Hold Fast: Envisioning Climate Change through the Art and Science of our Local Giant Kelp Forests

It's a pleasure to be here with everyone tonight. What an amazing turnout. This is great. We're all here to talk about kelp. But as we get deeper into this conversation, it will soon be clear that this is really a discussion centered around climate change and its impact on natural systems we've perhaps taken a bit for granted lately. Dating back to 2013 when I was just finishing up undergrad, one thing has been constant across all my research, and that's the impact of climate change. It's 2024 n

ow. It's been a short while since I started. But climate change has somehow touched every project that I've worked on. That's the backdrop to our discussion today. On that note, before we even start talking about kelp, I want to share the path that finally brought me here to the forest. Back then in 2013, I was studying the life history of baby market squid in the context of ocean warming. Shout out to my mentor, Charles Pretty, whose finger you can see up there modeling just how tiny these palp

able squid look without a microscope. I remember all our fieldwork brought us in and around La Jolla kelp forest, which if anyone remembers, used to be so thick near the cove. You had to veer way off and take the long way south past Point La Jolla, otherwise you risk getting the boat stuck in some seriously thick kelp. All that fun with squid soon opened the door to a job at NOAA, where before grad school I got to research even more on squid, but this time alongside other important coastal and o

pen ocean fisheries. But it didn't take long before I was ready to go back to school, so I started up my master's research, which brought me right back into the kelp forests. Along the way, I started working with the Department of Fish and Wildlife doing albony restoration work. This is right about when I realized that what's probably a very obvious connection to us all now. No matter what the topic, every system or organism I've studied to date has all but collapsed in the same window. If I'm t

he common denominator in all this, I am I the problem, is it me? I don't know. But needless to say, I do believe research focuses can be influenced by the major global themes that happen to be especially present during the infancy of a scientific career and the climate change has certainly inspired mind. Moving into my current field of study and how everything is connected. Although I started working in this environment in the context of abalone restoration, I realized the foundation species its

elf is also at risk and deserves attention. Otherwise, there's no home for the abalone anyways. One more folks seem to know about kelp forests these days, which is exciting compared to even a few years ago. I figured as people start hearing more about kelp forests, they're going to start asking questions too. I decided it was time to see how good our public resources are on this topic. I asked ChatGPT my first question ever, what is a kelp forest? And the response was pretty spot on, but I'll ex

pand on it a little bit further here. Kelp forests are coastal cold water habitats dominated by large brown seaweeds for about 130 different species globally. They are hard bottomed dwellers that form dense three dimensional stands, which creates a pretty unique habitat. Then I looked up what people would see if they asked about the importance of kelp forests. Most of the results in this were accurate too. They're the base of the food web and a habitat they create themselves, which also means th

ey're important for fisheries and tourism. If that's not enough, kelp is in your toothpaste, it's in your shampoo, your medicine, and even your favorite ice cream. It's all because kelp contains a natural thickener that's fantastic at keeping things smooth and mixed. But there's some information out there on a topic that needs a little bit more clarification and I want to make sure we cover it here. That's this idea of carbon superstration. I want to highlight what we know about kelp and carbon.

We know there are amazing fixtures of carbon in that they're prosynthesizing all the time, taking in lots of CO_ 2 as they grow. We know that kelp grows super fast, which equates to a bunch of carbon storage. But there's a big question mark of how long that carbon is stored and ultimately where it all ends up once it enters or leaves the kelp system. It's a complicated challenge and currently a growing area of research. But I need to stress that for that research to grow or even continue, it re

lies on kelp forests continuing to exist. I want to review a familiar pair of problems, namely long term and interannual climate change, especially in the local context here in San Diego. Climate change is affecting ocean conditions for kelp and here's how they're changing in our backyard at UCSD. This is the temperature off the scripts peer over the last century and we can see by the green line that it's generally increasing, and as a function of these elevated ocean temperatures we can see ran

ge expansion of competitors and grazers has caused significant decline in the size and density of our Southern California kelp stance. In addition to the long term increase due to anthropogenic climate change, the ENSO cycle creates these periods of warmer water and lower nutrient availability. The red in this figure represents increased sea surface height which corresponds to temperature increase during an El Nino. When that happens on our coast, kelp is subject to thermal and nutrient stress.

For some context before the 2015 El Nino, the all time La Jolla kelp high was in 2013, with over a million square meters. That's 250 acres or about 200 football fields of canopy coverage. Then during the 201 El Nino, La Jolla lost over 90% of its kelp and it still hasn't recovered to anywhere near the values since back in 2013. We know the patterns of loss observed here in La Jolla are also reflected across San Diego, the bottom eastern Pacific, and also globally, where it's motivated groups to

begin restoration work, and recognizing the value of local action in a global context, we've formed a multidisciplinary team here in an effort to understand, reverse, or prevent further kelp loss in San Diego. This is our team where we have the pleasure of combining expertise across psychology and ecology here at UCSD, under my advisor Jen Smith, Molecular Biology over at Salk Institute with Todd Michael, Developmental Biology at UCLA with Siobhan Braybrook, and Kelp Forest Restoration Ecology u

nder Cayne Layton at University of Tasmania. I'd like to add that this collaboration also happens to represent part of my growing PhD thesis committee. It's no coincidence that the goals of this project stem from my graduate research here at Scripps. Our work has four main objectives. First, we're looking at long term kelp forest health as it changes through time, especially with habitat suitability for kelp transplants in mind. We're basically asking how do rising ocean temperatures driven by c

limate change affect health and the dynamics of kelp beds in San Diego? Second, we're uncovering whether significant genomic diversity exists in San Diego kelp forests. Our question here being, do genetic variations in San Diego kelp beds impact their ability to withstand ocean warming? Third, we're testing how well local kelp tolerates environmental stress and whether there are any differences in performance cross populations, in other words, how do the microscopic life stages of San Diego kelp

respond to ocean heat waves? Given our growing kelp cultivation pipeline and seed banks, essentially our kelp nurseries, can we preserve kelp diversity before the next heat wave? Last, we're collecting field data at permanent monitoring sites that will eventually support experimental kelp restoration. Here's where we want to know how transplanted kelp fair in new environments and whether there's any link to thermal tolerance we might find in our previous objective. All of this work is ongoing a

t various stages in parallel. Going into some detail for these objectives, this map shows the kelp forest canopy at our permanent scuba monitoring sites in La Jolla which we're now serving on a seasonal basis, and explaining that panel that teal area is anywhere that has ever had kelp between now and 1984, and why is where kelp was detected in 2022? Note that the MPA seen inside that dash box also protects the southern half of La Jolla kelp forests which we've consistently found to have higher p

ersistence than in the northern regions of Ohio. It's this exact same pattern which motivated the distribution of our research sites which are labeled by those black dots. It's also where we hope to identify the community and environmental drivers that could be forcing the differences in recovery and persistence between these two regions of kelp. All this is ahead of transplant experiments along the regions of North La Jolla which historically had kelp, but have not recovered since last. A speci

al shout out to Keenan Chan and Rich Walsh for helping me build out these sites for the summer. It was some serious work, and now we're on our way. Our second objective involves sequencing DNA from kelp across our local populations, which then reveals the level of diversity and potential for pre-existing stress tolerance among individuals. Essentially, what we're asking here is whether there's already an inability present in these populations to adapt to any degree of climate change, and that in

turn can guide us in selecting natural kelp strains that might be more ideal for restoration work down the road. An exciting aspect of this project is that we got to develop a giant kelp reference corresponding specifically to here in San Diego, and that's what we'll use to map all the local samples we collect as we start to collect catalog diversity in these populations. Here's a real time sneak peek of what that diversity looks like with the few samples that we've already sequenced so far. Al

l you need to know for this figure is that every dot corresponds to an individual kelp, and the distance between each dot tells us how similar or different those kelp are across all the regions that we've sampled. The closer the dots, the less genetic differences between the kelp. But the bottom line is giant kelp in southern California are proving to be genetically different, even within San Diego, which means there's a better chance we might find kelp out there that's already more tolerant to

heat stress. The third aspect we're tackling tests. How well the early life stages of local kelp tolerates heat stress in the context of photophysiological, microscopic, and cellular level responses. In the same process, it will also determine the thermal thresholds for these populations in our backyard. We'll focus our efforts on six seaweed taxa that represent the most abundant habitat forming kelp species in San Diego. From the ground up this involves collecting reproductive material out in t

he kelp forest, growing in the lab to create other cultures and seed banks, essentially our nursery, before finally putting these specimens through growth experiments that simulate environmental stress on par with what they'd experience during a marine heat wave. On the topic of kelp nurseries for my research, it's been an absolute pleasure to work with Oriana, who's been documenting every detail and all the differences of my baby kelp from the very beginning. Yeah, thanks Oriana. We don't often

see or think of this tiny life stage when it comes to kelp, but they're just so darn cute, like little potato chips or basil leaves and they've even got these tiny little hold fast. I love it. All of this work feeds into our final objective, which tests restoration techniques in the Hoya, focusing specifically on macrocystis or giant kelp. We're testing its performance in the context of all the data we're collecting in our previous objectives. Revisiting those transplant sides are introduced in

our first objective, they all share two main ground truth criteria. First, they're at a depth of about 15 meters, or 50 feet, with consistent hard bottom reef structure, and second, they'd previously hosted thriving kelp forests, but now they're largely devoid of giant kelp. Following methods tested in previous restoration experiments by Leighton Johnson and Tasmania, we'll experimentally outplant kelp grown on polycarbonate tiles, fastened to the sea floor with expansion bolts, all in spatial

arrangements that are comparable to their natural kelp densities. Ultimately, this last aspect should uncover if the health and survivorship of juvenile macrocystis are related to either their thermal tolerance or their genetic line. Collectively, we've set up a project such that these findings could inform future kelp restoration efforts, particularly in regions affected by heat stress induced kelp decline. The work started a few years ago with early support from some UCSC seed funds, along wit

h an AUS scholarship. As the project gained momentum, we received a SeaTrees research grant to expand the work, and all of that just landed Sea Grant's 2024 support for accelerating kelp research and restoration in California. We're excited about the funding and equally excited to share an upcoming update on CW permitting. We've had a specific use permit application process for upwards of last year, and now it's in the final stages. We'll need this permit in place to start experimental restorati

on, and to collect more DNA samples from across San Diego's protected areas. We've definitely made some significant strides, humbly starting from a repurposed mini fridge for all the kelp culturing, before we advanced to dedicated incubators. Alongside, we've refined our DNA techniques to craft a San Diego macrocystis reference genome, and all this progress underpinned by Sea Grant funding, has been amplified by the strong support of our global community and positive engagement with the Birch Aq

uarium, the Kelp Forest Alliance and the Nature Conservancy to name a few. We're now set for the next phase of this work. Eagerly waiting Sea Grant funding to come in and the scientific permit approval, and that will scale up this kelp biomass that we're trying to collect, all for the upcoming heat stress experiments, the DNA sequencing, and our transplant trials. I know a bit of this talk has been pretty heavy in terms of extreme events in ocean warming, but there is this silver lining that I w

ant to leave you with. It's said, these same environmental downers can actually help select for tolerance to the climate stressors that characterize extreme events. Populations that have undergone the selection could be used as targets for restoration, which will boost climate resilience in natural populations. This work will hopefully demonstrate how selection might be happening in our local kelp force out here in our backyard, and it'll build a record of local population diversity as it potent

ially fluctuates with each environmental preservation. I hope reframing this perception of climate extremes as opportunities for developing resilience might inspire and direct our ongoing efforts in the context of kelp restoration. In closing, sincerely, heartfelt thanks to the Hold Fast team, and the Birch Aquarium for having me here today. To everyone who came here tonight to be a part of this steadily growing kelp culture, thank you. Hi everybody. Thanks for coming tonight. Thank you Mo for s

etting the stage so well with such a great representation of your work. I'm Oriana Poindexter, I'm a photo based artist and a marine scientist working at the intersection of science, art, and the ocean. I've always been most comfortable in the water, and my favorite way to communicate is to collect and share fragments of the natural world. I studied biology and visual arts as an undergraduate at Princeton. I fell in love with photography as a way to create an image of something that I'd found ou

t in nature, and the tangible physical craft of black and white dark room printing. The magic of chemistry and light, the alchemy of watching the moment in time be transferred to paper, the image surfacing through the developer. When I moved down to San Diego just over a decade ago, I quickly landed at this Scripps Institution of Oceanography just down the hill. I was sucked into the orbit of SIO by the marine collections. There's hundreds of thousands of jars with preserved marine organisms, ea

ch of which contains the story of an individual, a fish, a worm, a snail, the place it came from, and the person who collected and studied it. The exhibit that Hold Fast replaced, called oddities, was a celebration of these marine collections, and contained some of these photographs. I've photographed hundreds of specimens from the Scripps collections, attempting to find the good side of a snail fish, creating the portraits with dignity for each of these creatures that have been pulled from the

depths to join the scientific record. I've always been a swimmer, but I started surfing and diving in earnest here in San Diego in 2013 and 2014, when the kelp canopy was at its historic height. Free diving and scuba diving from shore in those years, I began to develop a relationship with these local spots. Each one has a distinct personality, with a certain set of inhabitants, characteristics, behaviors, underwater landscapes, and things to watch for. When I first started diving in giant kelp,

it was pretty easy to find, dense amber and full of life. I've been photographing in the kelp for a decade now. I started photographing with a 35 millimeter film camera underwater, the Nikonos III. Cameras and the tools of photography are a license of a kind, a ticket for me to get outside and go exploring. Taking it underwater one breath at a time, let me begin to learn about the kelp forest and all the creatures that call it home. The kelp forest can be a difficult place to make a picture. How

ever, the conditions are not always ideal. Sometimes you can't see more than a few feet in front of you. Like many photographers, I had images in my head that I wanted to capture, and kept trying for. One of these imaginary pictures was an evenly lit stand of giant kelp from top to bottom, so you could see the whole thing, all of the details, all of the scale. If you dive in the kelp, you know this is impossible. There's a single natural light source in the ocean and it's the sun, and it comes i

n very unilateral direction. After the marine heat wave of 2014 and 2015, and the multiple years of summer water temperatures hitting 80 degrees, the kelp started getting harder to find. I had to swim farther from shore, testing some diabetic relationships beyond their limits, as I wanted to swim out farther and farther, almost to the forest, I swear it's just past that buoy. One day in July 2018 off of Sanitas, I took the picture that I had in my head. The water had gotten so hot that the kelp

was literally melting, its buoyant nematicides had dissolved away, releasing their gas into the water. The tall standing kelp had gone from tall and vertical to long and horizontal, laying down flat at the bottom of the ocean. I hovered over it and snapped this picture. Delighted at my find. It wasn't until later that I put all the pieces together, realizing why this picture had come into being and what that meant. The more time I spent in the kelp, the more I realized how integral it was to be

thinking about the entire ecosystem, and that there was a disconnect between a lot of the fisheries and conservation work that was the focus of my time at my work at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a number of years, missing the forest for the trees. The feeling I wanted to communicate was one of awe, one of wonder, the feeling of being small, of being a visitor, a witness to something so much bigger, stronger, older, more powerful and more important than you or I. Some p

eople find the seeking out of this feeling to be strange, scary, or dark. But I think it's critical to find it and experience it in your own way. For me, visiting the forest and finding this feeling is an experience of joy. It's a revelation to apply the abilities that I'm lucky to possess. The ability to enter the water, to kick my legs and hold my breath and open my eyes, and to use these abilities to bear witness to the world of individuals below the surface. It's a world without cell phones,

without emails, without calendar notifications. It's a world full of creatures, interconnected neighbors, and relationships between locals and visitors. It's a world entirely beyond my control, and that I can only enter when the conditions are right, and with the unspoken acceptance of the risk that's represented by crossing that threshold. I'm often asked how I came up with the idea to create cyanotypes of seaweed. This is not a new idea. The cyanotype, or sun printing, is a really early form

of photography, invented in the 1840s. It utilizes a combination of two iron salts that become sensitive to UV light when mixed in the right proportion. It doesn't require a dark room or even a camera. It exposes in sunlight and it requires only water to process the resulting image and create an archival print. I'm not the first one to combine it with seaweeds either. Anna Atkins did that in England in 1843. She created the first book of photographs in the world, and there are cyanotypes of seaw

eed. About five years ago, I realized that I could use cyanotype chemistry to make images not just of the kelp, but with the kelp. That if I could find paper or fabric big enough, that I could make an image with the kelp at kelp size. I could make an image like the one I had photographed in 2018, of the melted evenly laying down kelp, but without having to wait for a devastating heat wave. I've been dreaming about making this silk forest since that day. It was just a figment of my imagination fo

r years. Even as I started telling friends, first on whispers, could you imagine forest of cyanotypes, kelp sized, big enough to swim through. Then I started writing it down, daring to include in proposals that kept going nowhere. It takes a lot to build a forest. I came to the aquarium with the idea for this show last year. This is Megan wearing one of the early samples. Like you do. As one does. I'm in the background making the print. I'm still in shock that this forest actually exists. It's b

een an absolute joy and privilege to have met and collaborated with Megan and the whole exhibits team here, to craft this exhibit from the proposal that I had presented. As soon as I met Megan and dared to show her a small sample of the silk sayanna type, she saw the forest. No more explanation needed. I made the images that you see in the exhibit in the six weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's of 2023. I created nine original pieces, one of a kind, cyanotypes on panels of paper ranging in

size from 12.5-16.5 feet long and three feet wide. To make each image, I first mix the chemistry and painted onto the paper at night in my studio. The next day I go free diving in the cold forest outside of the marine protected areas at some of the same sites that Mo uses as field sites. Looking for exactly the right specimen, I look around the forest for individuals that speak to me. Some days I don't find what I'm looking for. Each piece is truly a collaboration with the environment, the condi

tions, and what the ocean is willing to allow me to collect. I select individual strands of kelp that are as large as the paper I have prepared. For these, I was collecting pieces 12-16 feet long in the ocean. I break off one strand from the larger individual, like taking a single branch from a tree and then return to the surface. I put the piece in my bag and then swim back to shore. Back at my studio, I pulled the kelp from my bag and carefully pat dry each and every blade. I get to know the s

pecimen this way, as an individual. In the crowd, in the forest, they all appear quite similar, but each one is unique in the way people are. I carefully lay the kelp out over the light sensitive paper I prepared, composing a portrait of the strand of kelp in a way that will capture both the scale, and the details that make that individual unique. When it's right, I pull the paper with the kelp over it into sunlight, where the exposure is created. Anything covered up by the kelp stays lighter in

color while any part of the paper fully exposed to the light turns dark blue. The exposure time depends on the intensity of the sun usually between 10 and 20 minutes. After exposing, I return the whole situation to the shade, remove the kelp, and wash the image in water to process it. For this exhibit, we chose to use reproductions instead of originals to create something safe, immersive, and interactive. We digitize those original prints I showed earlier at life size scale and printed them on

100% silk to create the 27 hanging panels that you can see, touch and swim through today. The paper originals are still safe in a box at my studio if anybody wants to see them. Each cyanotype photogram that I make is a portrait of that individual. By recording the time, place, and species of each specimen I collect, I'm creating a collected portrait of that place, allowing each specimen to image itself in this light sensitive material. The three small pieces that you see when you first enter the

exhibit over here are photograms made with giant kelp, but not with kelp that I collected in the ocean. These three pieces are made with six month old giant kelp babies, sporophytes grown by Mohammad, etc. In the lab just down the hill. You can see the individual variation, the differences and size of individuals of the same age, and the first growth of what will become a hold fast on each one. The blue ones are cyanotypes made with the same chemistry as the large silks. The pink one is a lumen

print. It's a different chemistry, but it's the same idea of kelp over light sensitive paper in the sun. I create this work because I love the experience of making it. It's an experience that brings me joy, to enter the ocean, to leave daily life at the shoreline, and unburden myself in the water. To experience the beauty and the terror of life underwater, and to bear witness to the changes that we are causing. To create a document of that experience and to make it relevant to the scientific re

cord in my own way. I'm often asked what I want people to take away from my work, and I have trouble answering that question. If I'm making it for anyone, it's for the forest, for the individuals whose portraits are being created. This is my own relationship with the ocean, with the forest, and it manifests in these images. The fact that the pictures, the original unique objects can go on to have a life where they interact with you and can get you excited about this environment is an incredible

bonus. If I'm pushed to answer the question, I hope that the work can inspire awe for the marine environment and a desire to go develop your own relationship with nature, whatever form that takes for you. It's still really surreal to see this exhibit come to life in such a complete way. This is the third time I've had the opportunity to show my work, alongside the gyotaku work of Dwight Hwang, whose individual portraits of fish, lobster, crabs, and seaweed bring this cyanotype forest to life. Th

e exhibit has evolved to include the creativity of the entire team. It takes a village to build a forest, and this one exists thanks to Megan Dickerson, Dwight Hwang, Rob Brad, Tina Mao, Mohammad Sedarat, Jen Smith, Marianne Byster, and Audi Ken, just to name a few. I'll leave you with this. There's a sister exhibit on view through April 21 at the UC San Diego Geysl Library just up the hill and I had the honor of curating this exhibit. Ebb and Flow, giant kelp forests through art science and the

archives, which includes 36 works by four artists, Dwight Hwang, Marie McCkenzie, Julia C.R. Gray and myself dialogue with 25 original seaweed pressings made by scientists and citizens with seaweed collected in La Jolla between 1890 and 2023. If you want more seaweed, there's plenty more. Thank you, and I look forward to your question Again, I'm Megan Dickerson, Director of Exhibits, and I can't believe I get to work with these people. I'm so in love with this project and this work. Hopefully,

you feel that too. The passion, the joy, all while we're doing something that's really challenging. I think a lot about what Katherine Hayhoe wrote about rational hope, if you're familiar with her work, and I want to read it before we start the discussion. She writes that her hope is not based on burying my head in the sand or practicing positive thinking. My hope begins with looking at how bad this is. True hope, rational hope, muscular hope begins with looking clear eyed at just how bad it is,

just how high the risk is, how small the chance of success is. Hope is that small chance, however improbable, of something better. How we get there is recognizing that it's not guaranteed, but it's possible. The only way it's possible is if we do everything we can. Does anybody feel that? You know? I'm looking at both of your work and the feeling of being in the kelp forest and being with nature, which we hope we've simulated through the experience here. The feeling of looking at baby kelp whic

h I never thought I'd think were so cute. I had this squeeze moment every time I see them. I'm just like baby kelp. But at the same time, understanding that there's this great risk and this great challenge. I don't know how to do small talk, so I'm just going to go straight into that. How do you balance that? How do you balance in your work, the knowledge that you have? Like the work that you've done, that every animal that you've studied, has been impacted by climate in the last 10 years. How d

o you balance that joy and that reality at the same time? You're welcome. Thank you so much. That keeps me going that it's a love hate situation for sure. I only realized some of the impact that climate change has had on these previous projects I was chatting about very recently. It was almost like a retrospective realization that though this has definitely influenced every step I've made, every turn that I've made to get to this point. I wouldn't be here without it. Which is both amazing but al

so, it's a scary driving force, that we're here. I think that I'm not the only one that's having this experience, which is also what keeps me going. Here I'm sitting next to another example. We're all noticing and we're acting in a direction that reacts to how climate has affected all of these different organisms, these ecosystems that we're studying. I guess it's a catalyst for everything that I do. I think that's a good way of putting it as a catalyst. For me, I had a job where I was ostensibl

y working in that direction, but it didn't feel impactful to me. I just started diving more and just doing these things that felt good to me physically, of diving, of creating these images. Then the fact that they can go on and be seen and create these conversations and then create the opportunity to have these discussions was not my intention at the beginning. It's been a really wonderful surprise. I was thinking a little bit earlier about how you both are people who pay attention, and that's t

he work of artists. I think that's where artists and scientists really intersect. It's just noticing and what you notice might be a little bit different. I think as scientists, you're trained to focus on that one thing, whether it's squid or abalone, and you're not seeing the bigger picture. Have you had any challenges of pushing that forward to see the forest for the trees? Definitely. But it helps to just make the time to go observe without an agenda necessarily to try to see it with fresh eye

s. Then I think that's when you have the opportunity to see something new. That's a really good point with the abalone research, realizing that they're living in an environment that is soon going to be at even more risk compared to the abalone themselves. That was a big like, we can zoom out and recognize that there is a forest for the trees situation here. Sometimes it slaps you in the face and you realize when you're just way too focused under a microscope or underwater, looking way too close

to the sea floor. It's like if you've seen the baby kelp that are growing in the refrigerator in hold fast. I was mentioning how kids are obsessed with it and they're staring at it. Just watching it like it's a screen almost, and they're watching all these tiny little movements. I told this to Mo and Mo was like, well that's basically what I do all day. It's a bit of an intersection. It's just noticing. I was making this other triple Venn diagram of artists, scientists and children being aware a

nd paying attention to the world around us. Was there a story that made you move away from the specifics to really thinking about the habitat? Was there a moment that you can look back to? Not a specific moment in time, but I was just thinking, actually, when you were just answering that last question. I learned scientific scuba diving very early on in my scuba diving career. You're taught to have a task underwater, which is great because you are very focused on that task. For a long time, that

task was like find as many abalone as possible. You're on the bottom and you're looking underneath everything. You're not looking up almost ever. I went scuba diving recently with a group of artists, and usually I go free diving with artists. I don't go scuba diving with artists. We went scuba diving and I went straight to the bottom looking for abalone. I lost my buddies because they stayed halfway down the water column, taking in the forest. I was at bottom, I was like, what are you guys doing

? We got to look for stuff. Yeah, I don't know if that directly answers your question, but that was a moment relatively recently where I realized a mental switch of observation and of experience. Yeah. In that moment, you were still reevaluating? Yeah, I put the science gear back on, I put scuba diving stuff back on, and I was back in like science head. You're in very science head right now PhD student. How do you go in and out of it, do you go back and forth? Oriana definitely brings me out of

it in a really good way when we intersect. Awesome. A little aside, there's a psychology class that Jen teaches, art, my advisor at UCSC, every other year, and we're all in this class right now together going through it and enjoying. It's been a nice way to interact and think about all the seaweed that is around me when I'm doing my science, but also in a different perspective. I like to think, I don't think I've told you this but when we're in class and I see you working with the specimens, I t

ry to think okay, what's going on in Oriana's head right now? Like what perspective does she have? That sometimes helps me reframe what my approach is as well because you also have the scientific background as well and you've mixed that very nicely with the visual art form as well. It's definitely a role model in that sense too. I'm learning a lot in Seaweed class. I'm learning a lot from what you're learning in Seaweed class. I mean, just. Like a chain up the hill. Exactly. She'd be like, did y

ou know this? This one's so cute. No, I'm talking about Seaweed is cute. This is a real sea change for me, like moving from my other work, just suddenly thinking, oh my goodness, Clinton and Seaweed are so cute. But maybe you're saying that we should have an artist embedded in every class just every science class to help you see things a little bit differently. Maybe the opposite is true too having scientists in art class. That's your background. Your degree is similar to that from Princeton. Ye

ah, I've always had this wanting to be on both sides of the science and the art equation and never quite understanding why I'm supposed to choose one, but I've been lucky to find a path where I can combine the two of them. I think historically, in the 1840s, 1850s, as these art processes were being invented, photography wasn't really around scientists were expected to be artists also. They had to illustrate what they were finding. That was the only way to communicate it and at some point that ha

s separated as technology has evolved and scientists are still expected to be many different things, but artists is no longer one of them necessarily. I've always felt that they are very interconnected and come from the same curiosity and like you were saying earlier, this need to observe nature. Yeah,. Sorry. I get distracted because there's so many good conversations that have happened. I also want to, by the way, point out if he's here, Itamar, Leland, where are you? There you are. Ita is the

maker of the giant kelp lantern, if you saw it. If you haven't had a chance to go in the exhibit, it's right there. Some of you may be able to see it from your seats. It's entirely made of giant kelp everything but no non kelp. A lot of it was harvested from what we were moving out of our own kelp tank here. I think that there's in addition to this conversation of where the arts and sciences intersect, it's also where does that go? Each is also working on a kelp based paint. I think that this e

xhibit here is about being in the space about marinating in it, about having conversations in the kelp forest, but it's also about inspiring what more might be done. That's my favorite definition of play is what more might be done. What more might happen. I know we want to open up to some questions. Yeah. This is mostly for Mohammad, I think. Can you talk about the effect of the warming of the water on sea urchins and the impact of them on the hold fast, in addition to the plant itself being aff

ected by the hotter water. Yeah, great. If anyone's aware, in Northern California, around the same time that we've been talking, there was a series of heat waves and the kelp forests that were up in Northern California and the North Coast all also melted away like Oriana mentioned in her talk, the waters that eventually cooled down, and what we would have expected was the kelp to return to that area, but instead, it did shift, it shifted into an urchin barren. This is a situation where the sea f

loor is covered by a disproportionately high amount of urchins compared to any other organism on the sea floor, including outlawing including kelp that they love to eat. When the waters get warmer or they stay warmer, this, in a nutshell, can reduce the predation effort. It removes the predators on urchins that you would find in these environments. Some of that is because of disease. Like certain types of sea stars, like the one that we just heard about earlier today got wiped out when the water

got warm and they usually keep the urchin population in control. They're one of the players in that. A lot fell apart in that and this is what led to the urchins to be able to explode the way they did. I guess just touching on it again, but you asked about what temperature does to help itself. I mean, at some point it's a threshold where it just starts to melt away, but before it gets to that crazy red line, another, I guess it's a paired issue. When the water starts to rise or the water is gen

erally warmer, that also usually equates to lower nutrients in the water column which the kelp is hungry for all the time. It grows so fast, like down to, it grows so fast per day that we can actually describe the rate of growth of giant kelp in miles per hour. It's like 0.2 miles per hour, but we can see it essentially almost with our naked eyes. That means it's very hungry. It needs nutrients. Usually our coastal systems are, at least here in California especially, there is the presence of a v

ery strong upwelling current that brings deeper, cold, nutrient rich waters. We can't have one without the other. When the waters are warm, that generally also means there's less nutrients for the kelp to even do its thing. It's usually nutrients tend to be the problem first. As the temperatures get even warmer, it's just all bets are off and stuff starts to melt. Thank you for a great presentation. I love the format. I love how engaged you are. This is amazing. My question has to do with intern

al waves entitled forcing in the canyons which might bring colder water up into the kelp beds. I was wondering if you see any spatial relationship with the canyons and this forcing function. Thank you. Why haven't we talked earlier? This is great. There's a couple of papers that came out not too long ago, like in 2012, about La Jolla's kelp patch especially and that submarine canyon just north of that extent in the cove. You're absolutely right, like you're hitting the nail on the head, but what

they also found when they started checking the temperature in the water column across all of La Jolla from north to south, they found that on average temperatures closer to the Canyon towards the north of La Jolla footprint were actually like a little bit warmer. Then what you'd find further away from the submarine canyon in the south and that has exactly to do what they describe as with internal waves. The high amplitude internal waves traveling out of the canyon which is what lets them get es

sentially so tall, if you will, that mixes the water column so well right when it comes out the gates out of the canyon that the warmer waters near the surface of what the kelp forest experience gets mixed really well with the deeper, normally colder waters. That causes this whole environment like from surface to sea floor, to be just a little bit warmer. That's crazy for me, that's got my attention because in heat wave events, what's already a little bit of a warmer part of, at least in the hol

iest kelp forest, might get that much more warm. You wonder like, are the kelp that are living there or trying to live, adapted to that warmer environment. Are they actually okay or are they just barely hanging on normally? As soon as there's a heat wave event, they're the first ones to go so I don't know, but great. I was looking almost like a plant question. That's so good. Thank you. I have a question. Years ago we had Kelco that had a fleet of kelp cutters, and at that time they claim they w

orked on the health of the kelp beds. Have you seen any evidence of what happened while they were working and what has happened since then as affecting the comings and goings of the kelp beds. Right around again, everything's 2013. Where were you in 2013? What did the kelp look like too? I remember right around when I was finishing up the squid project that I was talking about, the Kelco was still very present here off La Jolla, off of our coast, in San Diego. I didn't even think twice about it,

there was that much help for them to collect. It was dense, it didn't see, they were just shaving off the surface. It seemed like it was fine. I don't know if that's all talk or if that's actually true. I never saw anything about that, but it also wasn't the height of my time in the kelp forest. I was in and around it, but I was studying squid I was studying abalone. I never saw them doing much more than collecting kelp, which at the time was perfectly it wasn't just sustainable. It almost mayb

e was a good, it was like volcanoes coming through causing that disturbance. Maybe actually promoted the health. Unless that was the angle they were working. We're shaving, we're pruning the leaves and we're inspiring new growth. Unless that was the angle, I'm not too sure. There was much more going on. Yeah, but now they're further south, they're in Mexico now. There's really not much here for them. You saw in those figures, so we can ask them the next time they come back north.