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.  

i Madonnari Kelp Forest

This beautiful scene from a kelp forest by Jennifer LeMay assisted by Jessie Altstatt was the featured painting at the i Maddonari street-painting festival.  That big canvas really gives scope for showing the ocean!

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.

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.

Weekend Storm

The storms of this weekend created large and messy surf, and tore out most of the kelp off Sands Beach. Most of that kelp is now sitting on the beach.