Help Indeed! kelp needs to be saved from potentially disastrous losses to the oceans and therefore to the whole planet. And this is a major problem right in my backyard/bay and the Salish Sea as well as globally. I’ll just skim the surface of this huge and critical issue here but will provide links to further expositions of the problems in greater detail.
Significant loss of these important coastal algae along with the extensive biome of which they are part covers 22 to 25% of the world’s coastlines. Kelp forests are found in temperate and arctic near shore waters and comprise the second largest marine biome, second only to sea grasses. Their biological importance was clearly recognized 182 years ago by none other than Charles Darwin:
The numbers of living creatures of all Orders whose existence intimately depends on kelp is wonderful … I can only compare these great aquatic forests of the southern hemisphere with the terrestrial ones in the intertropical regions. Yet if in any country a forest was destroyed, I do not believe as many species of animals would perish as would here from the destruction of kelp.
—Darwin 1839 Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle
Anyone who has spent much time fishing, cruising, touring or diving along marine coastal waters will have experienced the forest canopy with its bulbous bladders floating at or near the surface while its long leaf-like fronds drift with the current. Scuba divers are treated to a magnificent underwater wonderland like seen in the lead photo.
Kelp is also observable to those on land and can be seen along shores and beaches. Following high energy storms, kelp are often pulled from their attachments on the oceans floor and washed ashore on the waves and tide. Beach walkers find them strung along beaches and rocky shores. The largest of these kelps such as giant and Bull can reach lengths of 260 feet. The smaller bull kelp that drift ashore are favorites for kids as their long rope-like stems with a bulb as a handle are fun to swing around and use as whips in their beach play.
Today many anthropologists/archeologists credit these kelp forests as providing the “the Kelp Highway” stretching from Japan to Baja peninsula as the road to the Americas. (They pick up again along the Chilean shores as one goes south.) This highway provided the direction, the security and its continuous food source for the first peopling of the Americas beginning perhaps as long ago as 20,000 years.
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What is Kelp?
Kelp is often thought of as a type of plant as it looks rather plant-like and has many commonalities with plants. Many kelp have root-like structures called “holdfasts” that secure the stem to the rocky substrate of the ocean floor. At the top of the stem or along the stem there are gas filled bladders that serve to buoy the stem at or near the water surface where long fronds float exposing them to sunlight as they are photosynthetic, like plants. However, they are not technically in the plant Kingdom but rather in the Kingdom Protista.
Kelp are Brown Algae of the Family Laminariaceae of which there are about 30 genera. Most larger kelp that make up much of the kelp forests are of genera to include Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) and Bull Kelp (Nereocystis leutkeana). These two genera predominant the kelp forests off the Northeast coast and the West Coast of the US, including California and the Salish Sea. As you can see in the map above, kelp grow only in temperate or arctic waters as they depend on nutrient rich cold water that wells up from deep waters and mixes with surface water. Below are two of the major kelp species that create the kelp forests.
Why are kelp forests important and just what is being lost?
The fact that the vast majority of the world’s population has never seen a Kelp forest or probably even know what they are, does not diminish their importance to the world. I am going to mention just a few of virtues here as whole books have been written on this topic and I am sure that many of our readers are aware of others.
As noted in the Darwin quotation at the beginning, loss of one of these forests would pose greater harm to more species than would loss of any other forest “ in the intertropical region.” It is assumed that he was referring to the Amazonian rain forests to the north of where he was. It is of interest in this regard that I have also read that the loss of kelp forests is advancing three times the rate of loss of rainforest which we hear about often. WOW if this is true!
Carbon Sequestration: To my thinking the greatest harm today of losing the kelp forests is that they are one of the largest carbon sinks we have along with other coastal ecosystems including seaweed,/seagrass, mangroves and tidal marshes. And we need more of them, not fewer. These blue carbon sinks can sequester many times more carbon than terrestrial forests. The carbon from kelp can be more permanently sequestered than the other sea or terrestrial vegetation which degrades and releases their CO2 back into the atmosphere. Much of the CO2 tied up in dead kelp remains in the sea according to the dynamic cycle as shown below.
Sea Life Sanctuaries: Although kelp forests are a great boon to fixing CO2, it serves many other purposes in the coastal ecosystem. It is home, cafeteria and refuge to numerous sea creatures, too many to name including invertebrates, multiple fish species, birds, marine mammals including sea otters and whales that find refuge from high intensity storms. Loss of these forests is a disruption of habitat and food web serving much of the near shore plant and animal life.
Below are three photos from my files of some of these critters living among the kelp, taken on fishing trips to the Haida Gwaii archipelago, British Columbia.
Industrial & economic uses: In many regions of the globe, kelp are important cash crops for the numerous commercial products. Asia and in particular, China are the largest commercial producers of kelp, sea weed and grasses of all kinds. They have been important food sources for humans for eons.
Today kelp are harvested largely for its Alginates which are used in various preparations such as food and food supplements, in cosmetics, ice cream thickener, as industrial animal and farmed fish feed, salad dressing emulsifier, toothpaste, and pharmaceuticals and medicines as well as for biofuel. The list of commercial products is long for this vital marine resource. A quick look on Amazon under kelp reveals hundreds of kelp products for sale.
Elsewhere the New York Times hails kelp as the new sustainable super-food and provides recipes galore.
Accordingly, kelp farming has become an important aquaculture industry. Some kelp is cultivated and farmed with China and Indonesia by far the leaders. Some other countries have primarily harvested wild kelp directly from their off shore forests such as Norway, Europe, and Canada although they are moving toward cultivated and farmed kelp. Smaller operations collect kelp that washes ashore.
In addition to the direct industrial and food uses of kelp, these forests are enormously
lucrative tourist attractions for diving, fishing and wild life observation.
So these Kelp forests that occupy or affect nearly a quarter of the world’s shorelines are:
- major players in combating CO2 - related global warming,
- providing habitat and food resources for numerous sea critters,
- having large aquacultural economic impacts on some regions and
- help preserve shorelines from increasingly strong storms.
In part 2, I will describe the current research on how extensive the losses are world wide with a focus on some local examples losses from the shores of California and Puget Sound/Salish Sea in Washington State. Then I will describe some of the efforts to preserve and to rebuild these forests.