From Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX News for Tuesday, Aug. 24. I’m Sonia Waraich.
Caspar Cove is a beach just south of Fort Bragg. Early Sunday morning, about a dozen people were kayaking, hanging out with their families, playing fetch with their dogs and doing everything else you can imagine people doing at the beach on a weekend.
Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to the new fixtures at the center of the cove. A couple hundred yards off shore, you can spot what looks like an orange balloon and a yellow-and-black object, about the size of a basketball, floating in the middle of the cove.
That object is a solar-powered buoy known as the Spotter and it’s connected to a floating balloon and smart mooring system that can collect data on ocean temperature, wind speeds and more. There are about 50 other buoys just like it floating off the coast of places as close as Washington and as far as Fiji.
This nonprofit called Aqualink has been donating the buoys to conservation groups around the world. The nonprofit is building a network of buoys that are monitoring and collecting data in sensitive environments like coral reefs, kelp forests, eel grass beds and local estuaries.
That has implications that are both large and small. Researchers can use the data for studies on, for example, sensitive species. Beachgoers can also use the data to get a better idea of what local ocean conditions will be like. Data that relies on regional monitors is often unreliable.
Aqualink still has about a hundred more buoys that are supposed to go out. It bought the buoys from a company called Sofar Ocean Technology.
Zack Johnson works there.
Johnson says it’s not clear yet what kind of research the buoys can help support, but the data can come in handy for a wide variety of uses.
Caspar Cove is an important part of the network Aqualink is building because it’s an important site for kelp. Kelp do a lot. They’re powerhouses for storing carbon, they provide habitat for other species and they serve a lot of economic functions, too.
But a few years ago, kelp forests like the ones on the North Coast were decimated. So was a lot of other marine life.
For kelp, the trouble started in 2013. First, a virus wiped out the sunflower star, a sea star that preys on purple sea urchin. Purple sea urchin eat kelp.
Then a marine heatwave that started in 2014 made the ocean so hot and inhospitable that kelp weren’t able to survive. That heatwave ended in 2019.
With no kelp in sight, the purple sea urchin transformed into grazers and moved into shallower waters, grazing on all the kelp they found there.
Tristin McHugh has been working on kelp restoration since moving to the area in 2018. In January McHugh started working on kelp restoration with The Nature Conservancy, which received the donated buoy and put it out in Caspar Cove last month.
Beyond research and conservation, McHugh says the buoy has other benefits.
Johnson, the engineer at Sofar Ocean, encourages people to check out that data and put it to good use by going to aqualink.org.
The data’s also on display in the Noyo Center for Marine Science at 338 N Main St. in Fort Bragg.
For the KZYX News. I’m Sonia Waraich, a Report for America corps member. For all our local stories, with photos and more, visit KZYX.org. You can also subscribe to the KZYX News podcast where you get your podcasts.
