Herring Cale (Olisthops cyanomelas): Southern Australia's Kelp Mower
The herring cale is a cigar-shaped, beak-toothed herbivore that grazes kelp across the Great Southern Reef — and moves its energy up the food web.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Structured profiles of the species that build, inhabit and depend on kelp forests — from giant kelp to sea otters, urchins to weedy seadragons.
322 articles · Browse the structured Encyclopedia →
The herring cale is a cigar-shaped, beak-toothed herbivore that grazes kelp across the Great Southern Reef — and moves its energy up the food web.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Meet the tidepool sculpin, the Pacific's toughest little fish: how it survives heat, low oxygen and hours out of water — and finds its way home.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·

Meet the western blue groper — Western Australia's giant blue wrasse of the kelp reefs, an urchin-eating patriarch that can live more than half a century.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Meet the Pacific angelshark, the sand-buried ambusher of California's kelp edges: how it hunts, how it nearly vanished, and how it came back.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Meet the pigeon guillemot: the black-and-white auk with scarlet feet that nests in shoreline crevices and hunts sculpins through kelp beds.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Meet the tufted puffin: golden head-plumes, burrow colonies and deep kelp-coast dives. Where to see it, what it eats, and why its southern range is shrinking.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Oarweed is the digitate kelp marking the low-water line of North Atlantic shores. Learn its biology, industrial past, and the warm-water rival now replacing it.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Sugar kelp is the sweet-tasting cold-water kelp that farmers love. Explore its biology, range, life cycle and why it anchors a new wave of ocean farming.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Golden kelp forms the backbone of Australia's Great Southern Reef. Learn to identify Ecklonia radiata and why this habitat-maker is on the move as oceans warm.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·

Meet bull kelp, the fast-growing annual giant of North America's Pacific coast — its biology, Indigenous heritage, dramatic decline and the race to restore it.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·