Monterey's marine gardens

Rocky intertidal at Pt Pinos, with pelicans cruising in
 from the east.

The Monterey Peninsula juts out into the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Monterey Bay along the central California coast. The area is well known for posh homes, golf courses, and tourism, but has an equally wealthy abundance of marine life and history of human connection to the sea. The peninsula is well populated and busy with visitors, hardly wilderness on the terrestrial side, but the rocky intertidal and near-shore subtidal very quickly attenuates human presence and is the realm of rich marine diversity.

Point Piños is situated on the northwest tip of the peninsula and has been a tidepooling destination of mine for years. The intertidal shoreline here consists of smooth bedrock and boulders with only relatively small beaches of coarse sand linking the rocks to the low-elevation upland. Most of the rest of the peninsula is in fact rocky as well, miles of coastline that would take many years of low tides to thoroughly explore.

Yesterday afternoon’s tide was not particularly low, but sufficiently amenable to exploration because the water was calmer than I had expected given the weekend rain that has moved though the northern half of California. There was a light to moderate breeze and partial cloud cover. As the tide dropped, mounds of bright green surf grass (Phyllospadix) that covered low intertidal rocks became exposed. At slightly higher elevations, red seaweeds (many appearing more black then red) dominated the intertidal space. A bit higher still there were carpets of the rockweed Silvetia compressa.

Selected seaweeds at Point Pinos. Upper left: Codium setchellii; upper right: Bryopsis sp.; lower left: Silvetia compressa; lower right: Sarcodiotheca gaudichaudii.

Kelps were not particularly abundant, but I noted three species in the section of coastline that I explored. The feather boa (Egregia menziesii), nearly ubiquitous at all rocky intertidal sites along the Pacific coast, was the most abundant species. A more interesting species to me, Dictyoneurum californicum, was present in a few patches very low in the intertidal. This species grows as a mass of skinny brown blades that sway in unison as the surge flushes in and out of the low intertidal. The other kelp species was the perennial Laminaria setchellii, also quite frequent along the west coast of the US, though this species was not particularly abundant at Pt. Piños and seemed a little tattered by this time of year. 

Brown pelican in flight.

As the sun drifted lower on the horizon, an abundance of bird life filled the skies. Flocks of birds, some in more organized patterns like the lines of brown pelicans, cruised from east to west. In fact, all of these marine birds may have been there all along, but I was more oblivious to their presence as I focused on taking notes of seaweeds at the site.

The peninsula is well protected legally from resource exploitation and is also a conservation-minded community. Much of the rocky coastline and near shore areas of the peninsula are protected in state marine reserves or state marine conservation areas that completely limit take of all species (marine reserves) or allow limited fishing (conservation areas). Pt Piños itself is in the Pacific Grove Marine Gardens State Marine Conservation Area. Monterey is also at the center of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, a large NOAA-administered marine protected area that extends along the outer coast from the Bay Area to Cambria south of Big Sur. Sanctuary status protects the nearshore region from oil drilling and mining.