Scientists Say Kelp Should Be Off Limits : Channel Islands: They want two beds to be exempt from harvest of seaweed and fish to preserve a natural balance. The fishing industry says it would be devastating.

Two giant kelp forests off San Miguel Island in Channel Islands National Park--among the last that are relatively unaffected by humans--should be preserved as a marine study area, park scientists say.

Moreover, the way the California Department of Fish and Game regulates the harvest of kelp beds and fishes there and throughout the state should be restructured so that state waters are managed by zones, rather than on a species-by-species basis, the scientists believe.

They argue that the zone system would allow inhabitants of the kelp forests to interact in a natural ecosystem, heading off problems of overabundance of some species and overharvesting of others that occur throughout the state’s offshore waters.

A 95% reduction in black abalone at the Channel Islands in recent years is a strong argument for more study of the kelp forest environment and reduced harvests, scientists say.

Some zones would be taken out of production and would provide information for scientists in addition to restoring a balance in the area, uninterrupted by harvests.

Department of Fish and Game officials acknowledge that setting harvest limits for each species is a troublesome business, but they defend the practice as effective. “We try to figure out how many are out there and how often they replace themselves,” said Robson Collins, a marine biologist who supervises Fish and Game’s marine resources division. “But to try to figure out how many fish there are in the ocean is a very large task.”

The first hint of a proposal to take some of the state’s most fertile waters out of commercial production spurs fishermen and kelp harvesters to protest.

“Closing San Miguel would be devastating to the commercial industry,” said Steven Rebuck, a member of the California Abalone Assn. “Most everything we fish for is associated with kelp beds, because that’s where the animals feed.” Rebuck also serves as executive director of the Ocean Sanctuary Coalition in San Luis Obispo, a group working to retain commercial fishing rights in the event a national sanctuary is established in that county.

Rebuck and other fishermen claim that the National Park Service wants to put all Channel Islands National Park waters off limits to commercial harvest. Kelp forest preservation, they say, is simply the latest excuse.

The seaweed forests are home or playground to about 800 species of animals, including the gray whale that likes to loll among the fronds in the kelp’s surface canopy. Kelp forests provide food for sea urchins, abalone and crab, a home for fishes like the white sea bass to hide and feed, a playground for elephant seals and sea lions, and an anchor for sea otters to wrap themselves in while they sun or sleep.

About 15 million pounds, or 15%, of the state’s harvest of kelp, shellfish and fish, come from Channel Islands waters, National Park Service officials say.

Like the other 75 kelp beds in California waters--the California Department of Fish and Game has numbered all 76 beds--the forests off San Miguel offer a cheap and renewable source of raw material for a $35-million-a-year kelp industry. The industry derives a material called algin from kelp cell walls that is used to thicken or stabilize a myriad of products ranging from ice cream to beer to lipstick.

But a growing body of data gathered since 1981 by a group of scientists assigned to Channel Islands National Park indicates that the state’s marine resources are being mismanaged, said Gary Davis, a marine biologist from UC Davis, who is assigned to the park.

The state Department of Fish and Game sets harvest limits on kelp and fish species without the information it needs to know how the complex kelp ecosystem is affected, Davis said.

“We do not know enough about what drives the dynamics of the system to predict what should be harvested,” he said. And until studies under way at Channel Islands National Park yield those facts, at least one system of kelp beds, preferably that around San Miguel Island, should be preserved as a kind of natural museum and removed from Fish and Game’s kelp bed leasing program, Davis said.

“San Miguel Island is the last remaining bastion of naturally functioning kelp forests,” he said.

Stephen Jameson, who heads the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, said that more should be learned about the ocean’s ecosystem before harvests continue at present levels.

Harvesting puts too much stress on a system already weakened by the storms spawned by the warm El Nino current of 1983, he said. Those violent storms tore open kelp surface canopies and ripped plants from their holdfasts, the name for their anchors to the rocky ocean floor.

In their ongoing research on the kelp forests, Channel Islands National Park scientists are studying the condition of 60 species of fish and plant life that depend on kelp for survival.

“As go these populations, so go the kelp forest,” Davis said.

Davis said the decline in the black abalone population may be linked to an increase in the population of sea urchins, which also feed on kelp.

Heavy harvests of spiny lobster and other sea urchin predators has allowed the small and commercially undesirable purple urchin to thrive and overproduce in some areas, scientists say.

As the forests sought to re-establish themselves after El Nino, the plants fell prey to grazing urchins. Scientists say armies of purple urchins marched through weakened forests in so-called feeding fronts, devouring the holdfasts and wiping out forests at the rate of a foot a day.

Some kelp forests, like those around San Miguel, have returned to the lush fields they were before El Nino hit. In Northern California, stricter limits set on abalone harvests and an increase in the population of urchin-eating sea otters have helped kelp forests return there as well.

But more kelp forests, including some along the Ventura and Santa Barbara coastline, are still struggling to recover. And scientists say other forests may never come back.

The Department of Fish and Game acknowledges problems with kelp, abalone and other species and is trying to help them recover, the department’s Collins said.

“Abalone has been overfished for a number of years,” he said. “We are now trying to reduce the number of abalone fishermen,” a process that will take another six or eight years to reach the desired level.

Other populations that have been overfished include sardines, white sea bass and the bonito, a relative of the tuna, to the point where adult fish could not reproduce fast enough to sustain their populations, Collins said. All three are now recovering as Fish and Game sets new, stricter quotas on their harvests, Collins said.

Fish and Game also plans to increase restrictions on kelp harvesting, Collins said. It now leases all but about 20 of the beds to the highest bidder, but plans to take another seven or eight kelp beds out of the leasing program, he said. Kelco, a San Diego-based company that dominates the kelp-derivative industry, is the highest bidder for almost half the beds, and is responsible for about 95% of the total kelp harvest.

Fish and Game, which charges $1.51 per wet ton of kelp harvested, earned $231,000 in 1989 for nearly 153,000 tons harvested off the coast last year, Collins said.

Fish and Game reserves the remaining beds for sport diving and smaller harvesting companies.

Collins said Fish and Game regulations that allow harvesters to cut only the top four feet of the forest ensure the forest’s ability to reproduce and sustain itself.

Dale Glantz, a senior marine biologist at Kelco, said his company is careful to harvest only mature kelp forests to ensure that young forests can take root before they are cut. He surveys the coast monthly by air to determine which forests are right for harvest.

Far greater dangers to the health of kelp beds lie in discharge from sewage treatment plants, he said. The treated sewage adds nutrients and turbulence to the water and warms its temperature, making it inhospitable to kelp that thrives in cold, clear water. Other perils are posed by the offshore oil industry, he said.

But the state’s fishing industry, which takes an estimated $40 million a year in catches from the waters off Ventura, the Channel Islands and Santa Barbara, cannot be blamed for the health of the kelp forests, industry supporters say.

Rebuck and Diane Pleschner, a contributing editor of the trade publication Pacific Fishing magazine, said the National Park Service has wanted to close the islands to commercial fishing since the park was formed 10 years ago.

“It’s part of their hidden agenda,” Pleschner said. “They use the arguments that they are trying to protect something to eliminate commercial fishing.”

Pleschner believes that park service personnel seek to drive out commercial fishing in an attempt to preserve their own job security.

But Davis, the UC Davis marine biologist, and Jameson, the top marine sanctuary official, say the threat to the marine environment is real.

“In the last 20 years, we have lost all refuges from harvest,” Davis said. “If we’re going to continue to have food from the ocean, we need to manage our resources in a different manner. There is a lot at stake here.”