drifted for days, ghost-snagging a lobster (or a "cray" as the Aussies more accurately call them) and about 10 fish of every kind, most too small to eat.

On one of my last dives at Cathedral Cove, gliding through caverns covered with yellow zooanthids, I realized that the Tasmanian kelp forest is complete in itself, although it shares its fundamental feature with our forests.  Both are under great stress and may soon perish; but comparison of the two might help to preserve them.

Surface Kelp

Kelp on the surface at Yellowbanks, near the East end of Santa Cruz Island.  The buoyancy of the gas bladders on the kelp often lifts rocks off the seafloor.

Macrocystis Kelp

Macrocystis kelp floats near the surface.