California's water snowballs into aquatic crisis
Volume X Issue 3
Published December 2018
It’s not just the terrestrial forests being reduced to nothing in California, the coastal kelp forests along the Gold Coast have been eaten away by a purple epidemic.
Before California was known for its environmentalism in all its liberal-stereotyped glory, early exploitation of the state’s environment by early immigrants such as the gold rush miners crippled the aquatic ecosystems. The consequences of overhunting and overfishing, international trade, and pollution compounded upon California’s coastal kelp forests and the San Francisco Bay to beat them into the listless bodies of water they are today.
California’s kelp forests were home to an assortment of species ranging from abalone to eel, serving a similar role to coral reefs as the foundation for a unique ecosystem. However, take this foundation away and all the below water image of the coast begins to look a lot like the rocky, desolate beaches of northern California dotted with purple asterisks, the tool of the kelp forests’ destruction. Said asterisks are purple sea urchins and in every sense satisfy the role of nature’s leveller: they have few predatorial checks, are inedible and worthless to humans, and have defensive spines and shells. All this lends to the urchins’ ability to swiftly eat through all the kelp along California’s coast leaving it an urchin barren.
Of course, such power was stymied by the presence of otters, who were adept at breaking through an urchin’s defensive shell. Otter especially are a keystone species in kelp forests around the globe, their presence making or breaking the ecosystem. In California, desire for their fur made the species endangered and left few predators to check urchin growth. However, an outbreak of disease among sea stars occurred, possibly spurred by climate change and warmer waters favoring the pathogenic bacteria, eliminating the population along the coast, and removing the last restraint on purple sea urchins. Without any predators, the urchin population exploded and California’s coastal environment transformed form kelp forests to urchin barrens.
Currently, a number of activist groups have taken to the waters to hunt for and forcibly stem the growth of urchin barrens along the coast. Past precedent has also seen kelp forests recover with the reintroduction of sea otters — one instance of this being the kelp forests in the English Channels. Unfortunately, current efforts to reintroduce and nurture otters back to full strength along California’s coast and to fish purple sea urchins into extinction are far from fully reestablishing California’s kelp forests.
Along with the decline of its coastal waters, California saw the gradual tarnishing of the San Francisco Bay. Although overfishing and overhunting in the bay did not cause the same sort of spontaneous destruction it did for the kelp forests as the primary victim of this for the San Francisco Bay were the non-keystone species sturgeon, human influence was still the institution of the bay’s suffering.
The San Francisco area was grown by trade and was a major port city for oversea trade missions. The ships that passed through the city’s docks balanced themselves atop the water through the use of ballasts: starting every voyage taking in water and then releasing the water upon arrival, allowing the vessel to maintain its balance relative to the local waters. While truly genius in naval engineering, ballasts have the unfortunate side effect of introducing invasive species to wherever the trade markets take them.
​
The San Francisco Bay is especially vulnerable to invasive species due to its unique brackish water and pseudo-isolation from the oceans, and with booming trade came a plethora of ballasts and foreign species.
One example of how devastating these invasive species can be is the Channeled Whelk, which is best described as having the shell that people “hear the ocean inside of.” Channeled Whelks have no natural predators in the bay and are apex predators with their sandpaper-esq tongue boring holes into clams and mussels and sucking up the animals inside. With no defense against such tactics, the local mollusk population has dwindled.
Considering the impact a single invasive species can have on the bay’s ecosystem, the ruined state of the bay is no surprise as several hundred invasive species are already established in the bay, outcompeting native species, consuming resources, and disrupting the ecosystem.
​
On top of the foreign invasion of the San Francisco Bay is another human driven sap on California’s waters. An influx of population in the bay area has led to demand for land, and, in fulfilling such demands, landfill cities, such as Foster City or the San Francisco International Airport, began popping up over the water, encroaching on and shrinking the size of the bay.
​
Conversely to the kelp forests along California’s coasts, the damage done to the bay is practically irreversible at this point. It simply isn’t feasible to remove hundreds of species from the bay nor is it to remove Foster City. However, conservation efforts can still prevent a total collapse of the San Francisco Bay, and the limitation of pollution and human encroachment and the further introduction of invasive species will at least preserve what is left of the bay.