Seeds for the sea

Alex Coolman

LITTLE CORONA -- A small patch of air bubbles breaks the surface of the

ocean and a moment later, Gordon Lehman, decked out in full scuba gear,

comes up from the deep.

In one gloved hand he holds the golden, glossy leaves of o7 Macrocystis

pyriferaf7 , a California Giant Kelp plant. And though it’s somewhat

difficult to read Lehman’s expression behind his translucent facemask, he

appears to be smiling.

“There’s a lot of kelp down there,” he exclaims. “I didn’t mean to stay

down so long, but it looks really good.”

The plants -- there are about 100 of them near a small reef 100 yards off

the rocky shoreline -- are growing on the sea bottom because of a program

started six months ago by Orange County CoastKeeper, an environmental

group that focuses on ocean water quality.

With the help of Lehman, who is a scuba instructor and the co-founder of

an Anaheim company that focuses on kelp-growing technology, the group is

trying to accomplish something ambitious: restoring Orange County’s

once-abundant Giant Kelp forests to their former glory.

The forests can use the help. Though there is almost no kelp off Newport

Beach today, the coastline was once densely carpeted with the towering,

graceful plants.

“The kelp resource here in Orange County is at about the lowest it’s been

in the 26 years I’ve been teaching at Orange Coast College,” said OCC

Marine Science professor Dennis Kelly. “When I got out of college in the

1960s, we had a very large, almost continuous kelp forest -- not only in

Orange County, but all the way up and down the state. We’re now down to

very, very little kelp.”

The forests have died off in recent decades for several reasons.

Pollution and sediment, warmer water temperatures during El Nino years

and the declining population of sea otters, who feed on the animals that

feed on kelp, have all played a part, Kelly said.

To an ordinary beachgoer, the loss of the plants might not seem to be a

big problem. But Garry Brown, the director of CoastKeeper, emphasized

that the denuded seas are also less hospitable to marine life that depend

on kelp for breeding grounds.

“People don’t ask what happened to the seaweed,” Brown said. “They ask,

‘How come there’s no great fishing?’ ”

CoastKeeper’s reforestation program aims, over the long run, to reverse

the trend of kelp loss.

In custom-designed plastic carts that can be easily transported, Lehman

cultivates kelp spores. The tiny organisms affix to small pieces of tile

and, after a few months, grow large enough to be transplanted into the

marine environment.

The exciting thing about growing kelp this way, Lehman says, is that it

allows CoastKeeper to take its juvenile kelp plants to classrooms. There

will eventually be 10 carts, purchased for $1,100 a piece, that can

spread the gospel of Macrocystis to young minds.

Once the plants get into the ocean environment, though, the real struggle

begins. Big surf can sweep away the kelp before it grows large enough to

cling to the bottom. Predators like sea urchins can nibble on the

holdfast “roots.”

And the same problems that have affected the indigenous plants, like

pollution and excessively warm water temperatures, may strike at the new

growth.

Lehman says he thinks today’s stricter water quality regulations will

give CoastKeeper’s plants a chance to thrive where their predecessors

perished.

But even under ideal circumstances, Brown says, getting the underwater

forest back in shape is going to be a major -- and an ongoing -- labor.

“It’s like a garden,” he said. “You can’t just plant it and walk away.

Our concern is to maintain it so it can get to the point where it can

propagate itself.”