The Blob Hit California's Kelp. Protected Kelp Came Back Faster.

0:00 In 2014, two years after California finished building its statewide network of marine protected areas, the Pacific Ocean did something almost nobody expected. A marine heatwave named The Blob hit the coast, and it didn't let go for two years. Kelp forests up and down the state started collapsing. So the real test is how do these kelp forests in this new marine protected area recover after the heat wave? This is what we're gonna be discussing on this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and I'm a marine biologist and ocean communications manager for a, company called Pisces Oceans. It's a consulting firm that helps ocean projects succeed and have a greater impact on the ocean.

0:43 Today we're gonna be talking about what happened after the California Marine Protected Area Network went into place. Yesterday's episode was all about the history of how it came into place. Then we're gonna talk about something major that happened was the fact that a heat wave hit two years after it was designated and all hell broke loose. And we're looking at how a network of marine protected areas could recover after a heat wave or was it just the fact that these were paper parks and nobody was actually managing them? So we're gonna talk about that and what happened 'cause, uh, the thing is, like after one of these heat waves hit, like the blob, one of the major heat waves that happened during an El Niño and so many things happened that were bad, can it recover? Is that the idea? I mean, that's what a marine protected area does.

1:25 It takes away the human aspect of it, the human disturbance, all the extractive processes that can happen, fishing, mining, even some places where you can't do any kind of recreational activities in these marine protected areas to make sure that these areas were gonna be fine so that it could recover faster when these things happen with climate change. So we're gonna dive into actually what happened. So two years after this marine protected area was put together, this network, 2012. Two years later, between 2014 and 2016, a marine heatwave and compounding El Niño conditions hit two years after the network finished, and kelp forests statewide went into a large-scale decline, the exact habitat that the original law was supposed to prioritize.

2:12 Not only did that happen, but we saw sea stars go through probably the one of the worst cases of, death in that we've seen. Like, just the decrease that happened was unreal. They had sea star wasting disease, which was like a disease that came on because of the heatwave, and we just saw sea stars disintegrate right in front of us, and there was nothing we could do about it until that bacteria or whatever it was that caused it went away. And now sea stars are a little on the recovery, but still, it went through, like, something that was pretty dire. A lot of us thought that sea stars would never be the same again. And the same thing with kelp. When we saw the heatwave happen, kelp can't handle that much heat in that type of range, and so they started dying off.

2:52 So the big thing is, is like we couldn't do anything about the heatwave at that time. We can't just stop it in the middle of what was happening. So we said, "Hey, how do we recover from this? How do we make sure that these kelp forests continue to thrive after this? Can they rebuild after this?" The problem really comes down to the question of can the kelp habitats that produce and house a huge biodiverse, uh, system, can they recover after the heat wave? And the only way to know that is really to go into how management was done and how they looked at science data to ensure that, you know, the kelp was actually recovering and not just hope for the best after a 10-year review. So that check happened, for the first time as a decadal management review, and it was led by the Department of Fish and Wildlife for the Ocean Protection Council, drawing on long-term monitoring across multiple habitat types, so kelp forests, rocky reefs, mid-depth rocky reefs, sandy beaches and surf zone, deep habitats, and rocky intertidal zones.

3:53 Twenty-four universities, agencies, and research institutions contributed data to this program. The results came out as seven separate technical reports, plus a synthesis report from an outside research group, the National Center of Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Specifically so the state wasn't just grading its own work. So it wasn't as if the state went out and collected all the data, did the reports, and everything like that. It was like they had a third party look it over to make sure that the assessment was done properly. So after the heat wave happened, looking at these types of reports and looking at this data was gonna be really important to make sure that the kelp could recover or that we could analyze whether the kelp recovered.

4:35 Now, a peer review study out of UCLA published in the Journal of Applied Ecology used nearly forty years of satellite imagery from 1984 to 2022 to compare kelp recovery inside protected areas against similar unprotected stretches of coastline. The findings of that study found that the kelp forests inside the MPAs recovered measurably faster after the 2014 and 2016 heat wave than kelp outside of the protected areas, with the clearest benefits showing up in Southern California. The proposed mechanism is pretty straightforward. MPAs protect species like California spiny lobster, sheephead, and other predators that kept kelp-eating urchins in check.

5:17 With those predators intact, urchin populations don't explode into the barren-forming outbreaks that can wipe out a recovering kelp bed. That was the data. That's what they found, was the fact that the predators like the sheephead, spiny lobster, were able to stay there, even though the sea stars that were wiped out from the sea star wasting disease during the heat wave were not there to account for a lot of the predatory acts against sea urchins. So the kelp forests had the ability to recover, whereas in outside the marine protected areas, those predators were gone 'cause they were able to be fished out, and so the population wasn't as strong. Now, hopefully in twenty years from now or another ten years from now, we start seeing a spillover effect of the predators inside the marine protected areas like sheephead, fish, as well as the spiny lobster, to go outside of those boundaries and protect those areas and start feasting on those sea urchins.

6:07 So that is a big study to show what we needed to know, was the fact that inside a marine protected area, the predators of these sea urchins are protected and that will grow back and recover to make sure that any kinda thing that happens to the kelp, like a marine heat wave, the recovery will be a lot faster if those sea urchin predators aren't there or they're kept in check. And that's just nature for you. If we allow nature to be nature, a lot of the times they will recover, with, of course, some limitations. But this is what happens when you do the right thing and you are in an MPA that is really great to do that. So following that review The California Department of Fish and Wildlife released a formal set of prioritized recommendations in 2023, organized around three areas: MPA governance, the state's MPA management program itself, and the overall network performance.

6:58 The Ocean Protection Council is now folding those recommendations directly into California's broader 30 by 30 biodiversity commitment, which is protecting 30% of the state's lands and waters by 2030, which we've talked a lot about on this podcast, and treating the existing MPA network, already 16% of state waters, as a foundation to strengthen rather than just a finished project to leave alone. Like I talked to you, uh, yesterday and the day before with Anupa, how the fact that a lot of this reporting didn't come out as new assessments for this area. So this must have been an older report. So but there have been scientific reports that were released. I just wish they were released for a lot of the people that we talked about on Monday, but just it doesn't seem to happen that way.

7:41 So the fact is that we know that the ten years of monitoring, seven technical reports, one synthesis report, nearly four decades of satellite data in the UCLA study that I talked about, sixteen percent of state waters are currently protected. We know that this is working, and this is a great foundation to build on and maybe expand some MPAs, maybe look at areas where climate change can't have that much of an effect, and we can start prioritizing those areas to be protected. And this is a chance to look at the effectiveness of the MPAs and see where we can put either more or expand some just to make sure that we're protecting more of the state waters because that's an important aspect, right? The same review process is gonna happen in another ten years.

8:22 Hopefully, they start doing it in smaller chunks because I think that's really important to do it in smaller chunks. But the fact is that this is the way the system is set up. I would prefer, every five years at minimum to do this type of study, uh, and I think that's important to have. But the thing is, is that this MPA system, this network, produces those checkable, assessments to make sure that things are going well. This is not to say that California failed or passed or anything. These assessments are not for that. These are assessments to make sure that if anything has changed, like a marine heatwave, we can see how things are recovering and how they work. In fact, it's a way to say, "Hey, you know what? This works so well that kelp recovered inside the MPAs instead of outside the MPAs, so we should start expanding more." It's a case to have more because we need more kelp forests to be protected.

9:08 That's the show for today. it's pretty quick and easy, show. It's what we, It's what we do here. We kind of bring you the information because I don't want people to think, "Oh, here's a marine protected area. It's not effective." You know, because we don't really hear about what works when we hear in the press, and this works. So I want you guys to hear it here first before you go off and be like, "Hey, you know what? Like I don't think this is actually working." If you know it works that becomes a big benefit for us, in the future. Now, uh, Thursday's episode, uh, we're gonna shift, uh, from, hey, does this work, does this MPA work, to how do people get heard about what is happening next, right? Or what happens next. And so that's really a callback to, you know, the Monday's episode with Anupa, where we looked at, how this process didn't really allow everybody to be heard, and I think that's really important, to discuss.

9:56 and that's a good thing because we need to make sure that that process is better, when we go forward. So this is something that's really important to me. I hope it's important to you. That's the episode for today, so thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I am your host, Andrew Lewin. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.