Kelp’s Green Hope—The Fight to Protect Earth’s Ancient Ocean Forests

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Michael Marty Rivera
Marine biologist Micahel Marty-Rivera at AltaSea holding test samples. Photo by Arturo Garcia-Ayala

By Evelyn McDonnell

I admit that the Pacific had taken a cold turn on the early autumn day when I lured Michael Marty-Rivera into the water at outer Cabrillo Beach. Overnight, a wind blew the warmer top water off and it was now definitely below 60 degrees. I gasped a bit when my bare head broke the surface and briefly regretted loaning Marty-Rivera my swim cap.

Then again, the Puerto Rico-born and raised scientist — with the enviable title of “kelp curator” at the seed bank Kelp Ark — was braving the shore of Hurricane Gulch for the first time. For almost two years the amiable 36-year-old has been living in Long Beach and working in San Pedro, but his Caribbean-spoiled blood has not adapted to our chilly seas. “I’m a tropical person,” he told me. “I cannot tolerate the cold.”

Since he spends his working days at AltaSea examining, processing and storing the gametophytes of living beings like those that grow barely a mile away, I thought it was high time the lab rat visit these specimens in the wild.

Marty-Rivera was excited too. He became a marine biologist in part because he fell in love with the life aquatic while snorkeling off Puerto Rico. He bought a wetsuit from Amazon just for this Pacific plunge, though he had to borrow my cap and fins — the fact he could fit into my size sevens gives you an idea of Marty-Rivera’s height. Still, he needed to stop as we shuffled backwards through the shore break.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I just need to take a breath.”

HOPE AND PERIL
Kelp is an ancient life form with futuristic potential. And, like so much of our biosphere, it’s in peril. Beginning in 2014, warming seas kicked off a chain of events that resulted in a 95% reduction of the kelp forests off the coast of Northern California. Bull kelp and giant kelp were particularly devastated, largely by the spread of munching sea urchins. In a 2021 report, the National Science Foundation called the destruction “an abrupt collapse of the kelp forest ecosystem.”

The die-off shows just how fragile Earth is becoming. Forests like those off of Point Fermin are survivors, having existed as much as 32 million years ago. They can harbor more life forms than any other single ocean community, including Marty-Rivera’s beloved coral reefs. I’ve seen creatures including whales, nudibranchs, garibaldi, lobsters, goliath groupers, sea lions and dolphins in the saltwater glades from here to Catalina.

Neither plant nor animal but a form of algae, kelp is a kind of sleeping beauty. It may seem like stinky slime when it washes up on the shore, but float back and forth amid the gelatinous fronds as they sway in the waves like a troupe of impossibly flexible ballerinas, with the sunlight bedazzling the leafy limbs, and you too will fall under kelp’s spell. (If you can’t get in the water to see this for yourself, check out the installation “The World According to Kelp Scientist: Sergey Nuzhdin” by Taiji Terasaki at AltaSea’s Berth 60.)
Kelp is also one of the great green hopes of the new blue economy. It soaks up and stores carbon dioxide at an impressive rate and volume, meaning it could help save us from climate change. It can be eaten (I have seen a chef in his apron collecting seaweed on the beach) and is often used in ice cream and jelly. Fuel, toothpaste, medicine, soap, glass, fertilizer: all can be made from kelp.

But before kelp can save us, we have to save it. While there are many seedbanks for land-based vegetation, Kelp Ark (formerly known as AltaSeads) is one of just a few organizations working to preserve all varieties of those in the ocean. “We want to be a depository of genetic creation in the ocean,” said Sergey Nuzhdin, the University of Southern California professor who founded Kelp Ark.

“Our mission is to conserve biodiversity from as many populations as we can,” Marty-Rivera said to me on the day he walked me through the container-housed labs and saltwater tanks in an old shipping berth. “The main thing for us is conserving things before the wild populations go through another event like what happened to the bull kelp populations in 2014. … We’re really trying to get material before such events keep happening.”

TAKING THE PLUNGE
Marty-Rivera’s first dive into the Cabrillo kelp was tough. It didn’t help that the water was so murky we could barely make out the forest in front of our faces. As we got farther from the sandy backwash of the shore, the view cleared, and soon we could make out where the kelp’s hold-fasts grasp the rocks. I love this feeling of floating on the top of a canopy, looking down the trunks of the plants to the ground below — it’s the inverse of experiencing a forest on dry land. Michael got it too.

“It’s so much clearer here, I can see the bottom,” he said excitedly. “And I’m not cold anymore!”

As we swam past the orange buoy anchored by the Cabrillo Beach Polar Bears, fish darted below — probably kelp bass, maybe perch. The seaweed here — feather boa, giant kelp, and oarweed — takes a beating from the rocks, surf, swimmers, kayaks, etc., leaving many of its leaves tattered and brown. The young harbor seal that has been hanging out here didn’t make an appearance. But Marty-Rivera was still impressed, giving me a beaming thumbs up as I periodically turned to check on him. We took turns diving down to the bottom, where the temperature is even lower. Eventually, the cold got to both of us.
“It’s beautiful!” he said as we stood on the shore toweling off, our faces white with chill. “I’m freezing, but it was worth it. Thank you so much! Now I’m going to learn how to dive.”

FROM CORAL TO KELP
One might think that having spent his first decades on a Caribbean island, Marty-Rivera was born with a snorkel in his mouth, but that’s a mainlander stereotype. He grew up in Caguas, a city south of San Juan, where his mom sewed at a clothing factory and his dad worked at a gas company. They were about an hour from the coast in three directions, but his family did not spend much time at the beach. Instead, like many of his peers, he and his brothers “were raised more in a digital world.” He became interested in environmental science in high school and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in it at the University of Puerto Rico. For his graduate degree, he studied the effects of chemicals found in wine and green tea on coral bleaching. It was his studies that led him into the seas. “I could just walk out and snorkel around and grab my specimens,” he said. “It was very, very nice field work.”

In 2017 Michael finished his master’s. A couple months later, hurricanes Irma and Maria pummeled Puerto Rico. More than 3,000 people were killed. The entire island was left without electricity. He experienced first hand the cataclysmic kind of events that are becoming more and more frequent as humans change the climate of our planet. “At that point, I was like, well, I’m just going to stay home with my family to be supportive and just be here, but also it was difficult. We were without power for seven months. It was a rough time.”

A thesis advisor told Michael about an opening at the University of Connecticut, helping to breed sugar kelp. Marty-Rivera was interested in coastal environments but he didn’t know sargasso from oarweed, because they primarily exist only in colder waters. “We didn’t have kelps in Puerto Rico. But I started looking into it and I just figured, this is a really cool ecosystem. It’s kind of like the corals of the temperate zones; it’s such a biodiverse area.
“I was thinking they are similar in the sense that they’re photosynthetic organisms,” Marty-Rivera said. “But they’re very different. The coral is an animal and it has its own mood. While the kelps are more relaxed.”

TENDING THE NURSERY
Kelp Ark is basically a seaweed nursery. Marty-Rivera acts as nanny to about 2,600 specimens of 13 different species and genera, including those held with their partners at USC and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “Most of the collection is from California, but we also have a legacy collection from the ’80s that has seeds from Tasmania and China,” Marty-Rivera said.

“We are trying to become the seed bank for enabling future restorations,” said Nuzhdin. “The ocean is warming and the ranges of different kelps are shifting, and some portion of biodiversity which is present in nature will probably be gone relatively fast. And we feel that it is important to capture it before it is gone.”

Marty-Rivera spends much of his time checking on the collection, making sure they’re sleeping comfortably in their vials in the incubators. “He’s establishing procedures for how to properly keep them, because the problem is that they’re a little bit unique,” said Nuzhdin. “For example, some of those stocks were established in the ’80s … If those stocks are lost, there is no replacement for them.”

Those procedures have to be delicate, precise and performed under controlled conditions. For example, when a new specimen comes in, “I clean it off, I desiccate it essentially for a day. And then the next day I can come in and rehydrate it in seawater in a beaker that will stimulate the release of the spores,” Marty-Rivera said. He takes a low-density aliquot, or sample, “because you want to get individuals, right? And then I let them grow for maybe two months under rising lights. So it starts fully dark, because they did just release, they’re new to the world. Then slowly I ramp up the light on them to let them vegetatively grow, and then I can pick them up.”

Twice a year they change the vials, a delicate, time-consuming, repetitive process that can take weeks. “You have to be really precise because you don’t want to contaminate the things. Otherwise your strains are ruined,” Michael said.

Marty-Rivera also does education and outreach. You can frequently see him at AltaSea events, showing off his tiny wards to schoolchildren, journalists, business people and community members. With his curly hair, quick smile and gentle demeanor, he’s a well-cast ambassador for these potential green superheros.

“Michael is great, he’s so passionate, and his energy goes to his audience so well,” said Nuzhdin.

And with his Cabrillo Beach field work, he has experienced first hand the magnificent beings that they grow up to be in the wild. “Swimming at Cabrillo Beach gave me inspiration to get scuba certified,” he said later in an email. “I want to see more of what’s down there in person (just, when it’s a bit warmer though!)”

Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, an internationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She writes the series Bodies of Water – portraits of lives aquatic – forRandom Lengths.

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