Joshua Smith has been diving in kelp forests in Monterey Bay along the central coast of California since 2012. Back then, he says, things looked very different. Being underwater was like being in a redwood forest, where the kelp was like “towering tall cathedrals,” says Smith, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their tops were so lush that it was hard to maneuver a boat across them.
No longer. The once expansive kelp forests are now a mosaic of thinner thickets interspersed with barrens colonized by sea urchins. And those sea urchins have so little to eat, they aren’t even worth the effort of hungry sea
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