www.montereycountyweekly.com april 11-17, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 17 Imagine a future where the swaying kelp forests on the reefs of the Monterey Peninsula—alive with fish and invertebrates—are all gone, and replaced by barrens of urchins, purple and pink moonscapes inhospitable to nearly every other form of visible life. That potential future is not some wild hypothetical. The transition toward it becoming reality is well underway. The first blow came with the still-mysterious “sea star wasting syndrome” that hit the Pacific coast in 2013. That wiped out some sea stars, including sunflower stars, which feed on urchins, which in turn feed on kelp. An even bigger blow started with a marine warming event first detected in the fall of 2013 that became known as “The Blob,” where sea temperatures off the Pacific coast registered more than 4 degrees warmer than usual over a span of hundreds of miles. By the time The Blob dissipated in early 2016, it left a mark that lasts to this day—kelp forests along much of the California coast were decimated by the changed ocean conditions that created warm, nutrient-poor water. As kelp started to die off, weakened by a lack of nutrients, sea urchins proliferated in the vacuum. It may seem counterintuitive that urchins would thrive in an environment devoid of their primary food source, but here’s the thing about urchins—they can slow down their normal metabolic rate and go into a sort of permanent hibernation. In these malnourished conditions, their gonads don’t grow large enough for sea otters to want to eat them, so the barrens persist, and a new, zombie-like ecosystem is formed. When divers, scientists and others started noticing kelp forests dying off around the Monterey Peninsula in 2015 and earlier, many were alarmed. But Mark Carr, a marine ecology professor at UC Santa Cruz who’s considered one of the foremost experts on kelp forests, wasn’t one of them. “It’s been 10 years now, and frankly people like me, marine ecologists, said, ‘Calm down, kelp will come back. Kelp comes and goes,’” Carr says. “We were wrong.” Around the Monterey Peninsula, kelp forests have been dying off for a decade, overwhelmed by the sudden multitude of urchins, which keep migrating across the seafloor if they sense food nearby. And while scientists and regulators wrestled with the problem to try to better understand how to solve it—and if it could be solved—rogue divers set out with small hammers and started killing countless urchins, illegally, to protect the kelp forests they’d come to cherish. Other divers have sought to work through the system legally, but have been frustrated by the tangle of regulatory agencies charged with protecting local waters. Many divers don’t want to do science experiments, they just want to restore kelp forests. While local marine life has made a remarkable recovery from many of the human impacts on marine ecosystems over the past few centuries—otter hunting, whaling and overfishing sardines to name a few—a fundamental challenge facing local kelp forests is one that nobody has an answer for: climate change. Can local kelp forests be saved? It remains an open question, and in part, will come down to whether regulatory agencies make it a priority. Right now, they’re interested in gathering data and using it to make a plan. But some divers say they have seen enough evidence, and believe they can bring kelp forests back, at least locally. And to restore life, all they’re asking for is a license to cull. Keith Rootsaert first started diving in 1985, and when he moved back to the area in 2009, he returned to it after a years-long hiatus. He was quickly struck by how much the ecosystems had changed over time—for one, by his eyes, there were considerably less fish. “When I found it was so different,” Rootsaert says, “I decided I needed to get involved to make my observations more than anecdotal.” So he started volunteering locally for two nonprofits: as an instructor for Reef Environmental Education Foundation, teaching people about fish and other life on the reefs, and as a diver with Reef Check, doing surveys both inside and outside marine protected areas to assess the ecological impact of MPAs. He first noticed urchins starting to proliferate around Point Pinos in 2011. On a diving trip in the Puget Sound Left: A crew of divers, including Keith Rootsaert, collect urchins at Tanker’s Reef in Monterey in 2021 for a research project of Moss Landing Marine Labs. Top right: G2KR founder Rootsaert, who lives in Aromas, has become almost singlemindedly devoted to kelp restoration over the past decade. Bottom right: A thriving kelp forest seen in 2013 at Stillwater Cove off Pebble Beach. Dan Schwartz Daniel Dreifuss
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