Kelpscape

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.  

Channel Islands Fox

 
The foxes on the Channel Islands are becoming more common again. They are said to be the size of house cats, but this one seemed smaller than my smaller cat, who is not large.  The foxes have been here a long time: perhaps since the end of the last Ice Age. Golden eagles moved in when the bald eagles at the islands found that DDT destroyed their eggshells; I can imagine that a fox would make a great snack for an eagle. Now the bald eagles are coming back, the golden eagles are leaving, and the foxes are multiplying. This was one of a pair, completely unafraid of us, patrolling Santa Cruz Island near the trail south from Scorpion.

Refugio Beach

Refugio Beach is the most entertaining and accessible cove along the Gaviota Coast -- for both scuba divers and ocean creatures. I learned to beach dive there, but after more than 200 dives at Refugio, I still see something new on every dive. Every day the ocean presents a new episode of its eternal serial drama, in which each scene quickly gives way to another, introducing new actors to meet with the old ones.

As I learned to dive, I began to recognize the players on California's ocean stage: sea slugs with electric blue margins and orange tufts, fractal-mouthed burrowing clams, anemones of all sizes and colors, all amidst forests of kelp and meadows of eelgrass. I noticed changes from year to year. A dozen angel sharks assembled beyond the rocky reef, the next year swell sharks gathered, and the next jellyfish flowed through. One year the gray whales migrated near shore, and one surprised me with its blasted exhalation when I surfaced. Lizardfish were common early on; they reappeared only years later. Cormorants zipped past me underwater. A wolf eel moved in for awhile, far south of his typical range. Refugio Beach contains an ever-changing variety of sea life.

Over 12 years, I've noticed trends within the many fluctuations: an erosion in the amount of kelp, increases in the area of completely bare reef, and a decline in sizes and numbers of fish. Lobsters-large and common on my first dives-are gone. Urchins are more plentiful, the kelp thinner. Indeed, records and photos from a half-century ago show that kelp is much thinner, and that many fish once plentiful, such as sheepshead, are now gone from Refugio; although they still thrive in the marine reserves in the Channel Islands.

We are affecting the ocean -- as we have been for generations -- and we have the power to change it more. We can't ensure the survival of individual ocean creatures, and some species may be beyond recovery; but the ocean has tremendous powers of regeneration. We can set free those powers.

This description of Refugio Beach was written for Marc Shargel's upcoming book, "Wonders of the Sea: The Southern California Coast".

Recreational Fishing Destroys Sheephead Population

Recreational fishing in the channel islands has resulted in tiny, undeveloped male sheephead and a lack of big females.  Sheephead are naturally territorial; and unlike humans, they all start life as females.  The largest fish in a territory becomes male, and enjoys the favors of the resident females. Sheephead have strong jaws and teeth, and are among the few fish that eat urchins, controlling their populations. When a diver enters the territory they swim up to investigate, usually passing a few times.  They remind me of labrador retrievers: big, friendly, and not incredibly bright.  Spearing a sheephead is as easy as spearing your neighbor's retriever; but it's legal, and a way to gratify our delight in destruction.

Because urchins eat kelp, sheephead are guardians of the kelp, and of the ecosystem it supports: rockfish, perch, octopi, bryozoans, and so on. Without sheephead and lobsters, urchins take over.  The result is a desert full of starving urchins: the urchin barrens.

So many sheephead have been speared that the male in a territory is often hilariously tiny.  His harem consists of even  tinier females; small fish don't lay too many eggs, so sheephead are becoming scarce.  The big ones in particular are gone.  On my first visit to Catalina I remember two divers arguing on the boat back how big the sheephead used to be: "A big as me!" "Heck no, I remember ones as big as volkswagens."

There's no commercial fishing for sheephead, so this destruction was wrought entirely by recreational fishermen: including divers.

This article from the SB Independent describes sciences studies that document the destruction of sheephead:

http://www.independent.com/news/2009/may/13/california-sheephead-populations-dwindling/

Female California sheephead.

Red Urchin

Spines and feet of a red urchin.  The urchins are eating the kelp: they are out of control because the sheephead and lobsters are so scarece; but there was lots of kelp because the abalone were killed by overfishing and disease; and the abalone were plentiful only because the otters had been hunted out. 

The West Virginia of Australia

 

Tasmania is like West Virgina in many ways.  Both have large regions of forest with much wildlife, rugged but not particularly high mountains, wide valleys overgrazed by sheep, and great mineral wealth being extracted by outside interests.  Inhabitants of both have the reputation among their fellow-citizens of being simple country folk: "hillbillies" or "Tassies".  Both export many of their young people, and import retirees and summertime residents from the more "civilized" parts of their nations -- for a net rate of population growth of under 1%. Both have rapidly-growing eco-tourism industries, and both are trying to balance traditional hunting and fishing with conservation. 

But, Tasmania is about 25% larger and has about 1/3 the population.  And, Tasmania has an ocean.

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.

Pink Abalone

This pink abalone was in a crack at Hazards.  Usually their shells are somewhat overgrown; perhaps the other side of the crack had kept the shell clean. 

The Independent had a reasonably good story about the tiny area at San Miguel that still contains abalone, and efforts to re-open the abalone fishery there, while preserving the viability of that little group.  They had some great photos. These snails apparently look like hundred-dollar bills, from a purely commercial perspective.

Happy Earth Day!

Somehow I have the impression that the real Earth Day is on Tuesday.  But, all the festivities in Santa Barbara are today. 

Santa Barbara claims a link to the first Earth Day -- as described here by the Daily Nexus -- from the reaction to the oil spill in the channel one year before.  The LA Times posted some great shots of that spill last week.

I recall proudly wearing a green armband to Highland Junior High School in Louisville on that first Earth Day. The Vice Principal, Cletus "Sonny" Hubbs, stopped and quizzed me about what it meant. 

Meanwhile, the first bluebirds of spring are coming to the Goleta Valley.  The Earth celebrates her own day!

Oil Pier Pilings

These steel beams supported an oil-drilling pier in the 30's or 40's. The pier was a precursor of the oil platforms, in this case between Sands Beach and Haskell's Beach: supported on pilings driven into the bedrock beneath the beach.  The platform shelled by the Japanese submarine I-17 on Feb 23, 1942 was here; these may have been part of that structure.  In any case, the platform was dismantled when the wells became uneconomical. At some point the pilings were cut off at ground level or below. Erosion of the soft bedrock continues to expose them. In the ocean offshore, divers still find rough beam partly buried in the sand, or boxlike structures made from them. I've never been tempted to explore inside, although I once waited a subjective eternity as my dive buddy (who was divingwhile recovering from a recent hernia operation) poked around inside.