31 articles
A coastal atlas guide to Browns Bank, the Scotian Shelf plateau where kelp grows far offshore, urchins regrew and crashed, and science has watched for fifty years.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Off the Sahara's shoulder, the Canary Islands grow seaweed forests in upwelled water — until heatwaves and sea urchins turn them. An atlas of kelp's southern edge.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Lessonia trabeculata, the huiro, builds Chile's great subtidal kelp forests and feeds a global alginate industry. Biology, fishery, ecology and El Niño risk.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
Six days on Tasmania's kelp front line: a day-by-day diary of the baseline survey that will decide where Tidewright's next restoration lines go.
Jack Callum ·
The green sea urchin grazes kelp from Norway to Nova Scotia to Alaska. Its biology, the barrens it builds, the roe fishery it feeds, and how reefs recover.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Recruitment, grazer pressure, genetic diversity, canopy continuity: the measurable indicators ecologists use to predict whether a kelp forest will recover.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Oregon's bull kelp rides one of the wildest upwelling coasts on Earth — and its southern forests are on the edge. A guide to the reefs and the fight back.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
The long-spined sea urchin is reshaping Australia's temperate reefs as warming currents carry it south — a species profile of the barren-builder of Tasmania.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Where Highway 1 quits and the King Range rises from the surf, California's Lost Coast keeps its secrets — black sand, bull kelp and a hard-won wilderness.
Tom Okafor ·
A guide to Nova Scotia's kelp beds of the North Atlantic — the species, the urchin wars, the invaders, the warming, and where to see kelp today.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Why rocky reefs flip from kelp forest to urchin barren — and why flipping them back is so much harder. Alternate stable states and hysteresis, explained.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
From 2013, sea star wasting liquefied stars from Alaska to Mexico and erased the sunflower star, a keystone urchin predator. The science, and the kelp fallout.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Sonoma's coast lost most of its bull kelp a decade ago. A guide to the collapse, the abalone closure, and where the forest is quietly returning.
Jack Callum ·
A 1,900-kilometre arc of volcano, fog and kelp strung between Alaska and Siberia — the coastline that taught ecologists how sea otters hold kelp forests together.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Join Tidewright's dive survey team as they count an advancing urchin front on Tasmania's coast — the methodical, cold, essential math of kelp restoration.
Jack Callum ·
What settles on an urchin barren, and what survives? We bolted ceramic settlement plates to Mendocino reef to find out — before and after seeding.
Jack Callum ·
The sunflower sea star was the kelp forest's great urchin hunter. Wasting disease erased billions of them — and the consequences reshaped coastlines.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Tasmania's east coast has lost the vast majority of its giant kelp forests to warming seas and urchins. Explore what happened here, and what's coming back.
Dr. Lena Fischer ·
Tasmania lost around 95 percent of its giant kelp forests in decades. Here's the science of the collapse, the urchin invasion — and the restoration race to bring it back.
Dr. Theo Nakamura ·
A trophic cascade happens when a predator's removal rewrites an entire ecosystem. The sea otter–urchin–kelp story is ecology's classic case — here's how it works.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
A Tidewright field dispatch from Mendocino's winter monitoring season: working the barren-edge transects in the windows between storms.
Jack Callum ·
Urchin ranching collects starving urchins from barrens and fattens their roe on kelp feed — a fishery, a farm and a restoration tool in one. Here's how it actually works.
Naomi Reyes ·
Kina is Aotearoa's endemic sea urchin — treasured kaimoana, a kelp grazer, and the engineer behind New Zealand's barren reefs. Here is its biology and its story.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
The purple sea urchin turned patches of California kelp forest into barrens. Learn its biology, its hidden hunger, and why it is both villain and victim.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
A Tidewright field dispatch: transecting the moving edge of an urchin barren by Drifter sonar and drop camera, and deciding where next season's Holdfast lines go.
Jack Callum ·
Every autumn we weigh the urchins culled from the barren edge at Boomer Bay. This year the scales told a different story — and changed next year's plan.
Jack Callum ·
Urchin barrens can persist for decades even when kelp conditions return. Why barrens behave as an alternative stable state — and how reefs flip back.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
Two years after Tidewright reseeded an urchin barren off the Monterey Peninsula, a raft of sea otters moved in. Field notes on what that return really signals.
Jack Callum ·
A field guide to Northern California's bull kelp collapse — the heatwave, the urchin explosion, the closed fisheries, and the difficult road back.
Dr. Mara Ellison ·
The science of alternate stable states on rocky reefs: how kelp forests collapse into urchin barrens, why barrens resist recovery, and how reefs flip back.
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 ·