Last week, Nancy Caruso from Get Inspired Inc. ran out of money to fund her kelp restoration project that had been successfully reimplanting giant kelp beds off the coast of Laguna Beach over the last few years. With the new Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) that was enforced at the beginning of the year, collection of marine life, even for science, has become more expensive due to the huge amount of paperwork, studies and surveys that are now needed to do anything in a Marine Life Sanctuary like Laguna Beach.

Over the last few months, Nancy's team had been focussing on our favorite dive spot: Shaw's Cove. The Southern reef had been almost cleared of all urchins, deadly predators for giant kelp as they feed on the plant's steadfast, what anchors it to the reef. Removing urchins and keeping the population in check is one way to help kelp set foot and stay on our reefs. Another way would also be to re-introduce urchin predators such as sheepheads. That's also one of the goals of the MLPA: to help rebuild local fish stocks that have been decimated by local fishing (both commercial and anglers). In the meantime, removing urchins and restoring urchins barens to rock reef is the only way we have to help kelp regrow.

Since so much work had been done in Shaw's already, it was a shame to let the Northern part of the reef stay an urchin barren, so in a final spurt of effort, Nancy enrolled the local community to help her in her endeavor.

So for one morning last week, me and 25 other local divers became science divers and set forth on a journey to collect urchins off the reef of Shaw's Cove.

On the first dive, it seemed like an overwhelming task and I have to say, I thought I was wasting my time. The urchin population has been exploding and was totally out of control. All the reef was covered in purple. It is estimated that the urchin population figures in hundreds of thousand. But armed with my garden rake and my thick 7mm gloves, despite the surge (maybe we pissed off Poseidon who likes Uni for some reason or something) and despite the drag on my drysuit (yes, I know, it's not clever to dive dry and collect nasty pointy piercy thingies at the same time), I managed to fill one full lobster bag in less than 20 minutes... I was exhausted though. I was looking at other divers going one by one with a knife and I thought that my raking method was not that innefficient after all...

On the second dive, I managed to fill two big bags and I realized that the reef looked different... Amazingly enough, the combined force of a few motivated (now scientific) divers actually did make a difference. The urchin barren had disappeared and instead, vast regions of the reef where now cleared for kelp to grow...

Later on that day, the results came: we had collected a little shy of 15,000 urchins. In four hours. With 26 divers. It's only  1%-5% of what's still growing on the reef, but imagine what we could do if we did that every week end... So be aware, get inspired, talk to your congressman or something. Maybe you can make a difference too.