Kelped Crusader

It began slow and far away. Coursing over the ocean floor, the disaster struck along the California coast without warning.

The devastation was swift, deadly, silent,and, to the vast majority in Orange County, invisible.

Kelp shriveled. Fish and lobsters vanished.

Sea otters fled, followed by seals, sea lions, sharks, starfish, and scores of other sea creatures. Even the minuscule reef dwellers went missing.

Warm-water cycles had hit the Pacific coast before, but the El Niño that began in 1982 was the most punishing of the century. Without nutrient-rich colder water, the giant-kelp beds that had flourished on the rocky coastline of Southern California for centuries were nearly obliterated. And the vibrant sea life sustained by the shimmering, amber-colored kelp forests—about 800 marine species—disappeared as well. Nearly an entire ecosystem was wiped out.

The devastation of the kelp beds was a hidden environmental disaster, a perfect storm of ruinous natural cycles, man-made pollution, overharvesting by commercial users, and climate change. Orange County, with its rapidly developing coastline, was hardest hit. The only hope for recovery was to replant the barren reefs. Unlike other coastal counties, where it was possible to fill in existing beds, Orange County had to start from scratch.

“Once kelp beds go, unless they are fairly close [to other beds], they don’t come back. It could take 50 years,” says Mike Curtis, a senior scientist for a private consulting firm who has tracked kelp between Mexico and Newport Beach through aerial photographs for the last 40 years. “We have to get in there and fill in where nature can’t.”

Government marine agencies intermittently planted kelp up and down the coast, but funds were tight, and efforts spotty. For a while, things improved. Cooler ocean patterns returned for about 15 years in a row, and the kelp beds flourished. But in 1997-98, another El Niño—at least as severe as the previous—delivered a second devastating season of warm water.

After that, “there was pretty much nothing there,” says Ray Hiemstra, associate director of programs for Orange County Coastkeeper, the first nonprofit group to sponsor local kelp restoration in the county. Efforts to rescue the kelp beds seemed doomed. Ocean advocates began to question the wisdom of fighting Mother Nature, especially in Orange County, which lost an estimated 90 percent of the towering, translucent seaweed known as giant kelp, or Macrocystis pyrifera, in the past 30 years. Even the local Coastkeeper group gave up on the idea of restoring those underwater forests offshore.

“There was [almost] nothing else,” Curtis says, “until Nancy came along.”

Bobbing in a boat just off Laguna Beach, marine biologist Nancy Caruso and a few fellow divers worked methodically one recent day, prying sea urchins from a rocky underwater reef.

“The sea life on these reefs is fantastic,” said Caruso, beaming as she hoisted a bag of kelp-munching urchins onto the boat. During the boat ride back to shore, the 36-year-old ocean advocate and her volunteers counted, measured, recorded, and then dumped the prickly marauders farther out to sea. The work is arduous and possibly futile—since the urchins can come back—but Caruso and her volunteers have chiseled 60,000 of them off Orange County reefs during the last six years.

Caruso hopes to reclaim the natural balance by curbing the exploding urchin population, which was kept in check until their natural predators—sea otters, sheephead fish, and spiny lobster—disappeared along with the kelp beds. For Caruso, who maintains the urgent focus of someone on a rescue mission, even the tedium of hand-plucking urchins one at a time is worth it, as long as she has a chance to help restore what she calls “the rainforests of the sea.”

“Once the kelp comes back,” she says, “you have fish almost immediately.”

Since 2002, the veteran diver has planted and transplanted countless kelp beds along the coast from Corona del Mar to Laguna Beach. She has raised tens of thousands of dollars in grants, recruited and trained several hundred volunteer divers, and developed scientific monitoring protocols and educational curricula. She even taught several thousand Orange County students to grow their own baby kelp.

Thanks to Caruso and other kelp planters, and especially to the serendipitous, near-perfect conditions that began last year, giant kelp has made a surprising comeback. “This has been the best year for kelp in 25 years,” says Curtis. “It’s phenomenal.”