There are underwater forests spanning millions of acres — but they’re rapidly dying due to climate change and an unlikely predator.
Kelp forests, which are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea, play an important role in fighting climate change. Kelp, which is a type of macroalgae, is estimated to sequester 634 metric tons of CO2 each year — slightly lower than the amount of emissions released from the country’s largest carbon emitter, Texas.
Instead, the kelp forests are being replaced with the “ecological equivalent of a parking lot,” said Tom Ford, the executive director of The Bay Foundation, a nonprofit environmental group in the Santa Monica Bay area.
These “parking lots,” called urchin barrens, occur when thousands of purple urchins enter a kelp forest and mow it down. Urchins, about the size of a golf ball, with purple spikes shooting out from every direction, devour kelp at an astonishing rate.
Around the world, variables like predator die-off, overfishing, strong storms and warming oceans have caused purple urchin populations to grow and relocate to warmer waters, putting new pressure on kelp forests.
Once the kelp in an area is gone, instead of dying off, the urchins go into a dormant state where they’ll survive for years, waiting for new food to arrive.
While this is happening off the coasts off of Japan, Tasmania, Norway and Australia, California’s coasts are experiencing traumatic changes.
In the last decade, more than 90% of bull kelp forests have died off in the north coast of California. Tristin McHugh, the Northern California Regional Manager for Reef Check California, a nonprofit working to save reefs and oceans, is researching what led to this.
It’s hard to pinpoint one cause that has led to this current state, she said. But since the California Department of Fish and Wildlife started collecting data in 2008, California’s coast has experienced major losses.
In 2013, researchers watched urchin-eating sea stars die off for unknown reasons. “Losing sea stars in the north coast was kind of that last line of defense in terms of ecological structure,” McHugh told NationSwell. That’s because the purple urchin’s only other predator in the north was the sea otter, which was hunted to near extinction in the mid-1800s fur trade.
Between El Niño storms and the warm blob hitting the coast, “by the end of 2016, the north coast was kind of torched,” she said.
Purple urchins began to move inshore, feasting on the kelp forests that span 200 miles across Northern California’s coastline. Once the kelp forests, which are home to millions of underwater creatures, are gone, all that’s left is a desert-like urchin barren.
A few hundred miles south, areas on California’s coast have similar barrens.
In 1998, Ford, having completed thousands of diving trips, jumped into the water and swam through a kelp forest for the first time. “I was blown away by how gorgeous they were,” he told NationSwell. “That is the simple and honest truth.”
Ford began studying the forests and quickly learned the forests were declining and falling apart. That research led to looking towards solutions with how to restore the forests.
Since the urchins can remain in a dormant state for years, the only way to bring back kelp is if the urchins are removed or destroyed.
“To move it from an urchin barren back to a kelp forest, you can either wait a long time or you can go out there and get to work,” Ford said.
The startup company, Urchinomics, is also looking to get to work. Its solution: ranch them.
The company model is simple, collect these purple urchins, feed them until they’re at a marketable size and ship them off to consumers. The profits will then be invested back into restoring the kelp forests and collecting more urchins, deemed a restorative seafood model.
“We try to turn this environmental challenge into an economical, ecological and social opportunity,” Denise MacDonald, the director of global brand marketing at Urchinomics, told NationSwell.
Crack open a healthy urchin, and in its center will be spilling out with orange gonads, called uni. It’s found in a variety of Japanese, French, Chilean, Spanish and Italian dishes. In those regions it’s an expensive delicacy — “sort of like the foie gras of the sea,” MacDonald said. In the rest of the world, it’s a potential new market.
Brian Tsuyoshi Takeda, the CEO and founder of Urchinomics, worked with a Norwegian company that had successfully developed a feed for sea urchins. During that same period, Takeda watched the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami leave the coast of Japan, his home country, barren.
Those two things opened an opportunity to farm urchins and meet the market demand for the delicacy.
“There’s a lot of opportunities for us to do good by bringing these kelp forests back and being part of the solution,” MacDonald said.
Urchinomics is working with nonprofits to collect urchins. Urchinomics is in the final stages of launching its ranching facility in Newfoundland, Canada, which will transport urchins to the New York City market. It also has markets in Japan, Norway and other parts of Canada. In California, it’s working with divers to collect urchins for ranching.
Sam Briggs, a scientific diver, has collected urchins for over a decade. “I’ve witnessed firsthand what’s going on with the urchin problem,” he told NationSwell. So when Urchinomics hired his lab to collect purple urchins to farm, it was refreshing to be part of the solution, he said.
“I like the idea of using these animals for a purpose,” he said.
The Bay Foundation hires commercial sea urchin fishermen to go out and smash the animals.
Smashing is the quickest approach. Previously, divers at the foundation would capture urchins and relocate them to other, non-populated areas, but due to expanding numbers, it’s no longer viable to move urchins to other areas. Ford’s team also looked at collecting urchins and composting them, but that proved to be greenhouse gas-intensive work.
So for now, carefully trained divers enter the water and smash. Scientists research which areas to focus removal and monitor over the years. Since 2013, divers have spent 7,000 hours removing 3.6 million urchins across 46 acres. “There’s a tremendous amount of science before and after this all goes down,” Ford said. “They don’t just jump off the back of the boat and start swinging away like Paul Bunyan.”
So far their work has been successful. The kelp species in Southern California is a perennial, which means it is constantly reproducing and growing. Once nearly all the urchins have been removed, kelp rebounds in just a few months.
But in the north, where bull kelp is an annual species, that means there’s only one shot each year to reproduce. With all the changes to Northern California’s coast, conservationists are unsure if the kelp will grow back.
“We’re just not equipped to deal with such rapid changes to our environment like this,” McHugh said. So Reef Check is launching a study to see if the kelp will regrow when urchins are removed and how many need to be removed for regrowth.
Across the northern coast, groups like the Watermen’s Alliance are conducting large-scale removals of urchins, and NOYO Center is expanding public outreach.
Everyone from divers to scientists, fishermen to startup founders remain positive.
“There’s a wider audience that’s paying more attention to this kelp forest loss and not seeing it as the biologist’s problem but all of our problem,” McHugh said. “If the ocean agrees, I’m optimistic that the kelp will come.”
More: These Gorgeous Fish Are Invading Florida’s Coasts. One Solution? Eat Them
Tag: oceans
Scientists Found a 4-Propeller Solution to a 200-Ton Question
An animal’s weight is more than just a random characteristic: It’s a window into understanding fundamental truths about how animals survive. By weighing animals, experts glean insights into how much those animals eat, how quickly they and their population are growing and — perhaps most crucially — how outside stressors like the byproducts of human life can impact their health.
That information is a crucial launching pad for conservationists to determine how best to protect these species.
But weighing especially large mammals isn’t easy. When it comes to whales, which can grow over 100 feet long and weigh upward of 200 tons, scientists have had to rely on the limited information provided by dead specimens that were caught in fishing nets, washed up on shore or were intentionally killed for the purpose of research. Though obviously better than no specimens at all, this narrow scope pales in comparison to what scientists could learn from live specimens, especially as whales come under increased threat.
That’s where drones come in.
Scientists have figured out a way to pair drone photographs with historical data, using the combined information to develop a model used that accurately calculates a whale’s body volume and mass. The new model can be used to track both individual whales and various species over time.
This breakthrough, which was published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution in October, is an important step in both researching and protecting whales.
“Knowing the body mass of free-living whales opens up new avenues of research,” Fredrick Christiansen, the lead researcher of the study from Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, told Cosmos.
Standing on the deck of sailboats, researchers controlled drones and took photos of 86 southern right whales. Though these photos helped create a model endemic to this species of whale, scientists believe the approach can be adjusted for use with other large marine animals.
“Weighing live whales with a drone at sea, we can get growth rates and changes in body conditions,” Michael Moore, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a co-author of the study told Cape Cod Times. “We learn a lot more about stressors like food, what lack of food does to animals.”
Moore also noted that the model can help when trying to detangle whales from fishing gear. The model will allow veterinarians and conservationists to give an accurate dose of sedatives when freeing the whale.
Two co-authors of the study are already using the model to look at the links between survival rates of southern right whale calves and kelp gull harassment, which is when birds land on the backs of the calves and attack, which can negatively impact the calves’ health and survival rates.
Co-authors Mariano Sironi and Marcela Uhart, from the Southern Right Whale Health Monitoring Program, told Cosmos that “the use of drones to estimate whale weight and condition, as well as to individually track calves while they grow beside their mothers, has been a real breakthrough in our investigation.”
More: These Brilliant Nets Don’t Just Glow in the Dark — They’re Saving Sea Turtles’ Lives
Using AI as a Weapon Against Overfishing, A New Approach to Helping Homeless Addicts and More
How AI Can Help Keep Ocean Fisheries Sustainable, Fast Company
Overfishing is a huge threat to global ecosystems, but experts are taking a cue from Silicon Valley to find a solution. By mounting cameras on fishing boats and using the same facial recognition tech that Facebook uses to identify people in photos, scientists can classify different fish species and help root out illegal harvests.
A Sober Utopia, Pacific Standard
A new program in Colorado takes a radical approach to helping homeless addicts — giving them the freedom to rebuild their lives on their own terms. Housed in Fort Lyon (ironically, a former prison), the program is a mix of rehab, university and startup, with many residents pursuing creative interests and building businesses as they become sober.
Inside LAX’s New Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Unit, The Atlantic
With 75 million travelers passing through its terminals every year, LAX is one of the most vulnerable terrorist targets in the U.S. But the airport behemoth has built an intelligence team from the ground up with analytic capabilities that “rival the agencies of a small nation-state.” The team’s innovative approach to fighting terrorism could signal a larger shift in the way global infrastructure sites protect themselves — building their own intelligence units when “the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security [are] simply not good enough.”
Continue reading “Using AI as a Weapon Against Overfishing, A New Approach to Helping Homeless Addicts and More”
How Coral Reefs Might Resist Climate Change, America’s Coolest Mayor Runs for Senate and More
Unnatural Selection, The New Yorker
The ocean holds many wonders, but perhaps none are more precious and more fragile than its tropical coral reefs. Coral, at first sight, appears to be a lifeless rock, but it’s actually a miniature animal that houses an even smaller plant inside its cells — a symbiotic relationship developed over millennia. Ruth Gates, a University of Hawaii marine biologist, is attempting to speed up that evolutionary process and create a “super coral” by exposing it to the harsher conditions expected by next century: warmer, more acidic water caused by climate change. It’s a new take on conservation — call it “assisted evolution” — that’s also being tested on forests in Syracuse, N.Y., where a professor is genetically engineering a fungus-resistant chestnut tree. Can these scientists do what Mother Nature couldn’t?
This Mayor Wants To Give Struggling Cities a Front-Row Seat in D.C., Next City
Standing at 6’8” with a shaved head and tattoos on his arms, the mayor of Braddock, a Pittsburgh suburb hammered by industrial decline, doesn’t look like your typical public official. Dubbed America’s coolest mayor, John Fetterman has implemented some of the brightest ideas for urban renewal, as he replaced a moribund steel industry with public art, urban agriculture, craft beer and other hipster fare. Now, Fetterman is competing in the Democratic primary for Pennsylvania’s Senate seat (currently held by a Republican). If he wins, he’s promised a new Marshall Plan (like the billions invested in Europe after WWII) for America’s forgotten cities. In most election cycles, Fetterman would be written off as an outsider without a chance, but in this unpredictable year, this fresh candidate may just have a shot.
The Resurrection of St. Benedict’s, 60 Minutes
Up until 1967, St. Benedict’s Prep was your run-of-the-mill Catholic boy’s school, serving upper-middle class, white families in Newark, N.J. But when racial tensions exploded into bloody riots that summer, whites fled the city en masse. The school nearly collapsed (it closed for one year), but faculty member Edwin Leahy, then 26, quickly got it back on its feet. It reopened with one big change: students would run the school themselves, keeping each other out of gangs and competing for top marks. Of its 550 students today, nearly all from poor neighborhoods, only two percent don’t finish high school — in a city with a 30 percent dropout rate. Intellect isn’t the major problem in American education, Leahy, a Benedictine monk, argues; it’s all about making students’ realizing their own potential and see “the fact that they are a gift to somebody else.”
Did You Know That Sunscreen is Harmful to the Environment?
We usually think of sunscreen as something of a Godsend, allowing us to bask in the sun’s rays while protecting our skin from harmful solar radiation.
However, if you’ve ever noticed that oily sheen in a lake or ocean, you have to realize that these miracle lotions aren’t the best for marine life, from bleaching coral reefs to harming phytoplankton (an all-important microalgae that’s the basis of the ocean’s food chain and helps sequester carbon, which helps mitigate climate change).
Titanium dioxide — a common ingredient in traditional sunscreen — can potentially harm underwater ecosystems. As Ensia writes, this chemical, when washed off your body, reacts with ultraviolet light to form new compounds such as hydrogen peroxide, which causes “high levels” of stress on phytoplankton populations.
So what’s a sun-lover to do, especially if you’re suffering from seasonal affectiven disorder from being cooped up inside all winter? Make sure you time your trip to the beach or lake accordingly, so that you’re not there during peak sun hours. Also, don’t stay outdoors for long stretches of time. When you are outside, Ensia suggests that you wear protective clothing such as long sleeves and hats before opting for sunscreen, and if you must use sunscreen, make sure the goop is fully absorbed into your skin before you enter water.
You should also choose a product on the Environmental Working Group’s extensive list of eco-friendly sunscreens (there are plenty of reviews online about the best ones). After all, you should protect yourself in addition to protecting the ocean.
DON’T MISS: Kelp: The Sea Weed That Could Save Mankind
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The Problem With Your Washing Machine That’s Hard to See But Impossible to Ignore
How does doing the laundry cause pollution?
According to a 2011 study from ecologist Mark Browne, in an average wash, 1900 fibers come off a single synthetic piece of clothing such as polyester, acrylic and nylon. What’s scary is that these tiny plastic fibers — aka microplastics — are released into waterways around the globe. In his paper, Browne wrote that microplastic was found on every site he visited. That’s 18 coasts on six continents, from the earth’s poles to the equator.
As the Guardian reports from Browne’s study, 85 percent of man-made material found on coastlines were microfibers. Unsuspecting marine animals are also eating these synthetic particles, which means it can possibly enter the food chain.
“We found that these particles of plastic can transfer, once they have been ingested they can transfer from their gut to their circulatory system i.e. into their blood and accumulate in their blood cells and they are still there months later,” Browne said in an interview. “So our major concern is that there could be infiltration of this material into the food chain and so we really need to understand how much is in the environment and whether or not animals in the food chain have been affected.”
So that’s how innocently washing our clothes can cause pollution — and this is clearly a big problem.
MORE: How States Are Hunting Down This Cosmetic Culprit of Pollution
However, unlike the prominent fight to ban cosmetic microbeads, getting clothing and appliance companies to help stop the shedding of microplastics has been an uphill climb.
According to the Guardian, since his study, Browne has asked to partner with popular outdoor apparel companies such as Patagonia, Nike and Polartec to research ways to improve their textile design so it won’t shed as many plastic fibers. Unfortunately, besides women’s clothing brand Eileen Fisher, no other company has offered to support him in his research. Browne has also reached out to washing machine manufactures such as Siemens, Dyson and LG to discuss developing filters that can stop microfibers from reaching water, but no answer either.
So if these industries don’t listen, how can we fix this? Don’t buy synthetic fibers such as nylons or fleece. For the ones you already own, try not to wash it as often or choose gentler washing settings. Also stick with natural fibers such as wool, cotton, hemp or silk which break down but don’t harm the environment.
DON’T MISS: 5 Simple Ways to Make Your Wardrobe More Earth-Friendly
When Veterans Need to Let Loose, These Volunteers Help Them Ride the Waves
When you picture a surfer dude, you probably think of Hawaiian shirts, beach bonfires, ukuleles and a carefree attitude toward life. All of which is the opposite of the image that comes to mind when you think of a brave veteran wounded while serving our country. But the recent Waves of Valor Surf Camp proved that both vets and surfers can hang 10 together.
Sponsored by Team Red, White & Blue and the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, the event took place at the Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach, California on July 19. In total, four surf camps are scheduled for this summer, and this is the second year that volunteers have offered surfing lessons to veterans.
How do veterans learn how to surf? Each is teamed with four volunteers: a surf captain and three others on duty to fetch boards, help the service members mount the surfboards and assist with swimming when needed.
During the Huntington Beach event, the 17th Street Surf Shop closed for business for the day so its employees could volunteer — helping people such as Navy veteran Goldie Nwachuku catch a wave.
At first, Nwachuku was afraid but managed to stand up on a surf board for the first time. “It’s really good to have a smile on my face. I haven’t smiled in a long time,” Nwachuku told Ethan Hawkes of the Orange County Register.
Ryan Lee, Air Force vet, told Hawkes that surfing, “really helps relieve my stress, and it also helps me connect with the veteran community here and with the other volunteers.”
The program has proved so successful that for next year, organizers are planning a three-day surf event that will bring former soldiers from across the country to participate.
Whether the surfers can get any of the vets to yell “kowabunga,” however, remains to be seen.
MORE: How Does Running Coast to Coast Help Veterans?
Watch What Happens When a Famous Musician Joins Forces With an Eco-Friendly Yarn Maker
Singer, songwriter, and music producer Pharrell Williams has been in the public eye a lot lately, from dancing alongside scantily-clad women in Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” video to lighting up social media with chatter about the unusual hats he wore to the Grammys and the Academy Awards. But now, he’s making fashion news for a completely different reason: Williams is collaborating with clothing maker G-Star RAW and Bionic Yarn, (a company that makes yarn from recycled plastic), to make jeans from ocean debris.
In an interview with Brian Clark Howard of National Geographic, Williams said of his environmental collaboration, “I am not a fanatic or a hard-core activist. I’m not the guy with the picket sign or the guy who lays down on tracks, but I commend them for their conviction. I have a lot to be thankful for, all of the cool things that have happened in my life. We have to give back in some shape and form and that’s giving back to the Earth. I’ve been lucky enough to be given this collaboration and my message to people is you don’t have to do anything. But if you don’t want to let it go, then what Bionic is doing with the oceans is right for you.”
Bionic Yarn works with marine debris organizations to acquire plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate (or PET) collected from coastlines. If the plastic has broken down after bobbing in the ocean for a long time, they blend it with land-based recycled bottles to ensure the material for their fabric is consistent.
The collection will be available at G-Star Raw stores and online starting August 15. By then, there will probably be a new Pharrell Williams hit saturating the airwaves, reminding everyone to check out these ocean-cleaning threads.
MORE: This Ambitious Project Could Change What We Know About Oceans
Happy Oceans! Happy Life! G-Star Raw and Bionic Yarn partner up with Parley for the Oceans. from parleyfortheoceans on Vimeo.
This Ambitious Project Could Change What We Know About Oceans
The Los Angeles city council recently approved an ambitious project to build an extensive ocean research center on an unused pier in San Pedro, an economically depressed area. The project, known as AltaSea, will be a collaboration between public and private entities, including the Port of Los Angeles and several universities. It will span 35 acres of water and land, and include facilities for studying tsunami waves and other phenomena, classrooms, exhibits, labs and offices. The Southern California Marine Institute, which combines the marine studies programs of twelve universities, will be one of the first organizations to take up residence at AltaSea. The project will take 15 to 20 years to complete and cost $500 million, a good chunk of which has already been pledged by the Annenberg Foundation and private donations. The project is expected to generate nearly 8000 jobs for the community, and the gains it will make in our understanding of the ocean are incalculable.