This story was co-published with the Monterey Herald and supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center.
“Yeah, it’s an awesome boat,” says Joshua Smith affectionately as he dons a crusty old wetsuit with a bright pink patch right on the butt. When I ask him about the patch, he laughs. “This wetsuit got me through my Ph.D., so I couldn’t afford a new one,” Smith says. He goes on to explain that the man who made the custom 10-millimeter-thick wetsuit—vital for cold-water diving—has since retired. Smith is holding out as long as he can before replacing the suit. “It’s an antique!” he says.
The answers to these questions involve scuba excursions , satellites, motivated undergrads, artificial intelligence and people wading in tide pools. “One day we were down, and everything was normal, and [then] next we saw starfish starting to disintegrate basically in front of us,” Raimondi says. “There was Pycnopodia decaying, and [it] would just turn into literally the outline of a sea star and bacteria on the bottom.”
This phenomenon is called sea star wasting syndrome. Though the exact mechanism that causes the sea stars to dissolve into bacterial piles is still a subject of research, similar events have been observed as early as the 1970s, and they are typically associated with warming waters. Back on the Sebastes, Smith and his colleagues are done preparing for their dive. I’m going to be following them with a small remotely operated vehicle, or ROV. Today they are looking for purple sea urchins. They don’t need to look hard.
Already depleted by the unprecedented warming event, the sea urchin explosion clear-cut kelp all the way to the reef surface, creating a so-called urchin barren. In many places, all that was left was a carpet of purple. “In 2015 it was very motivated undergrads” says Tom W. Bell, an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
These days Bell’s team uses computers to automate the analysis, but a certain amount must still be completed by human eyes. “There's a new push called Floating Forests on a platform called Zooniverse,” he tells me, where citizen scientists from around the globe can help analyze images.
Die off on the Atlantic side too! Bioluminescence algae dying off!
Otters 🦦 are so freaking cute!
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