Where is the largest kelp forest?
Where is the largest kelp forest?
The region with the greatest diversity of kelps (>20 species) is the northeastern Pacific, from north of San Francisco, California, to the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Although kelp forests are unknown in tropical surface waters, a few species of Laminaria have been known to occur exclusively in tropical deep waters.
What is a giant kelp forest?
Kelp forests provide food and shelter for thousands of species. In ideal conditions, kelp can grow up to 18 inches per day, and in stark contrast to the colorful and slow-growing corals, the giant kelp canopies tower above the ocean floor. They grow in dense groupings much like a forest on land.
How big is the California kelp forest?
A thick kelp forest once stretched 350 kilometers along the northern California coast. More than 95 percent of it has vanished since 2014, satellite imagery shows.
Where is the kelp forest?
Kelp forests grow predominantly on the Pacific Coast, from Alaska and Canada to the waters of Baja California.
Who eats kelp?
Jewelled top snails live on kelp blades and eat detritus and things that grow on the kelp. Purple sea urchins eat kelp at their holdfasts (the parts that attach kelp to the bottom). They can reproduce very quickly. In the north Pacific, the sea otter is the main and only predator of kelp.
Are kelp forest dying?
Northern California’s kelp forest ecosystem is gone, replaced by widespread “urchin barrens.” Satellite imagery shows that the area covered by kelp forests off the coast of Northern California has dropped by more than 95%, with just a few small, isolated patches of the bull kelp remaining.
Why is the kelp dying in California?
Northern California’s kelp forests are declining due to two stressors. First, there has been unusual and drastic ocean warming in the area. Second, sea star wasting disease is killing the main predator of sea urchins, the sunflower sea star.
What is difference between kelp and seaweed?
Seaweed is a term which can be used to describe many different marine-based species of plants and algae. But sea kelp is more specific. It describes the largest subgroup of seaweed. Whereas kelp is most often found along rocky coastlines, and only in saltwater.
Who eats giant kelp?
Several species eat giant kelp, and fluctuating populations of purple sea urchins are known to play a role in kelp forest formation and destruction. Several species of sharks, bony fishes, lobsters, squids, and other invertebrates are known to live in or near kelp forests.
Where is the largest kelp forest? The region with the greatest diversity of kelps (>20 species) is the northeastern Pacific, from north of San Francisco, California, to the Aleutian Islands, Alaska. Although kelp forests are unknown in tropical surface waters, a few species of Laminaria have been known to occur exclusively in tropical deep waters.…