d eep Monterey b ay the War M ing pacific ocean beach surf salt p oint cli M bing
Take in our vibrant California Coast exhibit and help us restore biodiversity for a thriving California—and planet. Because every visit supports our mission to regenerate the natural world. Get tickets at calacademy.org
AQUARIUM + PLANETARIUM + RAINFOREST + LIVING MUSEUM
Steinhart Aquarium
Explore one of the most biologically diverse and interactive aquariums on Earth, featuring a vibrant 25ft deep indoor coral reef, an awe-inspiring rainforest dome, and over 800 species!
California brown pelican by Kevin Lohman Photography
WILDLIFE
Ocean Birds
The Farallon Islands host hundreds of thousands of breeding seabirds every year. Many have bounced back from extreme declines, and a rare island tour earlier this summer showed them crowding into every available nook and cranny. Yet in the midst of that success, biologists say, climate change poses a new challenge.
By Jesse Greenspan
SCIENCE
Seeing the Deep
The deep sea is the largest habitat on the planet, taking up more space than all of earth’s continents combined. New technology, from remotely operated vehicles to artificial intelligence, might help scientists understand what lives there before human activity transforms it.
By Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright
WEATHER
26
Boat vs. Float
Four thousand buoys floating in the world’s oceans beam back a constant picture of conditions at sea. Be careful not to mix them up with their namesake, the galley-like Greek boat that carried the Argonauts around the Mediterranean.
By Brendan Buhler
THE OCEAN
Life in Hot Water
Scientists have long excelled at studying the nonliving world. Now our ability to measure the living world is catching up. From eDNA to coastal monitoring, we’re starting to understand the stories marine life tells us about the changing oceans.
By Mary Ellen Hannibal
A Western gull on the Farallon Islands wonders if you have brought lunch.
EXPLORE
36 the coast
People around the world find renewal, connection, and meaning in saltwater swims. But how to put that first toe in the water? We asked renowned surf photographer Sachi Cunningham, who swims among the giant waves at Mavericks, how she introduced her daughter to the ocean.
By sachi cunningham
41 bay area (sponsored)
Solutions that give wildlife safe passage across busy roads in the Bay Area are gaining momentum. Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) and partners are using research to identify and protect the places most important to wildlife connectivity—and the list of success stories is growing.
By amy mayer
Clockwise from top left: Greg Clarke; Nick Paz; Jane Kim; GlobalP
p. 28 Mary Ellen Hannibal is an award-winning journalist and author and a frequent Bay Nature contributor. Her books include The Spine of the Continent: The Race to Save America’s Last, Best Wilderness and Citizen Scientist: Searching for Heroes and Hope in an Age of Extinction. Recently she has focused on the Anthropocene for Stanford magazine and Yale E360 and on the history of conservation in California for UC Berkeley’s Breakthroughs
p. 36 Sachi Cunningham, a filmmaker, water surf photographer, and journalist, focuses her lens on underrepresented voices and the pioneers of big wave surfing. The New York Times, the Today show, and NPR have featured her images, and she has been listed among Surfline’s top filmmakers and Surfer ’s top photographers. Her documentary film, SheChange, about pay equity in big wave surfing, is in postproduction.
p. 14 Claire Peaslee lives in the Point Reyes area, the source of her love for birds, weather, intertidal life, and all things ocean. She has published in the West Marin Review and Estero: A West Marin Quarterly and now writes a wonder log, sent by email and spoken on KWMR radio. She leads immersive outdoor excursions, teaches Action Theater improvisation, and works for bioregional climate action. Her past pieces in Bay Nature have ranged in subject from bioluminescence to chorus frogs. ClairePeaslee.net
p. 28 Known for their conceptual approach, Brian Stauffer ’s illustrations have appeared on the covers and pages of more than 300 publications, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. Brian’s “Worry” cover for The Nation was named #23 of the “Top 40 Magazine Covers of the Last 40 Years” by the American Society of Magazine Editors. He lives with his wife and two sons in Marin County.
p. 18 Jesse Greenspan is a Berkeley-based freelance journalist who writes about history, science, and the environment. He has previously written for Bay Nature about quail and wildlife crossings, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, Scientific American, Audubon, and other publications. In his limited free time, he might be found looking at birds while wearing a Mets hat. He also, sadly, likes the Jets.
p. 41 Haley Grunloh is an illustrator from New Haven, CT. Always fascinated by animals, she found drawing them a good excuse to study them closely. Aside from realistic natural history illustration, Haley also loves the art found in children’s books, an appreciation informed by her background working in a public library. In her work she aims to use humor, storytelling, and fun imagery to spark curiosity about nature. HaleyGrunloh.com
Other Contributors: Jane Kim (p. 12), Endria Richardson (p. 15), Sadie Rose du Vigneaud (p. 15), Lia Keener (p. 16), Anushuya Thapa (p. 17), Greg Clarke (p. 17), Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright (p. 22), Brendan Buhler (p. 26), Kelly Murphy (p. 27), Amy Mayer (p. 41), John Muir Laws (p. 46). Front Cover: This green-tinged wave along the Pacific Coast is not photoshopped or generated by AI. We mention it because viewers speculated otherwise. This is the real ocean in all her majesty. Jeffrey Rich
» Like Top Gun, but with Falcons Sonya Bennett-Brandt visits an Alcatraz flight school for birds that are learning to be the fastest creatures on earth.
Take a leisurely swim at BayNature.org, where new stories bubble up weekly, or delve the depths of our archives. Get great reads, events, and places to explore in our cool dip of a weekly newsletter: TinyURL.com/BayNatureNews
CORRECTION
» White Sturgeon Fishing Curtailed Harmful algal blooms, overfishing, and water diversions have all hurt local populations of this ancient fish. Now the state of California may list it as threatened, writes Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright.
» Eleven New Predatory Worm Species Found Some ribbon worms undergo a “catastrophic metamorphosis” that is “kind of like pulling a sweater over your head, but eating your body while you’re backing out,” a researcher told Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright.
In the Summer 2024 issue feature “In the Name of Eelgrass,” Bay Nature reported—based on an interview with a Point Blue Conservation Science researcher—that a Point Blue survey had made no recommendation about whether to place moorings in surveyed areas of Richardson Bay, implying that Marin Audubon had mischaracterized this survey. Bay Nature has learned that the survey did, in fact, make such a recommendation. Scan the QR code to read the corrected story.
LETTER
We were disheartened to see a prominent statement in Bay Nature ’s Summer 2024 article about eelgrass, indicating Marin Audubon (MAS) lied about a recommendation in a Point Blue Conservation Science report. This report, “Richardson Bay Proposed Mooring Waterbird Surveys,” recommends that “anchorout facilities not be located in any of the five plots [survey areas].”
Based on an interview with the study’s lead author and without checking further, the article claimed that Point Blue had not made the recommendation, and emphasized this incorrect statement by reprinting it in bold elsewhere in the article.
We are further distressed that the article’s tone paints MAS negatively for advocating for removing anchor-outs (anchored vessels upon which people live) and restoring Bay habitats.
The Public Trust Doctrine protects California waterways for the benefit, use, and enjoyment of the public. According to the doctrine, private residential uses are not public trust uses. Preserving Bay waters for wildlife habitat is a public trust use.
MAS’s advocacy to protect the Bay has contributed to the Richardson Bay Regional Agency’s beginning a process of moving anchor-out residents into land-based housing, which MAS supports.
MAS’s mission is to protect habitats, and we have always done so with honesty and integrity.
—Barbara
Salzman, President, Marin Audubon Society
Good Fire
Prescribed burns could help prevent disaster in the Russian River area. So why aren’t cities like Ukiah proposing to do more of them? Kate Golden reports.
» Creek Cleanups Will Continue Indefinitely Santa Clara Valley Water is spending millions cleaning up after unhoused people’s encampments. It would prefer to move them out, Anushuya Thapa writes.
» The New Trees on the Block
As urban canopies decline across the region, researchers are working out which species we’ll need in a hotter, drier Bay Area. By Anushuya Thapa, with sketches by Kate Golden.
B etter Understand an Ocean
A ye A r A go, Bay Nature editor in chief Victoria Schlesinger asked us to guest-edit this issue while she took some time off to recharge. This is not an easy publication to temp for! It is an incredible privilege to work with the group of editors, writers, illustrators, photographers, and readers that contribute to this community. Earlier this year a book by the two of us, Eric Simons and Tessa Hill, was published: At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans, about the human connection to the sea. We wanted to use this issue of Bay Nature to expand on that theme and to dive into stories from our changing Pacific. In the coming pages you’ll find new science and new stories about the ocean. Guananí Gómez-Van Cortright found researchers deploying video games and artificial intelligence to understand the depths of the “midnight zone.” Jesse Greenspan caught a rare press trip to the Farallon Islands to report on the uncertain future for seabirds and scientists there. As another El Niño departs the Pacific, and with a La Niña forecast for the winter, author Mary Ellen Hannibal shows how a big-picture perspective on marine life can help us understand such major ocean events. Surf documentary filmmaker Sachi Cunningham writes about her personal connection to Ocean Beach in San Francisco, and why it’s worth immersing yourself however and wherever you can. And as always, we cover people, places, and natural history worth discovering.
In At Every Depth, we wrote about how the ocean is changing and the pressures those changes place on the human relationship to it. There is bad news aplenty, but we emphasized as often as we could the opportunity to improve the systems and structures that have led to this point. We talked to ocean-lovers all around the world who are invested in building stronger cultural systems that connect people to the sea. One way we work toward a more sustainable relationship with the ocean is to establish a culture that feels connected to the ocean, and a culture that has the opportunity to look closely, to explore, and to understand.
As its tagline says, Bay Nature has always been about building that connection: Look into nature and understand everything better. It’s an honor to continue that work. And we dedicate this issue to the idea of turning the ocean, so often the big blue empty space on the map, into something everyone can know.
—Eric Simons and Tessa Hill Guest Editors
Simons is a science writer who was a longtime editor at Bay Nature In addition to writing about science, nature, and the ocean, he teaches high school math.
Tessa Hill is a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences department at UC Davis who teaches and researches oceanography and climate change.
Clockwise from top left: Courtesy of UC Davis College of Letters and Science; Davide_Lorpesti; Allison J. Gong
Root your child in nature with nature camp & environmental education.
Connect with the land in Sonoma County through outings.
landpaths.org
outings@landpaths.org (707)
Scan the QR code to get the scoop on how to participate.
Ocean Life in Fall
… has its seasons too. Furious upwelling relaxes; warmer water pushes toward shore. A tranquil pause before winter’s storms.
A Christm A s Cor
Gulls be G un wild
Congratulations: you’ve taken your first flight and made it out on your own on a jagged rocky Farallon island, 30 miles from the soft living of the mainland’s garbage piles. You grew up surrounded by thieves and predators; that’s how you honed your wit and courage. By early fall, fledgling western gulls (Larus occidentalis) are nearly grown and fully independent: foraging along the coast, skimming the sea for fish, and winging over to San Francisco to catch the end of baseball season. Western gulls born in Santa Cruz or Bodega Bay have been seen returning to their parents as late as September for an extra meal. But not those from the Farallones, the largest western gull nesting colony on earth and the incubator of what may be our toughest seagulls.
While not much marks the passage of time in the deep sea, the majes tic, slow-growing al ( Antipathes dendrochristos)—one of the 30-odd coral species known to live in the freezing depths off California’s coast—is arguably always in holiday mode. In 2012, scientists collected a piece from a beautiful specimen in 300 feet of water some 20 miles southwest of Point Reyes. A bright-orange rosy rockfish was peering out from underneath the “tree,” which measured 10 feet across; a similar-size coral specimen was estimated at over 140 years old. Until 2012 this species had only been seen in Southern California. Scientists gave it its name in 2005 because it “resembled a multicolored, snow-flocked Christmas tree, replete with ornaments of barnacles, worms, shrimps, and crabs.”
Ver-millions
The cold regions of the Pacific are awash in biodiversity, but not usually in col or. At least we have the vermilion rockfish (Sebastes miniatus), a resident of California’s rocky offshore reefs that shines through the depths in a radioactive red-orange it owes to zooplankton in its diet. Vermilion rockfish can be on the shy side; they’re a popular catch in both recreational and commercial fisheries, with about 220,000 pounds landed commercially in 2023. In our area, the fish spawn from September through December. Vermilion rockfish give birth to live young—sometimes more than one million larvae per mother.
Great white shark
Christmas tree coral
This Year's Spotlight: Western Gull
carcharias) swim to their famed hunting grounds around the Farallon Islands. They arrive in time to overlap with immature elephant seals, which attempt to haul out on pocket beaches. After packing on the calories between September and November, the sharks will leave California for the “white shark cafe” in the open Pacific. Farallones sharks are mostly repeat visitors: males show up every year, females alternate years. If a cage dive isn’t for you, shark season energy peaks on land with Sharktoberfest events around the Bay Area.
grow in clumps like an epaulet fringe on the rocky coast. Sea palms reach up to two feet in height and turn a rich caramel color in the summer and fall as they drop their spores. The crashing waves are doing them a favor, by battering other species out of the way. The spores stay close, which renders populations more vulnerable to threats like marine heat waves and overharvesting. Eventually winter storm surges best the mature palms, ripping them out by their holdfast roots and clearing the rocky coast, until the spores shoot up in early spring.
cies to our coast, while warmer water and north-flowing currents bring more temperate species. One of the temperate critters is Ditrichocorycaeus anglicus, a kind of tiny crustacean known as a copepod. Most copepods have a light-detecting eyespot, called an ocellus, but nonetheless hunt their phytoplankton prey by smell and touch. D. anglicus, though, has a lens-like structure built into its carapace. Experiments have shown that D. anglicus hunts better in the light than in the dark, suggesting it can do something many copepods can’t: use its eyes to see.
Vermilion rockfish
Sea palm
Ditrichocorycaeus anglicus
FHustle and Flow
The Pacific mole crab thrives in tumult.
or a chance to admire great resilience , go wading on a (safe) sandy ocean beach. Where shallow waves slosh onshore, you may find the Pacific mole crab, aka sand crab, Emerita analoga—a creature at home in impermanence. Found in patches on Pacific beaches from Alaska to Baja California and Ecuador to Argentina, this small crustacean is often super-abundant from spring through fall. At area beaches, like Drakes in Marin, a scoop of wet sand may wriggle and twitch in your hands.
Mole crabs live in perpetual motion. Unlike a barnacle, say, that clings to solid rock, a mole crab moves—fast—to stay within the ribbon of beach washed by waves. This mobile part of a sandy shore has a wonderful name: the swash zone! Not only can storms and currents relocate masses of sand; the swash itself perpetually shifts on the beach, with the tides. Mole crabs travel along with their dynamic habitat.
They’re ultra-efficient at this—always locomoting backward, whether paddling to body-surf in flowing water or digging to burrow into soaked sand. Emerita has a smooth carapace that’s egg-shaped for low resistance; five pairs of legs for swimming and steering; and a tail-like flap, the telson, for rapid shoveling. Place an individual you’ve examined on wet sand and watch it vanish in seconds, leaving only a dimple.
To feed on the ocean’s abundant plankton, a mole crab positions itself just below the sand’s surface, facing the surf. It extends its eyestalks and breathing antennae and unfurls a pair of longer, feathery antennae. With these it quickly combs the receding water, then draws the antennae through its mouthparts to glean food. It can do this more than once on a single wave.
Mole crabs reproduce from spring to early autumn. Gravid females (up to 1.6 inches long, twice the size of males) secure broods of bright-orange eggs to their abdomens with specialized thread-like legs and their tucked-under telson. Several times each year a female Emerita may release dozens to thousands of minuscule lar -
vae into the ocean, where they drift, feed, grow, and change through eight to 11 larval molts. After about four and a half months at sea, those that survive the journey try to land on beaches as masses of tiny adults. Huge populations and a wide distribution make this little decapod important as food for nearshore fishes and migratory shorebirds. Though Emerita seeks a zone in the swash that’s too deep for birds and too shallow for fish, its own feeding activity can reveal its location. Troops of sanderlings arrive in the sheen and motor back and forth, rapidly probing for crab treats. Shorebirds as large as the long-billed curlew also stalk mole crabs. Surf scoters may dredge the shallows for Emerita , while
nearshore fishes (mole crabs’ main predators) hunt beneath the breakers or even ride them into the swash.
Yet mole crabs persist. Even when winter surf gouges sand from a beach, mole crabs can go along for the ride and survive the winter in offshore sandbars. In spring the hardy adults move, with the sand, back onshore. A mole crab can keep up this rugged lifestyle for two to three years.
Though its numbers fluctuate, Emerita ’s regular appearances on California’s coast make it a useful indicator of beach and nearshore conditions. Since 2002, students in the Greater Farallones Association’s LiMPETS program have gathered mole crab data to build a baseline for evaluating shoreline phenomena like beach restoration or ocean toxins. You can survey crabs for yourself at the beach, at least unofficially. A handful-sample of wet sand may hold female crabs clutching tangerine-colored eggs; a carpet of oddly rumpled sand may house a throng of tiny recruits, newly landed to begin life in the swash. ◆
Claire Peaslee
Most crabs move in all directions; Emerita analoga is a backward specialist, and a champion burrower that can bury itself in one to seven seconds—after which its eyestalks may poke above the sand. Above: Curlew, with crab snack.
Above: Carla Brennan; below: Enrique Aguirre
a beautiful line
Afew years ago, I texted my dad a photo of myself and a dear friend harnessed a few hundred feet off the ground, attached to a cliff by a trio of bolts and some rope, both of us smiling (though my smile looks more like a grimace). “Find another sport,” he replied.
I did not, for some years, find another sport. In part because I loved hanging from cliffs with my friends, who kept us safe with fastidious knot tying and rope management. In part because the point of climbing was to outrun my fear.
I first visited Salt Point State Park, about 90 miles up the Sonoma Coast from Oakland, on a climbing trip. My friends and I were guided by directions provided by other climbers over years and decades, posted to online climbing forums. Climbers share knowledge that has been passed from person to person, often through word of mouth, about specific routes and risks, the clearest lines to fol low up the wall, and ways to minimize impact on fragile ecosystems.
This is a careful sport, requir ing the climber to confront the illusion of durability. Rock reveals itself as changeable, given enough time. Holds break and boulders shift. Cliffs crack into rubble. A sole climber, grabbing or stepping or falling at the wrong moment, can undo millennia of geologic work.
Salt Point’s sandstone is, in this regard, striking. Fingerand fist- and head-size cavities in the stone mark the park’s immense rock formations—sea stacks and arches and cliff walls—as undeniably vulnerable. These tafoni are formed when salt meets rock. The rocky terrace of Salt Point’s shoreline was exposed when the ocean receded during the Ice Ages. Now, the sea laps and pounds right up to the rock. Windand wave-driven salt eats the shoreline away, moment by long moment. While climbing, I see deep geologic time all around me. I grasp its works: its ridges and pockets. And I am aware of both my own and the rock’s fragility.
rain, navigating adrenaline and cortisol spikes, tensing my body against possible catastrophe.
What I remember most about climbing at Salt Point is fear. I’ve edged up the guano-slick ledges of Shipwreck Wall—a vertical sandstone cliff to the southwest of Fisk Mill Cove that’s home to nesting raptors and cormorants during some seasons—afraid of slipping, of the rope failing. And I have clung to the yawning underbelly of the Arch—one of many such sandstone caves in the park, hollowed by waves crashing against the coast—unwilling to commit to one more big throw.
There are terrific forces at play on the coast, easily seen, heard, and felt. Hang at any height from a rope and harness, or your own damp hands, and the ocean surges beneath you. Many climbs at Salt Point are only doable during very low tide, and even then, you will have to manage the nearness of the sea, the discomfitingly loud waves. Climb farther from the shore and you might still fall into a tidepool, where your crashing climber body will threaten starfish and urchins and chitons. Bolts and carabiners rust and stick in damp, saltheavy air. Climbers will have posted in forums about which bolts have recently been replaced (by largely volunteer crews), but known routes change suddenly, the result of broken and delicate holds. Grits of sand, the rock eroding in real time, fall into your eyes as you climb. The Arch collapsed entirely last winter, part of the natural course of shoreline geology, a moment of deep time experienced in the here and now.
It is my fragility that feels most present these days. In the long years since the pandemic hit, my relationship to climbing has changed. Climbing gyms reopened relatively quickly, but I tire more easily and am wary of crowded indoor spaces after repeated Covid infections. After witnessing and grappling with ongoing social and political crises, I find less joy in moving up steep ter -
I haven’t returned to Salt Point in years. Still, I love to remember climbing above the ocean. Bull kelp and red abalone swarm beneath the surface. California sea lions sun themselves on exposed shelves. Gulls and terns float, white and gray-bodied, above. I do not climb anymore, I am too afraid. I am porous and pitted, vulnerable as sandstone, if on a different timescale. And isn’t it beautiful, to be so exquisitely part of this ecosystem? To be dependent upon the interaction between rock and water, the kindness of friends and strangers, and upon our willingness to tread carefully? To say not only of the shoreline, but of our soft and gentle bodies, “be careful, you might, you will, break.” ◆
Get Busy Some
ways to show love to our coastlines and their
wild inhabitants.
North Bay Deal with Seals
Want to help rehabilitate puppy-eyed pinnipeds? Volunteer with the Marine Mammal Center’s animal care crew. You’ll spend your time feeding, weighing, cleaning, and caring for the California sea lions, elephant seals, harbor seals, and fur seals that call the San Francisco Bay Area home. MarineMammalCenter.org/get-involved
Bring Gloves
Keep one of the Bay Area’s most iconic beaches clean and safe for people and wildlife alike. The Golden Gate National Parks Volunteer Program holds monthly Muir Beach cleanups on the second Thursday of each month. Register, grab a garbage bag, and get out there!
bit.ly/muir- beach-cleanups
South Bay Hammer Time
If you’re a handy sort—perhaps even with experience in construction or contracting work—consider helping maintain the Marine Science Institute’s 4,000-gallon aquarium system and 90-foot research vessel in Redwood City; you’ll play a critical role in keeping this nonprofit educational organization shipshape. Hammerhead Building Team volunteers may construct wooden lockers or display cases, install windows, do plumbing, or repair decks and fences.
SFBayMSI.org/volunteer
Meet the Seals
Every winter, elephant seals flock to Año Nuevo State Park and form a loud, blubbery, lumpy-nosed rookery. You can introduce the public to these mammals by becoming a volunteer docent. You’ll lead guided walks through the elephant seal rookery, meet visitors at wildlife overlooks, and answer questions about the wildlife and history of the area. Application submissions close October 11.
Ea S t Bay Litter Fairy
Lake Merritt is home to more than a thousand different water-loving species, including ocean dwellers that float, swim, fly, or scuttle their way from the San Francisco Bay through the Lake Merritt Channel and into this historic tidal lagoon’s depths. Help keep this jewel of Oakland a jewel by removing trash every Tuesday and Saturday at 10 a.m., at cleanups hosted by Lake Merritt Institute. Volunteers meet near the Lake Merritt Institute office, 568 Bellevue Avenue, in the Sailboat House. LakeMerrittInstitute.org/about-theinstitute
Ea S t & South Bay Adopt
a Flyway
The Bay Area’s tidal marsh needs your help. Join the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory in restoring and caring for these important habitat zones and former salt ponds along shorelines at the Eden Landing Ecological Reserve, Bair Island, Alviso Marina County Park, and Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge—which lie along the migratory route of thousands of shorebirds and include nesting areas for western snowy plovers and California least terns. Check the SFBBO events calendar for volunteer days, when you’ll learn how to restore these critical habitats.
SFBBO.org/events
From top: Bay Nature staff; GlobalP
Condor Chauffeur
When you’re cruising below the clouds at 3,000 feet, the Bay Area is just far away enough to still look familiar. Unlike flying commercial, says pilot Mark Dedon, a small aircraft allows you to keep the details in view—useful for counting birds, or tracking an island fox. Or, if you’re off the clock, just to look around. To our left, pink and blue salt pond tiles reflect the swirl of clouds above. Beneath us, the wakes of tiny sailboats crack and marble the Bay. To the right, thick fog covers Angel Island like icing on a cake. When I can’t see the tip of Tiburon ahead, Dedon pushes in the steering, dipping the nose of his single-engine Cessna 182. The earth rises ahead of us. The view doesn’t get old, I hear him say in my headset. But it’s not the best part, either: “I just like meeting people and learning why they’re doing what they’re doing.” As a longtime conservation pilot, Dedon’s gotten to share his cockpit with dozens of biologists and surveyors.
Sometimes, that means helping a conservationist spot harmful algal blooms. Other times, he’ll be tasked with flying low above a lake, while the clipboard-bearing biologist next to him counts coots and buffleheads.
When ground-based radio antennae lose sight of tagged animals—mountain lions, eagles, etc.—pilots like Dedon get called in to find them. He’ll hook up telemetry receivers to wiring that runs along each of the plane’s wings. Once aloft, Dedon and a biologist might spend upward of five hours circling where the critter was last spotted, listening to sharp radio static, straining their ears to hear a chirp! from the radio tag below. Depending on which wing of the airplane “hears” the noise, Dedon tilts the aircraft: lower and to the left, then right, spiraling down, vectoring in on a location. The longer they stay in the air, the more exposed they are—to engine noises, UV rays, and difficult tests of the stomach and bladder.
The back seat, where the hull is tapered like a dragonfly’s tail, rotates out its passengers. Sometimes it has actual seats, sometimes just a cooler with a light lunch, and
sometimes a rescued California condor sitting pretty in a dog crate. “It feels better to have a purpose,” he says. “To do something that’s helpful for the environment.”
Dedon came into conservation flying somewhat haphazardly. Hired in 1985 as a PG&E wildlife biologist, he started flying to get from site to site, then to do surveys, and later for aerial telemetry work. Back then, he only knew one other biologist who was doing what he was. “We were pinching ourselves, ‘This must be a dream.’” Now that he’s retired, he still flies conservation missions as a volunteer for the nonprofit LightHawk.
If you want to do it intentionally, instead of waiting for serendipity, Dedon recommends starting with an environment-related degree, then shoehorning yourself into any conservation gig you can at an agency that also hires pilot biologists, like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. From there, the day job will help you pay for flight school and licenses, and your position on the inside will help you make the switch once you’re ready for takeoff.
Getting started flying, these days, is the easy part—if you’re flush. Arrive at a local airport of your choice, and that very day pilots will get you on a plane—a small one, like Dedon’s, with two fully functional steering yokes—and let you learn as you go. Introductory flights can be around $150 for a spin.
But once you’re hooked, the costs go, like the planes, up and up: about $20,000 in fees for a non-commercial license, or up to $100,000 for a commercial one, a requirement for federal jobs. If you spring for your own plane, you’ll pay for fuel, maintenance, and hangar rental. Cost is the biggest downside, Dedon says. But on the upside, there’s a view like no other. ◆
— Anushuya Thapa
GETTING STARTED
Pay range: about $60,000–$120,000 a year. Requires good communication skills, eyesight, guts, and bladder capacity. Nice to have: A spare hundred grand.
BIRDS ON THE EDGE
More than half a million seabirds breed at the Farallon Islands each year. Their up-and-down lives over the last decade reflect changes in the ocean. by jesse greenspan
The cacophonous alarm cries of western gulls rang out as a crane lifted a boat full of visitors onto the windswept Farallon Islands, a bustling avian metropolis normally off-limits to all but a few scientists and government employees. An immature Nazca booby, a rare vagrant from the tropics, perched on a nearby rock, seemingly checking out the scene.
A short walk turned up huge groups of common murres standing side by side, floating offshore, and whizzing by overhead, interspersed with majestic cormorants, orange-beaked tufted puffins, and pigeon guillemots that emit high-pitched metallic whirs as they take off. Cassin’s auklet chicks hid away unseen in burrows and nest boxes, awaiting their parents’ return that evening.
Every year, more than half a million seabirds arrive on the Farallones to breed. That’s more breeding birds than Oakland has people and more than any other seabird colony in the Lower 48. Just about every square foot of territory gets claimed by a pair of murres, guillemots, puffins, auklets, gulls, cormorants, oystercatchers, or storm petrels—except for what’s taken up by
five species of seals and sea lions. Located some 27 miles west of San Francisco—on clear days, mainland beachcombers can see the islands’ jagged outlines far off in the distance—the Farallones are a great conservation success story. Here birds like murres and cormorants have bounced back from much human-caused devastation, including hunting, commercial egg harvesting, oil spills, offshore dumping of radioactive waste, and gillnet-fishing entanglements. But now these birds face a newer threat: warming oceans that make it increasingly hard for them to feed themselves and their chicks.
In 2023, global sea surface temperatures reached record highs , and they’ve continued to spike in 2024. Around the Farallones, an El Niño that lasted from summer 2023 to the end of spring 2024 raised temps a couple of degrees above the long-term average and caused some birds to delay breeding, to not breed at all, or to lay fewer eggs than normal.
“They’re keeping more resources for themselves, basically, instead of putting them into reproduction,” says Amanda Spears, a Farallon Islands program biologist with Point Blue Conservation Science, a nonprofit that in partnership with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has been monitoring and conducting research on
David Wimpfheimer
Over 300,000 common murres nest on the Farallon Islands, an indication of the high productivity of the surrounding marine habitat.
the islands’ seabirds since 1968.
This year, of the dozen seabird species that breed on the Farallones, Brandt’s cormorants seem to be doing the worst. Researchers report that these fish-eating birds set up their nests as usual in spring, only to abandon them en masse and take off for parts unknown.
Once water temperatures cooled back down in May, some Brandt’s cormorants returned to the islands for a second go-round at nesting, leading to hopes that chicks will be raised after all.
Though not ideal this year, ocean conditions could also be far worse. From 2013 to 2016, a marine heat wave nicknamed “ the Blob” drove water temperatures in parts of the Pacific as high as 7 degrees Fahrenheit above average. All along the Pacific coast, seabirds washed up dead, especially Cassin’s auklets in the winter of 2014–2015 and common murres the following year. “Put your favorite choice expletive here,” says Julia Parrish, a University of Washington biologist and executive director of the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team. She co-authored a 2023 study estimating that “the Blob” and continued warming afterward caused millions of excess seabird deaths.
To make matters worse, an El Niño event extended some of the effects of “the Blob.” Then, in 2019, a second marine heat wave, nicknamed “ the Blob 2.0,” further stressed Pacific seabirds, though not nearly to the same degree as the first one.
On the Farallones, there have been boom years as well, times when nutrient-rich cold water, driven to the surface by strong
northwest winds, kick-starts a biological cascade that runs up the food chain from plankton to blue whales. “The ocean comes alive,” says Spears, who was on the Farallones at the start of California’s Covid lockdown and ended up spending 20 straight weeks there. “There’s this bloom of life.”
Overall, though, breeding success has become more variable
for the Farallones’ seabirds, whose populations, which had been skyrocketing for common murres and other penguin-like alcids in the early 2000s, have largely plateaued.
“Seabirds are long-lived, so they’ve always been able to withstand a few poor years,” says Pete Warzybok, Point Blue’s Farallon program leader, who has spent over 2,500 nights on the islands, more than anyone since the last civilian lighthouse keepers left in 1941. “But when [the poor years] start to stack up … eventually you get to a tipping point where the wildlife can’t adapt anymore.”
Much like kelp forests and coral reefs, seabird colonies are particularly vulnerable to climate change, which alters the ocean in various ways, including by increasing the frequency of both marine heat waves and extreme El Niño events. And when the water warms, it can affect the size, location, and number of forage fish and marine crustaceans that seabirds depend on for food, in addition to causing toxic algae outbreaks. “The basic story is there’s not enough food to go around,” Parrish says. She notes, however, that researchers still struggle to understand exactly “why we see millions of murres washing ashore, but not loons or grebes or gulls or cormorants.”
Besides lowering prey availability, climate change also causes sea-level rise that decreases the amount of land available
Right: A flight, or gulp, of Brandt’s cormorants.
Left: Point Blue Farallones biologist Amanda Spears holds a rhinoceros auklet to band its leg and track the bird’s survival.
birds of the farallones
by Jesse Greenspan
Brandt’s cormorant
These large, black birds are rocky coastline specialists almost never found inland. Brandt’s cormorants can be seen flying low over the ocean or diving for anchovies and other small fish.
ID: Their dark, thicker beaks are key to telling them apart from the other two cormorant species in the Bay Area.
(Double-crested cormorants have orange beaks, whereas pelagic cormorants have pencil-thin beaks.) A pale band below the eye is another diagnostic field mark, as is the spectacular blue throat patch they use during the breeding season to impress their mates.
Cassin’s auklet
Very rarely viewed from the mainland, Cassin’s auklets are hard to see even on the Farallones because they spend all day at sea, only returning to their burrows after nightfall. Much like salmon and blue whales, they depend on krill for sustenance.
ID: Small, plump, and bluish-gray in color, Cassin’s auklets have pale spots above their eyes and on the base of their bill (only visible at close range). In flight, they show a thin whitish stripe on their underwing.
inhabit every salt-watery nook in the Bay Area (though only rarely venture inland). Individuals on the Farallones have been tracked flying to places like Ocean Beach in San Francisco and Lake Merritt in Oakland, in part to feed on humans’ trash.
Common murre
The most abundant nesting seabirds on the Farallones, common murres, breed in colonies so huge that the density makes the islands’ surface appear dark in the summer. Males take their chicks to sea, before they can even fly, and finish raising them on the water. Murres are more easily seen from the mainland during the non-breeding season, when they sometimes forage close to shore.
ID: Penguin-like in appearance, common murres sport a blackish head and back and a white belly, coloring that make them look like they’re wearing tuxedos. Outside of the breeding season, watch for a distinctive dark line cutting across their white cheeks.
Pigeon guillemot
The Bay Area hosts up to a dozen gull species, each of which has multiple plumages depending on age and time of year. As a result, gull identification can confound even the best birders. Luckily, Western gulls aren’t the trickiest of the bunch—their large size and dark gray backs separate them from their brethren.
Another seabird species drawn to rocky Pacific coastlines, pigeon guillemots purportedly court each other with their bright red feet and mouth linings. Listen for their shrill metallic songs.
ID: Though superficially similar to common murres, breeding pigeon guillemots are blackish all over, except for their white wing patches and red feet. In the non-breeding season, they develop much more white on the head, neck, and underparts.
Left to right: Enrique Aguirre; courtesy of David Wimpfheimer; Enrique Aguirre (2x); Mario Balitbit, Point Blue Conservation Science
for nesting, and it fuels more intense storms that can wash away nests.
Seabirds do have ways of adapting. Cassin’s auklets, for example, have been found to produce two clutches during productive years, which has helped their Farallones population of around 25,000 remain stable despite several tough years. Researchers are currently replacing wooden nest boxes on Southeast Farallon Island with ceramic modules that stay cooler for the auklets when temperatures rise.
Biologists with
Other species seemingly hedge poor years on the Farallones with less tumultuous nearshore colonies. A 2022 study found that while “the Blob” was wreaking havoc on nesting pigeon guillemots in the Farallones, their counterparts on Alcatraz were doing fine. “They actually seem to be buffered from those warmer conditions,” says Tori Seher, formerly the National Park Service biologist for Alcatraz and the study’s lead author. “The Bay just provides a more stable environment.”
Still, the Bay Area’s much smaller nearshore colonies could never replace the productivity of the Farallones, which, even in poorer years, remain chock-full of marine life. The islands are now home to around 500,000 common murres, a population uptick from under 100,000 in 2000. (The murres are by far the most common bird there.)
Besides climate change, researchers on the Farallones worry about avian flu, which has decimated seabird colonies elsewhere, and about nonnative house mice (which attract burrowing owls that prey not just on the rodents but also on rare and secretive ashy storm petrels). Another issue is money: Due to budgetary constraints in the Fish and Wildlife Service, Point Blue is set to lose its federal funding starting in 2025.
The Farallones are closed to the public, and very few people get to set foot on the islands. But this May, the Fish and Wildlife Service and Point Blue organized a media tour for the first time in years.
After a two-and-half-hour boat ride through the notoriously bumpy waters outside the Golden Gate, journalists took turns being transferred to a smaller boat and then lifted by crane onto Southeast Farallon Island. They then trekked to the island’s highest point, where the lighthouse stands, and passed myriad gull nests with splotchy brown eggs inside. The gulls loudly expressed their disapproval of the human intruders while also jostling with each other. One gull had its neck bloodied in a fight with a neighbor.
Closer to shore, a California sea lion grabbed her newborn
pup, the umbilical cord still attached, and lurched it away from approaching waves as gulls swooped in to feed on the afterbirth. Just yards away, a massive male Steller sea lion, with a particularly enormous neck and shoulders, charged a smaller subadult. “That is awesome,” said Gerry McChesney, manager of the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge, while peering through binoculars. “I just love it out here.” ◆
seeing seabirds
Though many seabirds depart the Farallones at the end of summer nesting season, reliably calmer water and the chance of seeing sharks and whales can make an ocean boat trip fantastic in the fall. The following companies offer pelagic wildlife tours:
» Alvaro’s Adventures leads four full-day pelagic birding tours into December. The trips leave from either Half Moon Bay or Bodega Bay; cost $210. AlvarosAdventures.com
» The Oceanic Society offers full-day whale watching trips to the Farallones every Saturday and Sunday into December. Though the trips are cetacean-centric, the naturalists make a point of highlighting birds, pinnipeds, and island ecology. Boats leave from the San Francisco Marina Yacht Harbor; cost $299. OceanicSociety.org
» Shark Stewards offers six full-day weekend trips in September, October, and November focused on great white sharks and the natural history of the Farallones. Boats leave from Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; cost $263. SharkStewards.org
To find Farallones-nesters on the mainland, check the following birding hot spots: Santa Cruz Wharf, Año Nuevo State Park, Egg Rock (aka Devil’s Slide Rock) near Pacifica, Alcatraz Island, and the Point Reyes Lighthouse.
Point Blue maneuver a boat onto the Farallones while seals watch from the water.
Remote
cameras and artificial intelligence illuminate the living depths of the ocean. Now scientists are racing to use these new technologies to understand the deep sea before it changes.
CREATURES ALL THE WAY DOWN
by Guananí Gómez-Van Cortri G ht
The midnight zone begins half a mile below the surface of Monterey Bay, where sunlight can no longer reach. These dark depths are home to a menagerie of deep sea creatures, from bright red bloody-belly comb jellies (Lampocteis cruentiventer), with their strobing bioluminescence, to pale grapefruit-size pearl octopuses (Muusoctopus robustus) brooding over their eggs along warm cracks in the ocean floor.
Until recently, the deep sea was too distant, cold, and high pressure for humans to explore, and much of it remains unknown. Yet it encompasses more space than all of earth’s continents combined, making it the largest habitat on the planet and likely home to more animals than all other ecosystems.
“These beautiful, potentially very sensitive ecosystems in the deep sea are right in our backyard,” says James Barry, a seafloor ecologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). “They enrich our lives in ways that most people are not really aware of.”
The seafloor captures most of the planet’s carbon dioxide, supporting a stable climate by keeping the greenhouse gas out of the
atmosphere. Cold, nutrient-rich water is churned up from these frigid depths toward shore, where it fuels the California coast’s iconic biodiversity. But while scientists plumb the deep sea’s wonders and begin to grasp its planetary importance, the ocean is also being transformed by climate change and threatened by deep sea mining. Understanding human impacts and conserving deep sea ecosystems requires documenting them in the first place. However, the same underwater robots and other advanced technology that drive documentation and conservation also enable exploitation of deep sea resources.
“We’re already seeing huge changes in ecosystems, or communities, in the ocean because of climate change,” says MBARI engineer Kakani Katija. And yet “a lot of proposed solutions to combat climate change—like deep sea mining or offshore wind—are activities that are going to impact biological communities in the ocean.”
Fathoming the Depths
Off the coast of California, shelves of shale and sandstone are
A bubblegum coral (Paragorgia arborea) observed by MBARI’s ROV at approximately 3,000 feet on Sur Ridge, located offshore of Central California.
Artificial intelligence, trained with images labeled by researchers in MBARI’s Video Lab, identifies animals in deep sea footage in Monterey Canyon. Each box includes an organism’s ID number, probable identity, and the algorithm’s confidence score.
occasionally interrupted by seamounts and plunging underwater chasms, including Monterey Bay’s canyon, which reaches over two miles deep and begins zigzagging within a mile of the shore. For most of human history, these depths were unfathomable. Scientists gradually caught glimpses of deep sea wildlife as new technologies such as submarines, net trawling, and eventually remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs) became more advanced, especially in Monterey Bay’s uniquely accessible canyon. ROVs
revolutionized deep sea research by allowing scientists to observe deep sea creatures in their natural habitat, without shredding delicate gelatinous critters in trawl nets or having them implode under surface pressure.
The glaring beam of ROV headlights shines through the sunless depths like an aquatic UFO. ROVs traverse the midnight zone, collecting data on temperature, location, salinity, and more while filming hundreds of thousands of hours of footage. These beams illuminate passing deep sea squid (Bathyteuthis berryi ), stinging strands of goo called siphonophores, and many creatures yet to be named. By surveying the same areas regularly, researchers can identify, map, and monitor deep sea ecosystems and their inhabitants. Until recently, analyzing ROV footage required MBARI researchers to comb through thousands of hours of material, painstakingly labeling animals and geological features.
As scientific ROV surveys became more frequent, the sheer amount of footage quickly outpaced the scientists’ availability to analyze it. In the United States, deep sea exploration organizations have collected 300,000 hours of visual data, but only 15 percent of it has been analyzed or labeled, according to a survey done by the Ocean Discovery League. In recent years, the number of ROVs roaming the deep sea and hours of footage gathered have increased, a trend that seems likely to continue.
“We’re anticipating an exponential increase of data collection,” says Katija. “There’s a massive opportunity for understanding and more information if we were actually able to fully process that information.”
To address this processing gap, Katija compiled an archive
The Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), Hercules, shines light on never-before-seen deep sea habitat in Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.
called FathomNet, which contains almost 100,000 images collected and labeled by MBARI researchers since the 1990s. Machine learning programs trained on FathomNet’s data partially automate the process of identifying and labeling creatures captured in ROV footage. So far, FathomNet has improved the speed of identifying creatures by an order of magnitude, Katija says. Over time, Katija hopes to share resources like FathomNet technology with island nations to foster more inclusive ocean exploration. Ultimately, Katija says she hopes that FathomNet can become a global repository for information on ocean life.
Deep sea creatures may strike many as distant and bizarre, but Katija wants to put them in regular people’s pockets. Inspired by
A seafloor community at a depth of approximately 2,200 feet observed by MBARI’s remotely operated vehicle (ROV), Tiburon, on a rocky ledge at Rodriguez Seamount, in Southern California.
community science apps like eBird and iNaturalist, Katija’s lab collaborated with a game design studio in the Netherlands to design and launch a mobile game called FathomVerse.
In one part of the game, players float in simulated currents, open ROV images of deep sea creatures, and decide if the image is the animal they’re searching for. Katija hopes playing FathomVerse will help landlubbing members of the public feel more connected to deep sea science. Eventually, players label a creature; their assigned classification may be included in the FathomNet database and help train its machine learning models.
“By tapping into our collective curiosity, FathomVerse seeks to transform ocean exploration by engaging a community of ocean enthusiasts to work alongside researchers,” Katija said in a FathomVerse press release.
p rotecting the Unknown
FathomNet is part of a scientific race to understand the deep sea before human activity transforms its ecosystems for everything that lives there. In the last decade, the tension between exploration and exploitation has taken on particular urgency. Deep sea mining companies have begun prospecting the seafloor for polymetallic nodules—potato-size lumps of manganese, cobalt, and other metals key to making batteries for the booming electric vehicle industry. International governments and private corporations, working through the United Nations–backed International Seabed Authority, have already started to divide up large areas of the Pacific seafloor for mining. An election for the ISA’s leadership this summer was marred by allegations of corruption and bribery. A 2021 story heading in the New Yorker by environmen-
MBARI principal engineer Kakani Katija examines data collected by advanced imaging systems developed by MBARI’s Bioinspiration Lab.
tal journalist Elizabeth Kolbert reads, “We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it.”
Proposed mining operations would pump sediment up from the ocean floor, sieve out the precious nodules, and unleash the leftover sediment back into the water. These plumes of sediment would likely disrupt deep sea creatures’ ability to swim, breathe, find marine snow to eat, and communicate through bioluminescence—not to mention directly disrupting the lives of animals sucked into mining machinery. Polymetallic nodules are found way out in the Pacific’s international waters, far from California’s coast and marine sanctuaries. But the potentially far-reaching effects of releasing sediment plumes into deep sea ecosystems remain unknown.
Climate change is also altering the depths by shifting the livable range for prey species, transforming ocean food webs. Many deep sea creatures are being displaced by warming ocean temperatures—and the shifting oxygen concentrations that come with them. Land animals migrate toward the poles or to higher elevations to escape warming. Underwater, creatures do the vertical equivalent, going deeper to chase colder, more oxygen-rich water.
MBARI researchers have found that as the ocean warms, a layer of water with low levels of oxygen is expanding closer to the surface and deeper toward the ocean floor, pushing animals out
of the depth ranges they’ve evolved to live in. Giant larvaceans (Bathochordaeus), a group of tadpole-like creatures that live inside mucus blobs of their own making, have shifted their range upward in response to expanding low-oxygen zones. Moving closer to the surface means being exposed to stress from shearing forces and more light, enabling predators that rely on vision to hunt to more easily spot their next deep sea snack.
“The depths that [deep sea creatures] were evolved to occupy now don’t have enough oxygen,” says MBARI senior scientist Bruce Robison. “These animals are now being exposed to a level of predation that was not historically the case, in an evolutionary sense.”
Deep sea research is still in its exploration and discovery phase. As of 2023, only about a quarter of the ocean floor has been mapped. A study that sequenced genetic material from seafloor sediment found that two-thirds of the species identified were unknown to science. Almost every ROV survey reveals something new, from never-before-seen creatures to previously unseen behaviors and relationships. Outreach efforts like FathomVerse and tools like FathomNet offer new methods to speed up the pace of research necessary to understand and protect the deep sea from threats like climate change and deep sea mining before it’s too late.
“Deep sea exploration is really important for our future,” says Robison. “The more we know, the better we can anticipate the consequences of changes that are happening because of us.”
A map of Monterey Canyon and the adjacent Monterey Bay region.
Understanding the Ocean By Mythological Greek Boat
One of our greatest tools for understanding the earth’s oceans as a dynamic system is a collection of roughly 4,000 international oceanic probes called Argo.
The name is inspired by the most famous ship of Greek legend, the Argo, which carried Jason and—who knew?— the Argonauts.
Since it could be terribly embarrassing to conflate the boat with the buoys, let’s start with a brief compare and contrast. First, the name. Argo-the-buoys are named after the famous Jason’s ship because they communicate with a satellite that measures sea level and wave height and the satellite is named Jason. Argo-the-boat was named after the shipwright Argus, son of Arestor, who also voyaged with Jason as an early expert in self-branding.
Some sources say that the Argo was the first seagoing ship, was favored by the gods, and was so new in its appearance that some mistook it for a sea monster. Other sources say it was just a pretty nifty boat. Think of Argo-the-boat as looking like a long, early Greek galley, with dozens of oars, a midship mast, a sharp keel, and a great prow. Think of Argo-the-buoys as looking like a bunch of yard-long aluminum pipes each less than 8 inches in diameter. The buoys are built, maintained, and monitored by an international consortium of 28 countries, with about half of the buoys coming from the United States.
The Argo sailed on the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, voyaging from Greece to what is now the modern-day Republic
of Georgia. Modern-day Argo buoys are distributed all over the earth’s oceans, spaced about every three degrees of latitude and longitude, and they float up and down the water column from the ocean’s surface to 2,000 feet deep and back again every 10 days, measuring temperature, salinity, and depth. When they surface, the modern Argo buoys use high-bandwidth iridium transmitters to send all their data in under 30 minutes, whereas the original Argo was built partially with magic wood from Zeus’s oracle at Dodona. In times of danger (and, presumably, difficult parking) the front of the boat would cry out in a human voice.
Argo the ship was powered by fifty oars and a sail, while Argo buoys manage their depth with an external bladder and an internal reservoir of oil. When the bladders are empty, the buoys are the same density as seawater and float beneath the surface; when the buoy pumps all of its oil into the external bladder, the buoy becomes less dense than the surrounding water and rises. Onboard power for the buoys’ sensors comes from batteries, whereas the Argo was crewed and powered by up to 50 Argonauts. The Argonauts were a group of generally less-legendary-than-Jason heroes, but their number may have included several of the semi-divine, including, most famously, Heracles, who was just then taking a break from his Twelve Labors and was looking for some day-laboring on the side. According to some sources, he gets left behind early in the journey for weighing so much that the talking boat complains. He becomes the first lost
Andy Johnson/ The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation
Versus Understanding the Ocean By 4,000 Small Buoys
cruise-ship passenger.
The Argo only made one voyage, but the job of the Argo buoys is never-ending. The data from the buoys is made freely available to anyone, and it has so far been used in more than 6,000 scientific papers. It’s also a key contributor to modeling that big, blue driver of so much of our weather, the Pacific Ocean.
To create a local weather forecast, broadly speaking, first observational data about the planet is collected, either by direct measurement from instruments like thermometers, weather balloons, and buoys or remotely from radar and satellites. That information and forecast is then plugged into an algorithm, which is then run to simulate the weather, perhaps multiple times. Finally, in post-processing, those predictions are fine-tuned into a forecast.
A new multi-university research group, funded by a $6.6 million grant from the 2020 Inflation Reduction Act and called the Consortium for Advanced Data Assimilation Research and Education (CADRE), plans to analyze Argo floats data with an intent to improve both our observational coverage of the ocean and the forecasts that come from it.
Oklahoma University Meteorology Professor Xuguang Wang, who leads the CADRE project, says CADRE’s improvements will focus on the first step of developing a forecast: data assimilation. This is where the observational data is combined with a numerical simulation of the weather. Both the observational data and the numerical simulation are huge data sets. The combined anal-
ysis of these two data sets provides an estimate of the current status of an earth system, which can be used as the starting point for simulations forecasting the future status of an earth system.
Wang says that these simulations will yield not only a better forecast but, in the case of Argo, also identify critical gaps where the ocean is under studied. Finding these gaps could determine where the Argo floats of the future will be deployed.
“I’m hoping at least for some of the CADRE results to be adopted into the operational system two or three years after the project is over,” Wang says.
At the end of an Argo float’s life, the battery runs out and it stops surfacing to transmit data. Since it would be insanely difficult and costly to track down dead floats, dead floats are left to drift along under the surface of the sea until eventually their oil bladders fail and they sink to the bottom of the ocean.
At the end of Argo-the-boat’s journey, the ship is beached at Iolkos and left as a monument to the gods, who translate the boat into the stars as the constellation Argo Navis. The boat itself, though, was seemingly left to monument-in-place on the beach, meaning it was still there years later when Jason, having gone through a bad breakup with the sorceress Medea, was looking for a place to crash. One day, while Jason is weeping beneath his old boat, part of the Argo snaps, dropping a rotting beam on Jason’s head and killing him before he can send any embarrassing texts to his ex. ◆ —By Brendan Buhler
As another strong El Niño exits the Pacific, researchers look to marine life to tell us what’s happening.
by Mary Ell E n Hannibal illustration by brian stauff E r
Deep Sea-ing
In the early 1980s, Francisco Chavez returned to his natal homeland in Peru with his Duke University doctoral adviser, Richard Barber. Like many biologists studying ocean life, Barber had a case of physics envy. Physical oceanographers can precisely measure changes in sea level caused by underwater Kelvin waves that form in the western Pacific, which often herald the arrival of the ocean phenomenon known as El Niño. But Barber and Chavez wanted to measure biological signs of El Niño with commensurate accuracy. At the time, scientists were starting to suspect that El Niño played a major role in driving variation in the global climate, and Barber and Chavez knew species must respond to those changes. “But previous observations indicated that these changes were subtle,” Chavez, now a senior scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, told me.
Chavez and Barber started monitoring off the coast of Peru in June 1982. Their methods were simple: every week, they collected samples of water from the side of a small fishing boat, documenting various metrics including plankton density. On September 22 of that year the monitoring site temperature went up five degrees and kept going up. A huge El Niño was underway. “It changed the ecosystem and my PhD thesis at the same time,” Chavez said. The fishery off the coast collapsed. Inland, rainfall brought on by atmospheric changes deeply replenished the desert ecosystem. Gardens bloomed, crops burgeoned, insect populations exploded. “Deer seemed to appear out of nowhere,” Chavez told me. He noticed that the patterns in the ocean drove changes in the social fabric as well. Some livelihoods were decimated while others thrived. For Chavez, understanding the comings and goings of El Niño took on new relevance.
Barber and Chavez published “Biological Consequences of El Niño” in Science in 1983, and Chavez has continued to study these impacts ever since. Over decades, the living patterns of response emerged. Chavez and his collaborators discerned a switch from a warm-water “sardine regime” in the 1970s to a cool-water “anchovy regime” in the 1990s. The biological shift aligned with changes in ocean currents, temperatures, and atmospheric carbon dioxide
Brian Stauffer
levels. The correspondence was so clear, Chavez and collaborators wrote in 2003, “it has been suggested that a regime or climate shift may even be best determined by monitoring marine organisms rather than the climate.”
The impact of an ocean phenomenon on global temperatures is a reminder that ... “it is a blue planet.” The world’s oceans represent 70 percent of the surface area of the Earth, and water has a much higher capacity to absorb carbon dioxide than land does.
Humanity has long observed natural phenomena, the better to feed itself and to survive. For four centuries, potato farmers in Peru looked to high cirrus clouds for signs of El Niño and its inhibiting influence on rainfall. New Zealand’s Maori people detected incipient El Niños by measuring their annual harvest of shearwater chicks. Sardine and anchovy population changes were noticed well before El Niño and La Niña were associated with the underlying physical causes. These mostly localized observations were generally not considered in the context of global weather and ocean phenomena. Western science is focused on what can be measured and re-measured, which is fair. Until now, our instrumentation has not been adequate to capture the temporal and spatial scales at which species live their lives. It turns out we have been missing vital information. Today, we are beginning to close the gap. Scientists are using environmental DNA, or eDNA, to help determine where ocean species are, and when, which helps to reveal species interactions with each other and with the physical environment at a fine scale. Focusing on animal behavior, like seabird feeding patterns, helps reveal nuanced ocean weather and current patterns. Citizen-scientist-contributed observations to platforms like iNaturalist and eBird help us see where species are in real time, again revealing their relationships to each other, to the landscape, and to the weather. One exciting development is the so-called “internet of animals.” Biotelemetry devices placed on aquatic species, birds, and mammals enable us to track them at depths of the oceans and heights of the sky otherwise out of our reach. According to Roland Kays and Martin Wikelski, two researchers who have been refining the internet of animals for decades, unparalleled data streams also “describe the world that animals
are moving through, including weather, vegetation type, and land use.” Humanity’s mental separation from nature is a perilous roadblock to saving the natural world, but these tools of observation are helping us see how deeply the living and nonliving elements of our world are intertwined. As Wikelski puts it, the goal of all this observation is “to visualize the invisible.”
Earth’s Collective Intelligence
Humans excel at measuring the nonliving world. We have fantastically advanced our ability to observe through satellite feeds, drones, and globally distributed instruments that show us climate change drivers, often with high accuracy and in real time. The warming of the global ocean over the last half-century shows up in all sorts of ways: fleets of aquatic robots called Argo floats, for example, collect ocean temperature data that tell us that in approximately the last 25 years, the ocean has absorbed heat amounting to five Hiroshima-size atomic bombs of energy per second detonating every second, 24 hours a day.
We are not as good at checking in with the creatures that live in the ocean. That’s a big piece of the puzzle to miss. (Though satellites in space now discern phytoplankton from afar, helping to track their distribution and variability.) Biological species are not just riding along in the ocean; they help create its productivity.
As the Peruvian—and California—fisheries make clear, marine life links humanity to the ocean. But it is devilishly hard to keep accurate tabs on where many species are born, where they go for food, and where and how they die.
“There are no coordinated global surveys of biodiversity akin to those for physics,” Chavez told me. “We have a fragmented view of nearshore waters from individual country efforts, but that information is often treated as a matter of national security and therefore is not shared openly and not integrated globally.”
Chavez has increasingly turned his attention to the promise of environmental DNA to quickly and accurately assess the comings and goings of ocean species. Ironically, DNA sampling of the ocean begins with the great simplicity of collecting a sample of water. “You can pick up evidence of life-forms, from bacteria all the way to top predators,” Chavez told me. “You don’t need a net,
or a telemetry device.”
A single sample captures the DNA shed by the many organisms that have passed through an environment. Advances in the technology are increasingly making it possible to report on the presence and absence of sea creatures in near real time—a biological mirror to the kind of physical data we get from buoys and satellites. This has enormous implications for fine-tuning fisheries management and for anticipating long term weather patterns. For example, if sardines are detected in the water, it could mean an El Niño is on its way. Returning to Chavez’s original interest from decades ago, it uses the biological to understand the physical.
Birds Decide
“We’ve been monitoring out at the Farallones for 56 years now,” Pete Warzybok, a senior marine ecologist at Point Blue Conserva-
Sardines: Scientists discerned a switch from a warm-water “sardine regime” in the 1970s to a cool-water “anchovy regime” in the 1990s. The sardines shown here are in Moalboal, Philippines.
tion Science in Petaluma, told me. “Typically, long-term patterns like El Niño and other warm-water events will reduce productivity overall.”
The impacts of a warmer ocean are found to cascade along the food web, from microscopic plankton to blue whales. Point Blue studies El Niño’s impacts particularly on seabirds and marine mammals. “The birds can sense that there may not be enough food to get them into breeding condition in these years,” Warzybok said, “and they’ll start later in the season or even forgo breeding altogether. We’ll see fewer eggs and chicks, and fewer pinniped pups. We’ll see mortality events.”
Warzybok and other researchers expect dips in biodiversity populations as a regular pulse of nature. “We have 30 years of data,” he said, “and we’ve been making models with it.”
Warzybok says that recently these assumptions have been chal-
lenged. A pattern once defined by warmer water arriving roughly every seven years with an El Niño now seems to be changing into one where warm events happen every handful of years, and the El Niños are stronger and hotter than they were 25 years ago.
Like Chavez’s work in South America, Point Blue research has seen the biological both following and predicting the physical. Nutrient-rich zooplankton decline when the water warms up. Gelatinous species that contribute less to the food web increase. As El Niño patterns have been changing, Point Blue researchers have documented “habitat compression.” More warm water is pushing the nutrient-rich colder water around, sometimes horizontally, sometimes vertically. You can imagine how some species would be able to dive deep to get at the good stuff, while other species would be out of luck. A Cassin’s auklet could encounter a food desert at the depth it can feed, while a deep-diving murre could still access dinner.
There Goes the Neighborhood
Direct observation also reveals adaptive patterns that occur over longer time periods than we generally examine. El Niño has seemed to me like an ill wind spreading nothing but disaster. In the previous historic El Niño of 2015–16, seabirds starved and desperate marine mammals were seen (by me for one) lumbering along Marina Boulevard in San Francisco. Now the hot waters are coming more often, with more heat, more impact. Cue my primal scream. But the whole picture is more complicated. I learned that El Niño is not always a homewrecker and, in some cases, may actually be lending species a helping hand.
In mid-May this year I headed up to Bodega Bay from San Francisco. Eric Sanford has been monitoring tidepools here for more than 20 years and he darted across the precipitous rocks like a deer. I followed as my knees would have it, ungainly and slow. Sanford is a professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis and works at the university’s Bodega Marine Lab, a short walk from the water. His partner, Jackie Sones, administers research on the Bodega Marine Reserve and frequently documents invertebrates alongside him. Out on the rocks Sanford perched on the sharp, thin edge of a boulder. I was worried about the lack of tread on his unconstructed rubber boots. Anxiously I kept an eye on the big waves crashing inches from us. A round-faced harbor seal bobbed in the water, its steady gaze reappearing like an aquatic Cheshire cat. It seemed to eye us with intent. Sanford is out there so often, I wondered if the harbor seal recognized him. Sanford has gotten to know the invertebrates here on some -
thing of a personal basis. Consider the owl limpet. “They are territorial,” he told me, pointing out smooth oval shells that seem cemented to various rocks. “Notice the area around the animal.” How many limpets have I blithely passed by without noticing a smooth clearing of rock creating a circumference around them? “That’s the limpet’s garden. At night it will travel across this stretch of rock to eat, and it will bulldoze encroaching mussels or other limpets.”
Garden dining for a limpet means scraping algae off the rock with its radula, something of a cross between a tongue and teeth, which beats out spider’s silk as the strongest known biological structure on earth. Limpets can live for 16 years pretty much in the same spot, to which they return after foraging in their gardens. “You can go out year after year and find the exact same individual on the exact same patch of rock,” Sanford told me. I asked if he had named any of them, but he demurred. “We monitor thousands right here.”
Sanford and I crawled around the rocks, making note not only of limpets but sunburst sea anemones as well, another focus of his research. Again, anemones are long-lived creatures that stay put. South of us a bit at Duxbury Reef in Bolinas, a gigantic anemone you can spy at super low tides is said to be more than 100 years old. “It’s comforting, really,” I mentioned to Sanford, as if the ability of marine invertebrates to stick to a place amid historic change was evidence that humans could do the same. But the sunburst anemones, “these are newcomers here,” Sanford said. Since 2015, Sanford and Sones have monitored more than 37 species from Southern California finding a new neighborhood up north. “Bodega Bay is looking a lot more like Monterey Bay these days,” he told
Left: A sunburst anemone (Anthopleura sola) fluoresces under UV light, at Natural Bridges State Beach, Santa Cruz; right: a group of plate limpets (Lottia scutum) in Monterey.
me. El Niño shocks of warm water and north-flowing currents, coming on top of an ocean that’s warmed dramatically due to human-caused climate change, may be the explanation. “As the ocean temperatures warm, species are moving poleward to track warming waters,” Sanford said. “But how can they do that?”
Indeed, the image of a limpet or a sea anemone hopping on an aquatic bus headed north belongs only in a SpongeBob episode. Like all organisms, aquatic species are highly adapted to specific conditions. To survive ocean warming, how would a limpet actually find new ground, so to speak?
“Many marine invertebrates reproduce by way of millions of larvae released into the water,” Sanford explained. “El Niño is a powerful current that acts like an open door allowing them to move across distances they otherwise couldn’t travel.” Part of Sanford’s research is at the intersection of evolution and ecology, and one of his questions here is whether limpets and sea anemones, among other creatures, are evolving by way of natural selection to adapt to their new environment when larvae settle in for the long haul. El Niño brings warmer waters but only temporarily. Not all species that arrive in a more northern habitat will survive when more customary temperatures at Bodega Bay resume. As the ocean changes, more questions will arise. Which species will adapt, which will not? Can we predict responses, can we help species that need a leg up?
munities of species together, tearing others apart. The good news is, we are getting better at using technology to monitor nature as never before. The “internet of animals” is already in operation and set to become more robust in coming years. Martin Wikelski and colleagues have labored for decades in support of a global system of sensors by which we can track species to deeper depths, higher heights, and into wavelengths not discernible by the human ear. In 2018 the space-based system ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space) sent a receiver connected to thousands of animal sensors into space with a Russian rocket; technical and geopolitical difficulties curtailed the effort. Wikelski’s team pivoted and is set to launch ICARUS receivers on CubeSats, miniature satellites funded not by industry but by the Max Planck Society, which will help protect the project from geopolitical vagaries. Thousands of animals wearing tags linked to these receivers will report out on abiotic, or nonliving, environmental factors like air pressure and temperature and biotic signals like the animal’s caloric output; researchers will even attempt to interpret what’s going on by using AI.
The Internet of Animals
Monitoring tidepools, Sanford, Sones and many others are watching complex interactions between species and climate unfold. Human impacts are rearranging ecosystems, bringing new com-
In addition to providing revolutionary data about how the earth system works, Wikelski sees a wealth of generalizable data in the behavior of birds and other creatures. Studying migrating birds affixed with telemetry devices, Wikelski and colleagues were stunned to discover different bird species communicating with each other in the night sky, constantly chirping, “discussing which altitude to fly at and which direction to take.” This revelation helped upend the assumption that birds migrate based on genetic information alone. “By communicating with others, each individual bird taps into a communal knowledge bank built up by billions of animals over vast stretches of time,” Wikelski said. Listening in, we can learn from them too.
Bird species communicate with each other in the night sky, constantly chirping, “discussing which altitude to fly at and which direction to take.”
Seeing, Feeling, Taking Note
In addition to all the instrumentation ever-refining our ability to
see, there is the invaluable contribution of citizen science. On June 1, I joined Fort Ross Conservancy ecologist Dione Deaker and a handful of tidepool enthusiasts at Fort Ross, on the coast about 25 miles north of Bodega Bay. We were there to count marine invertebrates as part of Snapshot Cal Coast, a community science project of the California Academy of Sciences, which is building a model of reality based on human-driven observations. Snapshot Cal Coast enlists thousands of people to go out and intensively monitor the edge between ocean and land in Northern California, and this year the window of time was extended to a month. Snapshot Cal Coast data has been instrumental to tracking the kind of species distribution changes monitored by Eric Sanford and Jackie Sones. My very first day out in the tidepool with the Academy in 2012, we photographed the Pepto-Bismol-pink nudibranch called Hopkin’s rose, a southern species that more than 10 years ago began testing northern waters—its niche has historically been Southern California. Among our group at Fort Ross, some had read about Snapshot Cal Coast on a flyer and others were die-hard nature lovers well acquainted with California’s glorious embrace of the Pacific. Physical modelers have a globally distributed network of satellites and buoys, but part of the reality of biological observation in the 21st century is that we have a globally distributed network of people carrying smartphones. The 2024 snapshot at Fort Ross tallied up to 263 observations of 127 species.
The winds focused our tidepooling a bit. The disturbed surface waters occlude visibility and make it harder to see what’s below. We documented congregating anemones, snails, and scuttling crabs, and for a while we all fixated on tiny sculpin darting among the rocks. Snapshot Cal Coast data is automatically counted up by way of iNaturalist, aided and abetted by GPS location, the date, and the time of photographic observations. When Deaker joined Fort Ross, she was bequeathed a large cardboard box of sea lion survey forms with the explanation: “Here’s our data.” Today she collates the work of volunteers and gives their harbor seal data to the nearby Point Reyes National Seashore, which coordinates a larger marine mammal observation network.
After several hours we were not quite ready to leave the suspension of the glorious rocks and insistent breeze. We unfurled ourselves from the tidepool and stood up to take in the broader expanse, filled with foaming breakers. “That’s upwelling in action,” Deaker remarked, referring to the result of winds and currents that help drive the food web. In all my many years of staring at waves, I had never quite thought about why they were moving in a particular direction, and what that meant to the creatures below. A harbor seal popped its head up and seemed to look me in the eye. What was it trying to tell me? My joy was that given all that humanity has been throwing at its species and its habitat, it was still there. ◆
Courtesy of Hari Simons
A tidepooler peers into the universe at Fitzgerald Marine Reserve.
A Model World
For reasons not fully understood, 2023 was the hottest year in recorded history. The ocean broke temperature records every day for almost nine months. September 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded. So far 2024 is continuing the upward trend. Scientists have called today’s ocean temperatures “unprecedented,” “alarming,” and “crazy.” Marine heat waves are occurring across the Northern Hemisphere, and nobody knows what it means for life on earth. It’s possible that these “unprecedented” temperatures are a normal anomaly and will recede in time. It’s also possible that temperatures will just keep rising from here. El Niño and La Niña have historically helped predict weather, but the background ocean conditions of these events have now superseded their influence. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researcher Michelle L’Heureux commented that now, “El Niño and La Niña are just changing the details.” Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center notes that El Niño and its cool-water counterpart La Niña have been important for figuring out what the weather is going to do months in advance, but “now there’s a lot more going on.”
Partly because we can do such a good job of it, researchers track climate change mostly through abiotic, or nonliving, signals like temperature and precipitation. El Niño and other ocean-atmosphere events are also tracked by wind and currents, which of course are also nonliving phenomena. But right now, the abiotic approach may be hitting a proverbial brick wall. It relies on the historical record to put current markers in context. Today’s temperatures are so much higher than ever before (and continu-
ing to rise) that scientists sometimes say we are in a “no analog” world. We don’t quite know what to make of our numbers right now. It’s likely that species living far closer to nature’s pulse than we do can shed some light on the subject.
The impact of an ocean phenomenon on global temperatures is a reminder that, in the words of John Largier, director of the Bodega Marine Lab at UC Davis where Eric Sanford and Jackie Sones work, “it is a blue planet.” The world’s oceans represent more than 70 percent of the surface area of the earth, and water has a much higher capacity to absorb carbon dioxide than land does. Largier oversees many varieties of marine observation distributed around 30 locations, measuring phytoplankton, temperature, and salinity and sampling for harmful algae blooms. The Bodega lab data connects with networks of these observations all up and down the coast. “One importance of continuous observations,” he told me, “is that without them we would have no idea what is wrong with our models. Models are a reduction of reality and to some extent we make them so we can see how they deviate from reality.” Looked at this way, the 2023 El Niño is not a mistake in our climate models, but an opportunity to help fine-tune them. “When models are wrong it’s not a failure,” Largier said. “It’s a stepping stone.” Largier pointed out that as terrestrial creatures, we have little intuition about how the ocean works. “We’re not marine animals, and we don’t have a great sense of the patterns,” he said. “Observing the ocean helps develop our intuition a bit.” ◆
Support for this article was provided by the March Conservation Fund.
A satellite image of El Niño in 2024.
Letter of recommendation:
The Ocean
By Sachi c unningham
There is nothing quite like witnessing the rapture of a toddler waddling into waves for the first time.
I expected nothing less from my daughter, who swam inside of me for 10 months and was conceived when my husband and I quit our jobs in journalism in order to literally get on the same wavelength during a baby-making sabbatical, a 14-month road trip down the Pacific coast of the Americas. We named her Nami after the Japanese word for wave, as a nod to her ancestry and a not-too-subtle hint of what we expected her to love. The liminal line where the sidewalk ends in San Francisco, however, is not to be taken lightly.
Ocean Beach is a 3.5-mile stretch of wilds where the Pacific collides with all of the water from the Delta and Bay as it drains
under the Golden Gate Bridge. Sediment swirls out of the Gate, mimicking a river mouth, which creates massive sandbars and, on the right days, creates world-class waves. Bill Martin, the legendary KTVU meteorologist, used to quietly place a red dot over the Columbia River Gorge during his 10 o’clock weather report. Surf friends in the know among the then four million greater Bay Area viewers knew that the red dot indicated that high pressure was building, and offshore winds were therefore on the way. “We didn’t care about how big it was or how small it was,” says Martin; “we just wanted to be able to get in the water.” Most of the time, he says, it is the most dangerous beach in the world.
In 1998 Ocean Beach famously claimed the lives of seven people in one year alone. Wave energy born from storms in Japan
and the Aleutian Islands grows as it travels across the largest ocean on earth. It eventually slams onto our shores with nothing but the Farallon Islands to block its force. The lifeguards at Ocean Beach will not let you go into the water past your ankles without a wetsuit, flotation device, or swim fins, for good reason. I don’t know a local surfer who hasn’t done a rescue at some point. The waves are so menacing that the Pulitzer-winning writer William Finnegan describes it in Barbarian Days as “impossible, like trying to swim up a waterfall.” Certainly more challenging than my toddler should take on even if her name is Nami.
Still, the draw to the sea is universal. She loved to run into the waves, mouth agape as she sipped the negative ions in the air and shrieked with joy. If Ponyo could run on the water and Moana could make it part, surely she was no different. I knew a rip current could take her out to sea in an instant, so I always plucked her from danger, but one afternoon I thought it was time that she learned for herself about the ocean’s power. I saw her fearlessly charge into the surf and knew full well that it would knock her down. I was inches away, but chose to let her fall before I grabbed her. It was less than a second, but long enough to see the terror in her eyes. For an entire year she refused to go past the dunes. She was still learning to talk, but heard the ocean loud and clear. Her repulsion devastated me.
Ihave treated a bipolar diagnosis over the last 30 years with a combination of mood meds and talk therapy, but submerging myself in the naturally occurring lithium of the ocean is what I credit most for
Left: Christie Hemm Klok; right, Nick Paz
Sachi Cunningham photographs big wave surfers at Mavericks, a surfing spot just north of Half Moon Bay.
my mental health. Competitive swimming helped me stay the course when my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer when I was 15. The ocean is both freedom and a connective cocoon. We sweat and cry salt water. That saliva you’re tasting in your mouth right now came from the same collective body of water that all living things on this planet have shared and recycled for as long as there’s been life on earth. The ocean lives within each and every one of us. Our bodies, like our planet, are mostly water, so it should come as no surprise that my mind and body feel at equilibrium with the sea.
For 24 years I have swam, surfed, and photographed the waves from Ocean Beach to Mavericks on days when their heights reach up to 60 feet on the face. This ritual of surrender, and the practice of finding beauty and magic in the dangerous unknown through the lens of my camera, has been my salvation. The ocean gave me the strength to get tested to see if I had the same BRCA1 gene as my mother, and when I tested positive, the ocean gave me the physical and mental strength to get a double mastecto -
my and total hysterectomy. When doctors found a 2-millimeter tumor growing in my fallopian tubes, the ocean gave me life when chemotherapy sucked it out of me.
I am not your stereotypical mystical Bay Area hippie, but I definitely feel what the Hawaiians call “mana” every time I touch the water of our uniquely cold and treacherous coastline. Even a quick cold plunge connects me to the energy of our ancestors and the life the ocean supports.
On a clear day you can see spouts of gray, humpback, and blue whales with your naked eye just offshore. Despite living in a city of nearly a million people, I routinely experience the intimacy of a pelican’s prehistoric stare as it flies within inches of my head as I sit in the dunes or on my surfboard in the water. I have seen a baby salmon shark jump next to my surfboard and dove through a school of harbor porpoises as they surfed past me.
This piece of our shared human heritage should belong to everyone. Yet though the ocean doesn’t discriminate, people often have. A few years ago Bianca Valenti, a big wave surfer and Ocean Beach regular,
joined forces with three other wahine big wave surfers to use California coastal law, which protects equal access to the coast, to lobby for a women’s heat and equal pay at the annual Mavericks contest. This catalyzed equal pay in the World Surf League and in 2018, it became the first U.S.-based sports league to pay women and men equal prize money.
Several Bay Area programs work to introduce the ocean to people who historically haven’t had access. City Surf Program Director Troy Bohanon moved from his hometown of Stockton to San Francisco to pursue an Africana Studies degree at S.F. State, but his real motivation was to learn how to surf. He saw City Surf on Instagram and thought “it was really cool seeing people who looked like me.” As a Black man whose mother is from Ethiopia, he has experienced the glares of the old guard even though he’s been a lifelong swimmer. But he quickly realized that summers in the city are cold and outdoor water recreation is not as ubiquitous as it was in the swimming pools of the Central Valley. So City Surf takes students to Linda Mar Beach
Sachi Cunningham
Mavericks champion and professional big wave surfer Bianca Valenti pulls into the greenroom at Ocean Beach in San Francisco.
in Pacifica, where the horseshoe-shaped coast gives shelter from the wind and swell, and waves are more consistent. Bohanon tries not to allow quite the same terror in his students as I did with my Nami. The first lesson is to learn how to put on a 5.4-millimeter wetsuit and float in knee-deep water. He teaches students to stay calm if they are tossed around, and he tells them to count down while they are under. They are usually reassured when it is no longer than two to three seconds. He reminds them that a flotation device and coach are always an arm’s distance away. “I’ll often hear, ‘I just drowned!’” to which he replies, “Really? You’re just talking to me right now.”
I witnessed the power of this program firsthand when I assigned my video journalism students, who are also primarily first-generation college students of color, to produce video profiles of the City Surf kids.
For many it was their first time to the beach despite growing up in the Bay Area. Slowly but surely all including even the most defiant among them eventually took off their shoes and let the ocean touch their toes. A calm visibly enveloped their bodies and a knowing smile of joy lit up their faces.
No matter whether it’s a first time or a thousandth, ocean immersion lets us share that calm and joy. I introduced Nami to cold and danger at Ocean Beach, yes, but also to a life-defining relationship. She’s now 11 years old, and while she doesn’t remember my questionable parenting call to let a wave knock her down, she knows the ocean. She’s about to start her third year as a junior lifeguard in Half Moon Bay and has ample knowledge to paddle out on a surfboard and swim on small-wave days. She overcame her fear—perhaps in a similar way we can repair our societal relationship with the ocean.
Expanding Ocean Connections
A number of Bay Area programs work to engage historically underrepresented people with the ocean and diversify surf lineups.
» The San Francisco–based nonprofit City Surf has led more than 2,500 youth to the water through an innovative partnership with San Francisco Unified School District high schools. There’s no requirement students know how to swim to participate, and students can opt to surf to meet a physical education requirement. (CitySurfProject.com)
» The woman-owned surf shop Traveler Surf Club in Pacifica is one of several surf shops in the area that offer beginner lessons where a board and wetsuit are provided. ( TravelerSurfClub.com)
» The Surfrider Foundation has local chapters in Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz counties. Each organizes events including beach cleanups, water quality monitoring, and ocean education. (SurfRider.org )
» The MeWater Foundation offers free day, week, and overnight surf camps for underserved youth in Marin County and San Francisco, with an emphasis on the ocean’s benefits for mental health. (MeWaterFoundation.org)
» Queer Surf offers lessons, camps, ocean exploring events, coaching and clinics throughout California, all with the mission of expanding surf culture, and supporting queer wellness. (QueerSurf.org )
» Black Surf Santa Cruz offers a range of free events to connect people of all ages
Our Pacific can be cold and treacherous. Most of the time the gray fog never lifts, the wind sweeps sand that cuts into your skin and burns your eyes, and the ocean looks like an angry albeit glorious episode of Victory at Sea. Yet on the best of days Nami and I build sandcastles under the sun, ride boogie boards down the sand dunes like snow sleds, and splash in tidepools. Back when crab pots were still legal we’d paddle them out past the lineup on our surfboards, surf for a few hours with friends, and then gather our bounty from the Bay to feast on at night. It is my favorite place on earth.
Near the end of summer, Nami and I spent a weekend surfing and body surfing at Ocean Beach. Watching her squeal with joy as she rode wave after wave, I realized it’s not just my favorite place —it’s becoming hers as well. ◆
from Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities to the ocean, including kayaking, whale watching, and a variety of surf programs throughout Santa Cruz County. (BlackSurfSantaCruz.org )
» Salted Roots Surf , formerly Brown Girl Surf, offers “newbie” surf programs, community surf days, and youth summer camps throughout the Bay Area, including East Bay programs in Alameda. ( SaltedRootsSurf.org )
The San Francisco–based nonprofit City Surf has led more than 2,500 youth to the water through an innovative partnership with San Francisco Unified School District high schools.
MAK NG
How scientists and planners are creating safe passage for wildlife moving across the South Bay—and beyond. by Amy mAyer | Illustr At I ons by
H A ley Grunlo H
Ablack-tailed deer grazing at the edge of the staging area seems barely aware of visitors arriving to hike the Coyote Creek Parkway, a popular multiuse path in San Jose. Even when a car pulls in close behind, the deer doesn’t run.
Scenes like this can make it easy to imagine that Bay Area wildlife simply gets used to living among people. But from just beyond the parking lot, the roar of traffic on Highway 101 is a reminder that negotiating the landscape humans have created isn’t always so easy for other species.
Busy roads and the built environment pose formidable obstacles for animals trying to move from one protected space to another in search of food, water, or a potential mate. Populations hemmed in to one area risk becoming genetically isolated, which over time can send them spiraling toward extinction.
The geography of the Bay Area means that the stakes are high. Dense development separates protected lands in the Santa Cruz Mountains from those in the Diablo Range to the east. Maintaining connections between these two Bay Area habitats—and south to the Gabilan Range, inland of the Central Coast—is a top priority for Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST).
Working with many public and private partners, POST uses a range of strategies across the region to help support “wildlife con nectivity”—the ability for animals to move safely between different habitats. From foundational research to hands-on habitat restoration, here’s how conservationists are work ing to make sure animals can get where they need to go.
Starting with science
Connecting wildlife across habitats on a regional scale begins with learning about animals’ behavior. Which species are on the move? Where are they trying to go, when, and why? What obstacles stand in their way? Using tools like track ing devices, wildlife cameras, roadkill surveys, and habitat modeling, scientists can find out—and identify the locations most important to wildlife movement.
POST collaborates with organizations like Pathways for Wildlife, a specialty research organization,
on scientific studies. In 2022, the partners released a study on wildlife connectivity in the southern Santa Cruz Mountains. It was a major milestone in understanding how wildlife are interacting with the roadways that lie between the southern Santa Cruz Mountains and adjacent mountain ranges to the east and south.
In addition to the more grim task of analyzing data on roadkill, researchers collected footage from more than 40 camera monitoring sites. Motion-activated cameras were placed at existing highway undercrossings to find out how often wildlife used this infrastructure to safely cross beneath roads. Amid all the data, two animal personalities stole the show: footage that showed a badger and coyote seeming to play together at the entrance to a highway undercrossing went viral on social media. The surprising moment put a playful face on the research—but the study’s real value to planners was in highlighting locations where improvements are needed to make highways safer for wildlife and people.
“This study is an example of applied research,” says Marian
Researchers use camera monitoring to learn about wildlife movement—now and then capturing animal antics in the process.
Resea R ch
Vernon, who heads POST’s wildlife linkages program. “The findings are already being used to inform crossing projects.”
Caltrans has started design work on one such project, at a spot on Highway 101 in San Benito County that the study identified as especially hazardous for wildlife. In addition to POST and Pathways for Wildlife, partners include researchers at UC Santa Cruz and UC Davis, seven land trusts, state and federal Fish and Wildlife officials, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, and federal, local, and state nonprofit agriculture and environmental groups.
traffic can help make crossings feel more safe to wary species such as deer, while replacing paved surfaces with natural ones encourages use by smaller critters like salamanders, newts, and frogs.
ND PROT ec TION
Preserving the irreplaceable
“It’s a lot of folks, all rowing together to try to get this stuff done,” says Bryan Largay, of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz County (LTSCC). “It’s really cool.”
ss ING s
Over, under, around, and through Elsewhere, research recommendations have already moved past the design stage and into the realm of the concrete, in the form of crossings that help wildlife negotiate busy roads.
On Highway 17, a tight bend known as Laurel Curve is the site of one such crossing. The Santa Cruz Puma Project, a collaboration between UC Santa Cruz and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, first identified Laurel Curve as a critical crossing point more than a decade ago. Researchers—including Pathways for Wildlife—found that 50 percent of recorded collisions between wildlife and vehicles on Highway 17 occurred at this one location.
Since then, says LTSCC’s Largay, “it became increasingly clear that facilitating movement of the animals across Highway 17 at Laurel Curve would be an important action to make sure that the mountain lions within the Santa Cruz Mountains could at least get across that highway.”
With Caltrans receptive to the idea of an undercrossing, the land trust began to acquire parcels on both sides of the highway, allowing construction of a tunnel underneath the busy road.
“It took about eight months to get our first mountain lion [in the crossing],” Largay says. “Deer started after maybe two months, and then at one point we had a mother deer and her two fawns sitting under the wildlife crossing in the shade.”
The success of the undercrossing at Laurel Curve has helped spur similar projects nearby, including an additional crossing on Highway 17 and another on Alma Bridge Road.
Encouraging wildlife to use these crossings requires a thought ful design that considers the unique conditions of each project site. Part of the danger to wildlife at Laurel Curve is a break in the fencing that otherwise helps keep animals off the highway. To guard this gap, which drivers use to access surface streets, Caltrans embedded slightly electrified mats in the pavement. These help steer wildlife away from the road and toward the tunnel.
Even a well-situated and well-designed crossing is of limited value to wildlife without protected habitat on either side. Acquiring land in the Bay Area is an expensive and complex undertaking— one where POST, whose core mission is to “protect open space for the benefit of all,” often plays a key role.
In Coyote Valley, on the southern edge of San Jose, the land-acquisition long game has netted big wins for wildlife. Situated where the gap between the Santa Cruz and Diablo ranges is at its narrowest, the valley forms a critical linkage between more than a million acres of wildlife habitat. It’s also one of the few remaining undeveloped valley floors in the greater Santa Clara Valley.
But “undeveloped” doesn’t necessarily mean “available.” Irina Kogan, POST’s director of landscape conservation, explains that some parcels identified as top priorities for conservation were privately held by landowners who planned to sell their parcels for use in industry or as tech campuses.
“There was intensive development envisioned for this area,” Kogan says, “and people were speculating based off of [that] potential.” Some landowners had been holding on to parcels for decades, envisioning steady growth in property values.
But times changed. “The City of San Jose was doing long-term planning and thinking about climate and carbon neutrality,” Kogan explains. “It realized the importance of protecting Coyote Valley as open space and agricultural land.”
As market conditions shifted, POST and other organizations raised funds and jumped on opportunities to buy and piece together parcels of land within Coyote Valley. Now, along with partners such as Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority and the Santa Clara Valley Habitat Agency, POST has protected about 1,500 acres on the valley floor and another 4,500 acres on the hillsides beyond.
“In this particular case, POST was instrumental in being the party that bought the properties,” Kogan says. “The idea is to secure undeveloped land that can also be restored for wildlife habitat and support connectivity.”
BIT a T R es TOR a TION
Bringing landscapes back to life
In many cases, the land POST acquires needs work before it can reach its full potential as wildlife habitat.
In addition to deterring animals from dangerous locations, planners can try attracting them to safe ones. POST’s Marian Vernon explains that crossings with wide openings and a clear line of sight to the opposite side are more inviting than small culverts with restricted entry points. Soundproofing and barriers that block light from
One such “fixer-upper”: Calero Lakeview, a property in southern San Jose’s Almaden Valley that POST acquired in 2019. Calero Lakeview lies on the trajectory of animals’ movement in and out of Coyote Valley, and sits directly between the protected land of Calero and Santa Teresa county parks. While this is an ideal location to support wildlife, the parcel had some issues.
On the property were several structures that were not built to
code. Much of the land was covered in a thick overgrowth of inva sive weeds like black mustard, purple star-thistle, and stinkwort.
To improve the site for wildlife and prepare it for transfer to Santa Clara County Parks, POST undertook a multiyear landscape restoration effort. Workers removed 11 dilapidated structures, decommissioned sections of old road, and hauled away more than two million pounds of contaminated soil. They also upgraded 10,000 feet of boundary fencing, replacing old barbed wire with wildlife-friendly designs that allow animals such as coyotes, badgers, and bobcats to pass through without injury.
Similar habitat restoration work is underway on various properties in nearby Coyote Valley, where the Santa Clara Valley Open Space Authority is leading a planning process to shape the valley’s future. So far, efforts have included cleaning up trash, removing invasive plants, and planting native species along Fisher Creek— steps that help wildlife move more easily across the landscape.
Taylor Jang, a senior project manager for POST, says that effective restoration work has to consider species’ different habitat needs. “Some prefer cover—shrubs or other vegetation that provide for that type of passage—and others prefer more open conditions,” he says. Badgers, for example, like grasslands where they can dig burrows and hunt for prey like ground squirrels and gophers.
“If you know that there are specific points at which animals are crossing, then you can target habitat restoration, or other types of actions, around those specific locations.”
Good for wildlife, good for people
In explaining POST’s emphasis on landscape linkages, Irina Kogan points out that “wildlife habitat” is in some ways a misnomer: strategies that benefit threatened species—such as preserving open space and restoring native ecosystems—benefit people, too.
“Biodiversity is a critical part of climate resilience,” Kogan says. “Areas where there is a diversity of wildlife, diversity of plants— those are the places best able to handle the disturbances that climate change throws our way. A more climate-resilient future is certainly better for humans as well as wildlife.”
Her colleague Marian Vernon agrees. The wide array of benefits that come with safeguarding habitat connectivity is part of the reason so many different kinds of organizations—public and private—are prioritizing this work.
“It’s really an exciting time.” she says. “Partners across the region are coming together, pooling resources, learning from one another, and leaning on each other’s strengths, all in the hope of accelerating this work and making more of an impact. Wildlife don’t recognize property boundaries or county lines, so organizations need to collaborate—and we are. We’re working toward a vision of a network of open spaces where people and wildlife can truly thrive.”
This article was paid for and reviewed by Peninsula Open Space Trust.
With important parcels of land now protected on both sides of Coyote Valley, POST and its partners are turning their attention to the “triple barrier” that cuts across the linkage: Highway 101, Monterey Road, and an active rail line. Work is underway to design new wildlife crossings and improve existing culvert undercrossings to make them more inviting to animals on the move.
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Noticias de CUHW
Boletín de los Trabajadores Unidos que Cuidan en Casa
PRESIDENTE
proveedores y cuidado en un mundo atrapados ambiente, nuestra exponernos a otros consumidor, usted demanda que usted es un usted vive en su relación proveedor de familiar, diferente. años y proveedor hogar, pero sobre el empleador de problemas que Independientes extraño. CUHW, ha ya durante intervención de dirigidos por Ejecutiva Loretta campaña condado de médico y los trabajadores. En un grupo sido los enriquecido sus plan para
Garbage is a manufactured product, created when otherwise recoverable resources are mixed and mashed together. Most rooms in every building in the whole country have a basket where this manufacturing begins Discarded resources are put in one by one, then dumped into a larger bin, and then into a truck with a more modern body based on this one A hydraulic piston smashes everything together The objective is to pack in more cargo before the truck has to be driven to where it can dump onto the land, to be covered in a “sanitary“ way. Liquids leach out and make their way into the planet's water eventually. These “sanitary” methods of filling the land (hence “sanitary landfills”) also provide for anaerobic decomposition of organic materials –which generates methane. Landfills are the largest human-created source of methane. In the short term methane is 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in creating the greenhouse effect. Making garbage changes the climate!
de marcar un hasta aquí, de nuevo, rompiendo la burbuja del pasado, siempre avanzando acercándonos,
de que se nos haya dañado o se haya abusado de nosotros mentalmente.
•Merecemos el derecho de que se nos pague bajo el esquema del Seguro Social por una vida de trabajo por un miembro de la familia.
•Merecemos vacaciones pagadas, merecemos el derecho de que se nos trate con compasión y respeto por las
In 1938, Gar Wood Industries of Detroit introduced its first Load-Packer truck body that could be sized to multiple dimensions and mounted on many chassis It began to sell in quantity after World War II. Army engineers returning from Europe had been trained to dump all discards into a single hole and move on. The new compactor truck was perfectly suited to be married to the layered “sanitary” landfill developed in Fresno, California.
“CUHW está rompiendo todos los mitos al enfocarse en los miembros.”
NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day from February 12, 2002, colored the Earth's methane green and an animation showed how it spins to the poles. NASA said, “Methane (CH4) is second only to carbon dioxide (CO2) in creating a warming greenhouse effect The largest abundance released by the US … is created when anaerobic bacteria break down carbon-based garbage in landfills.” [Emphasis added ]
conforme continuamos construyendo el “Puente Hacia un Mejor Futuro” Estamos reventando la burbuja cuando nuestro Comité de Constitución sugiere un cambio que combine el espacio de nuestro Secretario Tesorero y que cree una nueva posición, Vicepresidente segundo. El
número de celular o un teléfono fijo. Una vez más nos salimos de nuestra burbuja, hemos lanzado un Programa de Voluntariado de Incentivos para ofrecer descuentos a nuestros miembros en los negocios al mostrar sus tarjetas del Sindicatolo cual representa un ganar-ganar para todos. Hemos establecido oficinas en más de 9 de nuestros condados. La mayoría de las oficinas tienen bancos de llamadas y capacidad de difusión de web y cuentan con grandes pantallas. Contamos con otra acción que es también otra burbuja que se rompe, y estas son las actualizaciones por email y mensajes de texto que alertan a los miembros de los últimos acontecimientos de IHSS. Yo personalmente quiero salirme de la burbuja en la que se considera la reforma de IHSS en California y sugiero que empecemos con
If you're not for Zero Waste, how much waste are you for?
Urban Ore has been salvaging for reuse in Berkeley since 1981. We have 3 acres of secondhand goods, open 360 days a year until 5:00PM, 900 Murray St near 7th x Ashby Come shop
dificultades que enfrentamos en nuestros trabajos por una paga justa, beneficios médicos y oportunidades de educación, al igual que las otras fuerzas de trabajo.
¡No solamente lo merecemos, pero lo debemos de exigir! Necesitamos
