Making the bed provides habitat for bay creatures
By DAVID EISENBERG Special to the Daily Press
A volunteer group of underwater foresters have restored enough of Santa Monica Bay’s kelp to fill a two-story office building.
Since 1996, more than 130 volunteers have restored more than 150,000 cubic feet of kelp in beds off the coast of Malibu, said Santa Monica Baykeeper marine biologist Tom Ford.
Ford, 35, has coordinated Baykeeper’s Kelp Restoration Project for the past three years, and is currently its only full-time employee.
“The restoration work — it’s not science, so much,” he said. “It’s really physical work.”
While most people have little experience with it outside of aquarium exhibits, kelp is one of the cornerstones of the bay’s ecosystem. Nearly one-quarter of California’s marine species rely on kelp during some portion of their life span, Ford said. A healthy bay also is critical to local economies.
“When beaches start to close or when fishing starts to tank, all of a sudden you’re looking at entire industries being compromised,” Ford said.
While the program is not the first of its kind, it’s the only project in the Santa Monica Bay to have earned the ongoing support of the state of California and the federal government.
Volunteer labor has stretched the project’s $100,000 annual budget enough to allow divers to visit their five restoration sites near Point Dume two to three times a week throughout the year.
“What holds municipalities or governments back from doing the right thing is often that they don’t have the money or the time,” Ford said. “Volunteers can step in and just do the job.”
To replant an area with kelp, volunteers anchor mesh bags full of leaf-like blades of the kelp plant to the bay floor. In other cases, they may drag long stalks of loose kelp down from the surface and tie them in place near a reef. Using methods that simulate the way that kelp spores naturally spread encourages their success, Ford said.
“A kelp spore knows a great deal more about where it should best be than I do,” he said.
Sea urchins must be removed from those areas because they feed on young kelp. Many of the spiny creatures’ natural predators have been removed by unregulated fishing, Ford said. The result has been their presence in unnatural and, sometimes unbelievable numbers.
“We show up to some of these sites and there are just urchins everywhere,” Ford said. “You can see nothing but urchins.
“Sometimes it feels like you’re diving down onto a big pin cushion,” said program volunteer Joe Couce.
The divers spend much of their time placing sea urchins into bags and floating them to the surface. At the end of each day, Ford said the creatures are taken out to sandy areas of the bay and released from their study areas.
“We know that they’re not very good at walking,” he said.
Laws prevent the group from destroying the creatures, or taking them too far out of their normal environments in the bay.
Another large portion of the work involves collecting data about the health of the kelp, as well as the number and types of marine life that have moved into the restored habitats.
While he admitted that he wished the program was more visible, Couce, who has been with the program for five years, said volunteers “don’t go out for praise or glory, they just want to work for the environment.”
Couce is a Los Angeles City firefighter and paramedic. Like many other volunteer divers, he helps out on his days off. The project currently has 35 active members, who dive as their schedules permit.
The kelp beds in the bay naturally increase and decrease in size over a period of years. Weather patterns, events that affect water temperature such as EL Nino and La Nina, and as well as certain types of pollution, are believed to have a role in those fluctuations, Ford said.
Over the past 30 years, kelp beds have become less able to recover from the disruptions.
“Everybody who’s studying this stuff sees this … one year it’s there and the next year it’s back,” Ford said. “But historically that wasn’t the case. We didn’t see the ‘vanishing kelp act’ as frequently.”
Increases in water pollution, dirt running into the water as a result of increased coastal development, and the exploding urchin population have made it hard for young kelp to grow.
“If you take a look at giant kelp, it’s easy to forget it starts off as a single cell planted on a rock. It doesn’t take much to interrupt it at that stage,” Ford said.
Ford and his crew hope that their beds will recover more quickly from disturbances, and help keep the surrounding kelp healthy.
Ford said he is glad the restoration effort is under way, despite that the bay is far from being healed.
“We could sit and wait until we had everything all cleaned up and then say, ‘now that the water’s all clean, let’s go fix it,’” he said. “I’m afraid if we wait that long, there won’t be anything left out there to fix.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 29, 2005. Read the original PDF.