A Current Event : The warm waters of El Nino have had good effects and bad. While fishermen have a field day, biologists worry about the future.

Traveling up and down the Southern California coast, marine biologist Ron McPeak has seen more than his fair share of sea creatures: the long-tentacled varieties that hover below the water’s surface, the brightly colored types that dart in and out of kelp beds, the shelled denizens of the deep that crawl along the rocky bottom.

But none has evoked quite the response in McPeak as the sea-loving species he came across not long ago: the T-shirted people clustered on the shore.

“They walk around with T-shirts that say, ‘Hooray! The 1992 El Nino is here!”’ he said. “They gather with their poles on the piers.”

McPeak, who works at Kelco, a kelp harvesting company based in San Diego, has an altogether more sedate opinion of El Nino, the warm ocean current from the Equator that pushes up the California coast about once a decade.

But what struck him most about the T-shirt message was its unabashed enthusiasm.

“Obviously,” he said, “how people feel about El Nino depends on their point of view.”

For sportsmen, this year’s El Nino has been a blessing, bringing with it schools of fish that probably don’t know this is Ventura County and not Mexico. Ocean swimmers and surfers have been treated to water that in some places has reached 72 degrees. Whale watchers have been treated to rare glimpses of marine mammoths off the Channel Islands.

But for businesses such as Kelco, which rely on temperate waters to stay financially afloat, the rising marine thermometers are being watched with the wariness of a homeowner who sees a wildfire making its way over the next ridge.

For those firms--as well as marine researchers who worry about the warmer water’s negative effect on several species of marine life--El Nino holds the potential for disaster.

“We already know from experience that an El Nino can be devastating,” said McPeak, who makes regular aerial inspections of kelp beds from San Diego to Monterey. “This year we’ve been lucky.”

Gary Davis, a marine biologist with the Channel Islands National Park, hopes the luck will continue. But leaving the ocean’s fate up to Providence, he says, isn’t enough.

“El Ninos . . . have been around for millenia, and the ocean has apparently always recovered quite nicely from them. But what we’re doing now is trying to look at the bigger picture,” said Davis, glancing out his office window to the sand-bordered, gray-blue panorama.

“Human activities are reducing the resiliency and stability of ecosystems. . . . Things like pollution and over-harvesting (of the ocean) weaken the system’s ability to respond to an event like El Nino.

“And if we’re not careful, if we keep on doing what we’ve been doing,” he said, “the next El Nino could push a lot of species over the edge.”

Down the coast just a ways, at the Channel Island Sportfishing Center in Oxnard, gulls screech as they swoop down, their feet extended, and land beside passenger-laden charter boats preparing to head out for the day.

Here, news of El Nino--and the gifts it has brought--has been greeted with open arms and baited hooks. Sportfishermen like Pat Gray, who works in the tackle shop, use a tone generally reserved for religious experiences to describe the influx of fish that normally make their home in the tropical waters to the south.

Even temporarily losing some species like salmon, which have headed north in search of cooler waters, doesn’t bother enthusiasts like Gray; it is a small price, he says, to pay for what’s out there now.

“We’ve had some yellowtail, some bonito and some giant sea bass that were really big,” Gray said. “I don’t know exactly how big, but we’re talking huge. They’re all pretty rare around here.”

Skippers on board the charter boats of Island Packers in Ventura also have reported unusual sightings. “Barracuda has been good since April because the water warmed rapidly to about 68 degrees,” said Island Packers’ co-owner Mark Connally.

“The warmer water also brings a lot more flying fish into the area. We’ve gone for years without seeing them.” Some marine biologists have speculated that the warmest period of this year’s El Nino may now be coming to an end, and that the waters off the coast once again are cooling to normal by the upwelling of colder water from the ocean floor. Connally isn’t so sure.

“Researchers have different statements about when it (El Nino) started, when it will end or if we’re still having an El Nino now,” he said. “But we just go by the different things that we don’t normally see.

“If it’s weird, we say it’s because of El Nino.”

Gray, on the other hand, has his own sources of information.

“From what I’ve heard, the El Nino hasn’t kicked in full yet,” he said. “We’re expecting a bunch of blue fin and dorado and a lot of tuna. Tuna would be so great. El Nino just makes everything that much better. I can’t wait.”

But Gray’s vision of fish, no matter how huge, probably pales in comparison to what some other charter boat passengers--their fishing poles left wisely at home--already have spotted around the Channel Islands.

It is a different kind of gift from El Nino.

On board the 65-foot Jeffrey Arvid, which makes its home in Ventura Harbor and regularly takes sightseers and campers as far north as San Miguel Island about 50 miles away, binoculars are trained on the choppy, cobalt-blue sea.

Many of the passengers on this weekend day are children, part of a camp-organized overnight trip out to Santa Rosa Island. As the boat pushes past Santa Cruz Island, rising and thudding with each swell, many in the boat take on the facial color of sea turtles.

Hanging onto the rails or sitting silently with their eyes closed, they seem to care about nothing but making it back to terra firma.

But then, from the starboard bow of the boat, comes a yell that jolts even the most emerald-hued passengers into looking up: “There!”

At first, it is difficult to see anything except the white tips of the waves. As eyes follow an outstretched finger that points to a spot a few hundred feet away, the entire group seems to gasp simultaneously. A whoosh of spray shoots into the air, followed by what appears to be a light-gray submarine coming to the surface.

Except it’s no submarine.

“We’ve been seeing groups of blue whales close to the mainland since mid-June,” says Island Packer’s Connally. “They’re extremely unusual here. Our observations have been that they seem to be feeding on red crab, which show up in this area in El Nino conditions.”

Whale-watching boats out of Santa Barbara also have caught sight of the blues, in addition to humpbacks and several unusual species of dolphins and porpoises. For many people--including research biologists who have been monitoring the marine mammals around the Channel Islands--the whales’ presence is a good sign: Not so many years ago, blue whales and humpbacks were hunted almost to extinction.

As passengers train their eyes on the sea for another glimpse of the visitors, Peter Davis, the Jeffrey Arvid’s Australian-born co- captain, tells the group what he knows about the blue whales.

“These aren’t just as big as dinosaurs. They’re the biggest things that have ever lived,” he says. “This boat is 65 feet long, but a blue whale can get to be 120 feet long and weigh 120 tons. Its heart is as big as a Volkswagen!”

Davis pauses for a minute, focusing his gaze on a child who, until the whale sighting, had been moaning that he wished he’d never come on board.

“Last Sunday, one of the blue whales actually went right underneath this boat,” Davis says.

For a moment, the boy appears to forget all about his queasiness. He turns his head and looks out to sea.

“ Cooool ,” the boy says.

McPeak, of the Kelco company, has nothing against sportfishing. And he certainly can appreciate the splendor of a blue whale rising out of the ocean as the sun glistens off its back.

But when it comes to El Nino, McPeak would probably turn off the warm water tap if he could. After what happened 10 years ago, one can hardly blame him.

During 1982 and 1983, California coastal waters were hit by what has been called one of the worst El Ninos in 100 years. The warm water, which carries virtually no nutrients needed for fish and marine plants, wiped out an estimated 50 square miles of giant kelp beds from San Diego to Santa Barbara.

Each square mile of the kelp, which contains a substance called algin used in products ranging from ice cream and beer to automobile tires, was valued at more than $1 million. Kelco, whose 180-foot ships resemble floating wheat harvesters, was forced to import dried plants from other countries.

Kelp wasn’t the only industry hit hard that year. “The El Nino virtually killed the salmon fishery along the coast,” McPeak said.

But the salmon eventually returned, and the kelp beds, which grow up to 2 feet per day, soon began to recover.

The exception was kelp beds along the Santa Barbara coastline, which in some years provided Kelco with up to 60% of its total harvest in California.

“We were thinking the plants would naturally recruit back, but that area was completely destroyed,” said Mark Otjens, who manages what now is the company’s kelp restoration project off the Santa Barbara coast. “Ten years later, though, there still isn’t much change there.”

Fortunately for kelp harvesting firms such as Kelco, this year’s El Nino hasn’t come close to causing the kind of damage that occurred a decade ago. Harvesting boats recently were sent out around the Channel Islands, where on average they collect about 600 tons of wet seaweed each day.

And, with signs that the water is cooling down again, McPeak and Otjens both said they have experienced a sense of relief.

It is an emotion that neither Gary Davis nor Trudy Ingram at Channel Islands National Park say they can share just yet.

Gary Davis may be a marine scientist, but when it comes to monitoring the ecological health of Ventura County coastal waters, he thinks of himself more as a physician.

“In the same way that a doctor measures vital signs, respiratory and heart rate,” he says, “we do the same by looking at the populations of plants and animals, at the populations in tide pools, at the kelp forests, at the sea bird population and sea lions, and at vegetation and the availability of food.”

Unlike some medical specialists, Davis, who is in charge of the long-term management of ecosystems with Channel Islands National Park, says he cannot look at one symptom; he must consider the patient as a whole. When one element is thrown out of balance in the ocean, he says, you can be sure it will affect something else.

El Nino has been no exception.

“The warm water has few nutrients in it . . . which promote the growth of plants in the ocean. So kelp doesn’t do well in it,” he says. “But a lot of fish--snails, urchins and abalone--also use the kelp as a shelter.”

The lack of nutrients in the water also affects the food supply for marine mammals, including sea lions, which began washing up on Ventura County beaches in May. Animal control officers said El Nino conditions came during the sea lions’ annual pupping season, leaving numerous animals stranded, exhausted or sick. Many more died.

Davis has seen even more long-term effects. A few years ago, while making a routine check of Anacapa’s black abalone population, he found something alarming: large, skeleton-like pieces of abalone shells, some of them with rotting meat, inside the tide pools. The remaining abalone were so weak they could be pulled by hand off the rocks.

Already, the once-plentiful abalone had become scarce because of man-made pollution and a massive harvesting by commercial and sport divers.

Quickly, a task force was formed to identify the cause of the malady. Still, it progressed: Of the original cluster of 550 abalone counted at Anacapa in 1986, as of January only one remained. At Santa Rosa, 419 abalone had been reduced to three; and at San Miguel, 544 had dwindled to about 50.

Theories about their plight have been numerous. Davis, however, believes it is connected to the El Nino in the early 1980s, which destroyed the kelp beds upon which the mollusks graze. Increased competition for a decreased amount of food may then have weakened the abalone to the point of death.

In many ways, Davis says, the plight of the abalone is a symbol for numerous other species in danger of being weakened by pollution or over-fishing. Then, when combined with a natural condition like El Nino, the effects can push them over the edge into extinction.

“The ability of those species to rebound (after an El Nino) is what disturbs me,” he says.

John Engle, associate research biologist at UC Santa Barbara, echoes that sentiment: “It takes a long time for marine mammals to build up their populations again after they have been greatly reduced.

“We used to have sea otters here in the 1800s, for instance, but the otters were harvested almost to the brink of extinction. The otters used to keep the sea urchins in check, which feed on the kelp. Now, man is the urchin’s only predator. And in California, he (eco) system still doesn’t have sea otters for the most part.”

All of which serves to intensify the efforts of Trudy Ingram, a wildlife biologist in charge of the sea bird monitoring program for Channel Islands National Park.

Although Ingram says all of the sea birds this year have had a difficult time because of El Nino, of particular concern are the California brown pelicans, which were placed on the endangered species list in 1979. The dumping of the pesticide DDT had nearly wiped them out.

“The only place the California brown pelican nests in the United States is on Anacapa and Santa Barbara islands,” Ingram says. “And this year, only about 1,500 pair attempted to nest on Anacapa. Normally it can be up to 6,000 pair. Making it worse, though, only 500 nests remain. When food sources go away in conditions like El Nino, the birds abandon the nests.”

Right now, Ingram says the pelicans are not in immediate danger. But over-fishing and pollution--coupled with another El Nino year--could change that.

It is a message both she and Davis hope more people will understand.

“Everything is related,” Davis says. “Everything is affected by everything else.”