A specimen of giant kelp collected by Jennifer E. Smith off the La Jolla coast on Jan. 25, 2021. It's featured in "Ebb and Flow" at UCSD Geisel Library. Show Caption ...

A few days ago, I had an interesting encounter with a sevengill shark in our La Jolla waters.My girlfriend, Jackie, and I were excited to dive a new kelp forest that we had our eyes on for a while.

San Diego spear fishermen of today come from a lineage that began in the ’30s, with the Bottom Scratchers of La Jolla. Today there are less fish but the equipment is superior.

Before World War II there were San Diegans who would feed their families with what they could scratch up from the ocean bottom. This was when few went more than waist deep. The first “goggle ...

With a growth rate equal to bamboo at up to two feet per day, kelp forests along California’s coast have been harvested since World War I. The first large industrial uses of kelp were for potash ...

The giant kelp forests off the coast of La Jolla, Del Mar, Cardiff and Encinitas declined in size by nearly 90 percent due to a spike in coastal ocean water temperatures in 2014 and 2015.

Over the past 134 years, the giant kelp forests off the coast of Southern California have been studied by marine scientists at labs like the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego in L… ...