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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of Air conditioning desk cooperation.
Grant Downey was out of the Pacific for about 10 minutes when he realized he could no longer see with his right eye.
The second-generation commercial diver was deeper under the waves than usual, looking for his catch — red sea urchins, appreciated by restaurateurs for unior gonads from sushi. But red hedgehogs, which inhabit underwater algae forests, have become increasingly difficult to find in recent years. And each extra step at depth required more nitrogen in his blood, increasing the risk of dangerous bubbles accumulating in his body or brain.
This time, with half his vision against a black wall, he feared he had finally pushed his body too far. Although his right eye regained its function 20 minutes later, the 33-year-old decided he had ended up taking such risky dives, even if the decision would ultimately cost him income.
“I knew it was for me,” Downey said last March, about seven months after the incident on the shores of Fort Bragg in Northern California. “I’ll probably go down to 65 feet, but I don’t know if I’ll make that deep, deep edge. It’s getting harder for the boys who are still trying to leave. “
Anyone who depends on the life of California’s algae forests can tell you that something is wrong beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean. Not only the population of red hedgehogs is declining. Gone are most of the algae, the dense, autumn-colored canopies of algae that once provided food, shelter, and safe haven for hundreds of marine species — from sea otters to ears, sea rocks to fragile stars. Where lush tufts of giant algae or bull-like algae once swayed, entire stretches of underwater forest were leveled to threads by one particular predator: the purple hedgehog.
People sometimes refer to purple hedgehogs as “zombies” of the sea – the result of their incredible hunger and great survival skills. (They can survive starvation for years.) Like baseball-sized spikes, purple hedgehogs are omnivorous, consuming everything from plankton to dead fish. But they especially love algae and can chew through the prisons that anchor each thread to the seabed.
The resulting “wireless hedgehogs,” as divers call them, could stretch for hundreds of miles, with scientists announcing earlier this year that some northern California algae forests have suffered a 95 percent loss since 2012.
Kelps are key to much of the West Coast’s marine biodiversity. Like terrestrial forests, algae (technically a form of brown algae) are important carbon sinks, converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into leaves and canopies. But unlike trees, which return much of this carbon to the atmosphere as they decompose, dead algae have the potential to sink to the bottom of the sea, providing a natural form of sequestration. As the algae forests were leveled and starving hedgehogs waiting on the seabed, this cycle was severely disrupted.
“We’re losing really critical systems, which means a loss of fishing, a loss of recreation, a loss of carbon sequestration, a loss of coastal protection,” said Fiorenza Micheli, a marine ecologist and co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. “It’s essentially the equivalent of losing tropical forests – except we don’t see it.”
Parts of the West Coast have seen up to 10,000% increase in purple hedgehogs over a five-year period. The sheer number of “purples,” as commercial divers call them, has shaken communities off the coasts of California and southern Oregon. As a result, many algae lovers – commercial fishermen, entertainment enthusiasts, divers and scientists, to name a few – have become increasingly desperate to take the purple sea urchin infestation into their own hands, often armed with hammers and diving knives. .
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