Short Wave - An unexpected forest in the ocean

Episode Date: June 28, 2023

Salomé Buglass discovered an unexpected kelp forest while studying underwater mountains in the Galapagos. Kelp—a type of seaweed—usually grows in shallower, cooler areas. So why was an entire kelp forest growing in these deeper, tropical waters? Today on the show, Salomé talks to host Regina G. Barber about what it means, and how it could help in the fight against climate change.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Salome Buglis has an office that looks a little different than most. My work is in the islands of the Galapagos, which is a volcanic archipelago, about a thousand kilometers west from Ecuador, and it's slapbang on the equator. Salome is a marine ecologist, and she spends part of her year in the Galapagos exploring. On land, she says the... The islands have a bare, harsh-looking, rocky landscape. But when you go into the water, it's just a paradise.

There's just so much life. But most of the time, for Salome's research, she's in a boat. And something else does the underwater exploring. An ROV is a remotely operated vehicle. So it's essentially like a drone, but that looks like a microwave on a long tether. And that's because underwater GPS doesn't work. At the end of 2018, Salome and her team were searching in the Galapar Marine Reserve for underwater mountains, called sea mounts.

They can rise hundreds to thousands of meters from the seabed and are often hotspots for biodiversity. She had a $10,000 National Geographic Grant to do this work. But toward the end of the expedition, she still didn't have all the data she wanted. My heart was slightly sinking because I felt like, oh my God, we spent so much money. I've made these like ROV pilots and ROV team come all the way to the Galapagos to help me. And on the last day, we lowered the ROV and we're lucky we hit the summit of the seaman. And as I look at the screens, I see these tall, green things just like swaying from one side to the other.

And I was just like, what am I looking at? Was it a community of coral or sea sponges? So I thought, is this like some weird black coral that is really like flappy? But then it hit her. Salome was looking at kelp. kelp is a type of seaweed. And finding kelp in the Galapagos is like finding a polar bear in the Bahamas. Today on the show, why finding a kelp forest the size of several football fields in the Galapagos is such a big deal.

And how this kelp could help contribute to the fight against climate change. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Salome Buglas found an unexpected kelp forest. in the waters surrounding the Galapagos Islands. Quick biolessen, kelp is a type of seaweed. There are dozens of species, but almost all are found in cool, shallow waters, like along the Pacific coast, except a few.

And they're probably what we think, remnants from a colder past that have died out as the tropics became warmer and warmer. Can you actually tell us a little bit more about the habitat, like what lives in these kelp forests? Yeah, so generally in a kelp forest, we tend to think of them as nursing sites. And then there's just hundreds or maybe thousands of different types of invertebrate species

from snails to crabs to all the different types of crustaceans. You have your echinoderm, so sea stars and sea cucumbers. It's like a tiny little apartment block with lots of tiny little holes. Like it's a high value real estate in the marine world for the creepy cruelly. Humans interested in it because of food as well? 100%. Humans have been eating kelps for centuries. In fact, there's a big theory of how the first people who colonized the Americas actually came through what we call it.

The kelp highway theory, which was following all the coastline along from Korea to Alaska down to the Pacific. And they were using it to like eat too. Yeah. Like they were using it to like guide where they're going because they were following the kelp forest. and they were using it to eat. Yeah, and it makes sense now that that evidence never appeared earlier because when sea level rose and all of the west coast of the Americas in America and South America, it's sinking.

So any kind of archaeological remains are underwater right now. So that's why archaeologists have been looking, which is why they first went with a theory that we were following big megafauna, like when Russia and Alaska were connected, and that's how people came. And they probably came there too. But it's way faster and way more efficient to come by boat. Right. And what better way than following food that doesn't run away from you or doesn't want to kill you,

which is kelp and all of its critics? That blows my mind. Wow. Okay. Can you tell us a little bit more about how kelp can help us humans, the environment, by storing carbon that may otherwise end up in our atmosphere? Yeah, yeah. So carbon sequestration is one of the many ecosystem services that has now also been attributed to kelp forest. And that's because kelp, as they grow, they take in carbon from the air or the water.

So to grow, all photosynthetic organisms, including kelp, use carbon to grow, and that's how they grow their body. And then when the kelp dies, if it becomes stored in the sediment, then it's trapped. and it stays there. And that's how it becomes sequestered. We don't know exactly how much. Those are numbers that are still being worked out. Like scientists are working on that hard right now, because there's a lot of interest in looking into farming kelps, huge kelp farms to do sequestration projects. So this kelp forest in the Galapagos, is it a whole new species? Maybe, yes. It definitely looks different to anything we've ever found in the Galapagos.

However, before I went on on this research, I always knew that we had kelp in the Galapagos. And I remember learning like it's one of the only tropical kelp species in the world. And I asked, oh, my senior marine biologist, like, where is it? I want to go see it. And they're like, we haven't seen it for about two decades. We think it might have gone extinct in the last El Nino. You're saying that people kind of knew that there was something there. Yeah, no, we knew that there was a species called Essena, Galapagantzi.

but the last records were really far off on the West Coast. And the last time it was seen was in 2007 by some researchers who made like an extraordinary effort to find it and they found a few patches. But no one had, like no one I had known had seen it. So when I find this kelp forest, I'm just like, holy moly, it's kelp. It's the lot kelp and we found it again and it's been hiding in the deep. And this is the other part that's really interesting. is that we found it between 50 and 70 meters depth.

And finding it down here deep also means there's a lot less light. What the hell is it doing so deep? And how is it photos synthesizing? So I had like a million questions like, is this the same kelp as the one that kind of disappeared? How is it so deep? What is it doing on top of a sea mount? Why haven't we seen it before?

And when I managed to get a sample, this kelp was almost two meters tall, so definitely the biggest seaweed ever recorded in Ecuador. And when I saw pictures of the original, what I call the OG kelp of the Galapagos, it's almost three times the size or mostly double the size. It could be different from the one you read about. Exactly. So if this is a new species, do you get to name it and do you have any good names? Yes. If it is a new species, myself and whoever, rather taxonomists I'm working with, we will come up with a name and we'll see.

Usually you either go with something that creature inspires you to see or something very visually obvious and you take the Latin word of that usually. Or you Latinize it. Right. I actually have no ideas just yet. Okay. No pressure. Yeah.

So we have gotten, we've done the genetics of the species and I thought that, oh, you send this to geneticists and then they put it in the, in the. and to the machine and they check all the things and then we'll find out of it's the new species. And what it really has told us is that we know what genus it is, but it's not similar to the other known species in that genus. However, there are other kel species from the same genus in Peru and Chile, but there's no genetic data for them. Oh, so you have to go on another expedition. Exactly. So you had mentioned before that, you know, this kelp is really far from the sun and it's growing and it's huge.

Does this mean that the ecosystem might work differently there than scientists thought before? Like, what does this discovery mean for the ecosystem of this kelp forest? So the zone that we're in in the ocean from 40 to 200 is what we call the mesopotic zone. That's where we have a little bit of light, but it's definitely darker. So if you're a diver and you go down there, you need torches for sure. I think before we thought that only a few of the kind of like photic zone species live down there, but now we realize if we have kelp forest, that means aphoric depth. It means that this place is way more productive and important in terms of the role it plays

in things that grow there, the habitat that forms, the amount of food is down there, and the sequestration of potential carbon that's happening at that depth. So we just talked about how kelp can be pretty significant in absorbing more carbon than it releases. So is this discovery a good thing for thinking about climate change or how to mitigate climate change? I think it tells us many things. First, it tells us how little we know about the ocean. Like the fact that I take the most affordable technology right now and go a little deeper than we usually go in and find a kelp forest ecosystem. I mean, globally, there's probably so much more we don't know about just hiding a little bit beneath the usual explored surface of our ocean.

For me, and one of my research questions for my PhD is finding out, are these shrinking relics from a colder past? So are these just like the last of their kind that I've found? And maybe this is really important to know where they are because we need to protect them and see how vulnerable or resilient they are. now that things are getting warmer, even faster, are they going to disappear in the next 10 years? They've been holding on to dear life at depth because it's colder maybe. However, my hypothesis is they're well-adapted, deep water, dwelling kelp forest, and they're way more abundant than we thought we just haven't looked.

Salome, thank you so much for talking to us today. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. Thanks for having me, and it's been fun talking to you, though. Salome Buglis is a research scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation and a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy, edited by Sadie Babbitts and our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Susie Cummings, and the audio engineer was Maggie Luthar. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming, and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.

I will always remember this day because I said to the team, I think we're looking at some kale here. And they're like, kale. And I'm like, yeah, kale. And they're like, do you mean kel? And I was like, oh, yeah. So you make this amazing discovery and you accidentally call it kale. Yes.