Monterey Kelp Forests Restoration Status 2020

Monterey kelp forest regrowth continues in spite of hordes of purple urchins chewing on holdfasts – even with volunteer divers smashing urchins one at a time with pointy hammers and praying for the return of sea stars recovered from wasting disease to devour the urchins. One ironic twist – purple urchins are now losing their spines to their own wasting disease and might make cemeteries of the urchin barrens.

This video by Cariolis Films discusses the research underway at Lovers Point on kelp restoration near Hopkins Marine Station. Please click through to Vimeo for a better viewing and the 2020 follow up information in the text below it there. This was filmed in 2019. [Shared from Johanna Van de Woestijne‎ to Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University]

James Watanabe, Stanford lecturer, on the local kelp forest ecosystem around Hopkins Marine Station

James Watanabe, Stanford lecturer, on the local kelp forest ecosystem around Hopkins Marine Station, and sitting in one place for a long time to find out “who these [kelp forest] critters were, how they make a living, where you can find them, and the processes that affect them.”

Click here to link to the article.

Behavior of Rockfish Living in Monterey Kelp Forests

Meet an interdisciplinary team of researchers combining forces to study the impact of climate change and other environmental stressors on the behavior of fish living in a California kelp forest. Jody Beers of Hopkins Marine Station, Steve Litvin of MBARI, and Mike Squibb of the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford, are combining water quality and animal behavior data to study the interaction of physical and biological components of the kelp forest community, in part by tagging rockfish off the Hopkins shelf, planting monitoring sensors along the shelf bottom, and observing behavior when cold water wells up onto the shelf from the mile-deep Monterey submarine canyon.