18 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY april 11-17, 2024 www.montereycountyweekly.com in October 2013, he saw sea stars suffering from wasting disease—“I was seeing them turn to goo,” he says—and then he saw the same thing when he came back to Monterey in November. In 2014 and 2015, he started seeing kelp forests disappear, and urchin barrens around Pt. Pinos in 2016. The kelp at Lovers Point cove, he says, was lost in 2017, and he noticed the deforestation moved in an eastward direction, working its way down the Peninsula. He did witness one instance where the kelp made a natural recovery—from Coral Street in Pacific Grove all the way around the point to Asilomar—but he says it only lasted from 2017-19. “Urchins turned around and ate it.” In 2018, Rootsaert started his own group of volunteer divers, Giant Giant Kelp Restoration Project (G2KR), to try to address the problem legally. That same year, Reef Check got a scientific collection permit from the state Fish and Game Commission to cull some urchins around Lovers Point to better understand the maximum threshold of urchin density that would allow for kelp to “recruit,” i.e. grow new plants. Rootsaert and fellow G2KR divers participated in that project, which started in 2019 and lasted two years. They would dive down with welding hammers—one side pointed, the other blunt—clipped to their buoyancy control devices, and then hit each urchin once or twice to split it open, killing it. But the kelp didn’t grow back, and in Rootsaert’s opinion, that was because the state wouldn’t allow the divers to cull enough urchins. When that two-year project ended, he started pursuing his own project, and after repeated denials, was finally granted, in December 2020, an amendment to state sportfishing laws allowing urchin culling for three years on Tanker’s Reef, a shale reef off Del Monte Beach that is outside state or federally protected waters. Over the course of two-plus years, Rootsaert and G2KR divers culled hundreds of thousands of urchins—he estimates he’s culled over 200,000 himself—and restored 11 acres of kelp forest. But he wanted to go bigger, and repeatedly applied for (but was denied) permits to cull elsewhere. At the same time, it started to become clear that the three-year legal amendment for Tanker’s was still set to expire on April 1, 2024. Rootsaert’s understanding was that if his team’s effort was successful, they would be allowed to continue culling there indefinitely. Instead, regulators wanted to assess the rate at which urchins would encroach on restored forest in the absence of culling. So G2KR divers walked away from the project at the end of July 2023, eight months before their permission expired. Rootsaert feels like despite his best efforts and intentions, he got the rug pulled out from under him. “It’s so fucked up. I just want to cull urchins,” he says. “Firemen put out fires. In the ocean, no one comes, it’s just us. And it’s raging, burning underwater.” For now, as scientists study what happens at Tanker’s Reef over the next year, Rootsaert says he and others will be down there independently taking photos and video. “All I can do,” he says, “is document the destruction.” The various bureaucracies overseeing local waters make for an alphabet soup, and aside from the Fish and Game Commission, which issues scientific collection permits to those culling urchins, there’s the state Ocean Protection Council, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. Mike Esgro is a senior biodiversity program manager at OPC, which advises the governor on ocean policy and works with the Department of Fish and Wildlife on day-to-day management issues. Esgro learned to dive in 2014 and has since become OPC’s lead on kelp protection and restoration. He emphasizes the state is trying to put together a toolkit for statewide kelp restoration. Part of that is assessing kelp’s ability to recover naturally, and exploring ways to promote that. Nonetheless, he says, “I completely understand [Rootsaert’s] perspective,” adding that the idea of culling urchins “is a very emerging restoration method.” OPC is still trying to figure out how effective it is, the pros and cons and potential damage to the substrate, other species, and how self-sustaining it is, so you don’t have to “garden forever.” The questions OPC and other agencies were asking when G2KR started culling at Tanker’s in 2021 was whether divers could cull below a 2-urchinsper-square-meter density; if they could self-organize; and whether kelp could revive and survive on its own. “Keith and his team knocked number one and two out of the park,” Esgro says. “I have a lot of respect for Keith… A difference in perspective is how ready this method is, and even more than that, how it can scale up. The bar for conducting these more experimental types of methods is necessarily higher. That’s why we have to get an understanding of how this whole thing plays out.” (As to number three, Rootsaert believes Tanker’s Reef is nowhere near resilient enough yet to survive the onslaught of urchins. “The state doesn’t want projects to succeed, they want them to fail, so they can say it’s impossible,” he says.) Dan Abbott, the Central Coast regional manager for Reef Check, which advised G2KR in its Tanker’s Reef project and led the 2019-21 project at Lovers Point, echoes Esgro’s sentiments, and also lauds G2KR’s project. “It definitely worked, that data is very clear,” Abbott says. “It went from a complete barren to a very healthy forest.” But big picture, Abbott says: “We’ve tried removing urchins, we’ve shown that works. But it’s a tremendous amount of work, and is it scalable? Especially if you have to go back year after year.” Since 2022, Reef Check has hired commercial divers—who don’t need a permit—to remove urchins in a barren south of Point Sur surrounded by kelp forests, and recently, the state granted the project a permit to cull, not just collect. Rootsaert wonders why. On Reef Check’s own website, the project description begins: “When a local community member of Big Sur indicated their concern for kelp forests, particularly at Big Sur Reef, a barren approximately 2.5 acres in size, Reef Check began surveying this site.” Who is that community member? Rootsaert would sure like to know. Abbott says he can’t say—the person, or persons, want to keep their identity private, and he says they contributed money to offset the project’s cost. Abbott is ultimately hopeful for the future of kelp forests, citing their resilience and ability to grow in a wide range of temperatures. So too is MBNMS Resource Protection Coordinator Karen Grimmer, who also has nothing but Top: Before divers start culling, they ensure all their gear is properly clipped in to their buoyancy device and ready to go—that includes a welding hammer and a flashlight. Bottom: Divers getting ready to descend to Tanker’s Reef, located off Del Monte Beach. Daniel Dreifuss Daniel Dreifuss
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