The new Mercury and Air Toxic Standards announced by EPA administrator Lisa Jackson on December 21st require the electrical industry to limit stack emissions of mercury, arsenic and other toxic pollutants that originate from coal and oil-fired power plants and end up in America's air, water and food. Power plants are the largest source of mercury emissions at around 50 tons of mercury pollution annually. Because the particles are heavier than air, the mercury eventually falls back down and is deposited in rivers, lakes and oceans where it is converted into a more toxic form called methylmercury. This builds up in the food chain, meaning that fish at the top, such as striped bass, blue fin tuna and shark, carry the highest levels of the toxin.

The EPA estimates that 11,000 premature deaths and 130,000 cases of aggravated asthma among children annually by 2016 will be prevented, as well as other health benefits. Women, children and the developing fetus are most at risk for serious health problems resulting from mercury exposure. Between 300,000 and 600,000 of the 4 million babies born in the U.S. each year are exposed to significant amounts of the neurotoxin while in the womb.

Using scrubbers and other well-demonstrated technology, the rule requires power companies install equipment or shut down old plants by 2014 with the possibility of an extension into a fourth year. Seventeen states have already required the industry to apply the clean technology. These older US plants, operating mostly in the Midwest and East, can affect our Bay Area waterways and we will benefit from the new rule. However, most of the mercury in the San Francisco Bay enters from spills, the air, or water runoff from land from natural sources and historical mining.

Mercury levels will remain high in many species of San Francisco Bay and some ocean fish as well as other toxins like PCBs. The California Office of Environmental Health and Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) monitored contaminants in chemical contaminants in fish from the San Francisco Bay.

While the EPA rule is good news for Americans, we must be cautious about what fish and how much fish we consume. Some fish from San Francisco Bay like rockfish and smelt are low in mercury and can be safely eaten. Others like wild king salmon are high in Omega-3s that have been demonstrated to be beneficial to human health. Others like sharks, striped bass and other top predators like swordfish and tuna bio-concentrate mercury and should be avoided, especially by women 18-45 and children under 7 years. The point is to ask where your fish is coming from, how was it caught and how much can you eat. A mercury calculator on the "Got Mercury?" website allows one to calculate how much mercury they are consuming and if it exceeds advisory guidelines produced by the EPA.

The "Got Mercury" Campaign, a project of the Turtle Island Restoration network based in Marin County, is building awareness about toxic mercury in commonly eaten seafood. To reduce risk from mercury exposure, "Got Mercury" is asking the government to increase health advisories and reduce action levels for mercury in fish. The program is also petitioning the FDA to lower the legal mercury action level from 1 part per million (ppm) to 0.5 ppm to be in line with the Environmental Protection Agency’s mercury standards for recreationally caught fish and to require seafood sellers to post mercury in fish warning signs.

Harbor porpoises as seen from the Golden Gate Bridge. (Photo: William Keener/Golden Gate Cetacean Research)

Harbor porpoises haven't been seen in San Francisco Bay for more than 60 years. But now, they're coming back through the Golden Gate in growing numbers and researchers are trying to understand why they’re returning.

The best place to look for them is 220 feet above the water on the pedestrian walkway across the Golden Gate Bridge. That's where Bill Keener of Golden Gate Cetacean Research photographs them, holding a massive telephoto lens over the side of the railing.

"There's a porpoise right there, coming very, very close," he says pointing. A dark shape appears in the water. It's a harbor porpoise, coming up for air. "And here's a mother and calf coming straight at us."

The porpoises have dark gray backs and pale bellies. They're about five feet long, smaller than most of their dolphin relatives.

"Look at that! That one's on its side," Keener says. "The porpoise turned on its side. It's spinning and it's feeding."

Porpoises spin as they go after schools of herring and anchovies, which means these porpoises are feeding in the middle of a heavily-trafficked shipping lane. "The porpoises have found a way to not only avoid the ships, but it's also the noise they make," says Keener.

Studying a Shy Marine Mammal

Seeing this behavior is huge for Keener. Harbor porpoises are notoriously shy in the open ocean, so they're tough for researchers to study. Here in the bay, Keener and his colleagues have identified 250 individual porpoises with their photos by looking for unique scars and color patterns on the animals.

Porpoise mating display as seen from the bridge. (Photo: William Keener/Golden Gate Cetacean Research)

When these researchers first started their work on the bridge, they caused a bit of a stir. "You noticed there was a Golden Gate Bridge patrol officer here just a few minutes ago," says Keener. "Well, we're staring down at the water for hours. They'd start getting worried about us. But they know us now. They know what we're doing."

Of course, the big question is why harbor porpoises disappeared in the first place. Keener says the bay has historically been porpoise habitat. Their bones have been found from hundreds of years ago.

"And then there were reports in the 1930s. And then we don't really have reports from around World War II. And there were a lot of things going on during World War II that could have caused that."

San Francisco Bay became a wartime port and a major ship-building center. The Navy strung a seven-mile-long net underwater across the opening of the bay to keep out Japanese submarines. Hundreds of mines were planted in the waters outside the Golden Gate.

Keener says all that activity certainly would have disturbed the porpoises. But there's a bigger change that may have driven them away.

The Changing Bay

To see it, we head toward the Golden Gate Bridge on a twenty-two foot boat with Jonathan Stern, a whale researcher at San Francisco State University. Stern was the first person to spot the porpoises in the bay three years ago.

"I just couldn't figure out what they were doing here. It's like when you see somebody you're used to seeing at work and you see them somewhere, in Hawaii or something. What are you doing here? You're out of place," says Stern.

The bay we're gliding over today is a far cry from the bay in the 1950s and 60s. As the Bay Area boomed, so did water pollution. Keener says raw sewage used to flow right into the bay. "I remember coming across the Bay Bridge when I was very young and it would just smell. It would stink."

After the Clean Water Act was passed in 1972, the bay's water quality began to improve. But Stern says it took time for the food web to come back. "It takes the biology a while to track the chemistry. So it's not surprising that it's taken years for this ecosystem to generate like this."

Stern says it's also possible that the porpoises had to rediscover the bay. "Because over 60 years, we're talking about a number of generations of porpoises. So it's quite likely that San Francisco Bay as a location, as a habitat was out of the institutional memory of the harbor porpoises off the coast here."

Bill Keener and Jonathan Stern search for porpoises in the bay.

As we slow down under the bridge's span, Keener keeps an eye out. "There are porpoises between us and the south tower at 200 yards," he says.

Keener and Stern have a special permit that allows them to approach the porpoises. We wait, listening for them to surface.

"I just heard one here. Here's a cow-calf pair close to the boat and we'll hear this puff," Keener says.

We hear two loud puffs as the porpoises surface just off the bow. "The old time sailors used to call them puffing pigs. That's the exhalation," says Keener.

The harbor porpoises seem calm around boats in the bay, which Stern says will let researchers study their life cycle and social structure, as well as how they might react to big events like the upcoming America's Cup race. Overall, he says it's a good sign that the porpoises are here.

"It's one of those very few good news environmental stories. And it's in our backyard. You know, there was the will to get the bay cleaner and we're now starting to see the effects of that. It gives one hope."

Four-year-old white sturgeons farmed by Sterling Caviar in Sacramento County. Photo: Jenny Oh

Sturgeons, the fish whose eggs are known as caviar, have been around for about 250 million years. These giants are the largest of the freshwater fish and have been known to grow to over 4,000 pounds and live more than 100 years. But it took us only a couple hundred years to deplete their stocks around the world, to the point where most caviar is now harvested from farmed sturgeon.

Caviar is generally associated with the Caspian Sea, the large land-locked body of water surrounded by Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan. Sturgeon are such big animals and the females produce so many eggs (in the wild, eggs can make up as much as 25 percent of their bodyweight) that historically they were a great source of protein. The caviar was for royalty, with the lightest-colored, blond caviar being reserved for the tsar, in Russia, and the shah, in Iran. But this year, virtually no wild-harvested caviar came out of that region.

Less known is the fact that in the late 1800s, the United States was a purveyor of wild-harvested caviar to the world.

“Here in California, they were harvesting millions of pounds in the late 1800s. And actually there was a town in New Jersey called Caviar, which was the world-leading exporter of caviar,” said Peter Struffeneger, general manager of Sterling Caviar, one of the two companies in California that farm sturgeon for caviar. “But within a span of 30 years they wiped it out. They closed down all fishing from about 1905 to the 1950s, 1960s, depending on which river, for the stocks to recover. And most of them have only gotten back to a point where there’s a limited sport fish for it.”

Two species of sturgeon are native to California: the white sturgeon and the green sturgeon. The green sturgeon is a threatened species and can’t even be fished by sport fishermen. Anglers in California can only catch three white sturgeon per year and need a special card from the state’s Department of Fish and Game to do so. White sturgeons have been plentiful in the Bay Area in 2011, according to this report. But sturgeon poaching remains a problem.

We filmed the caviar harvest at Sterling Caviar’s processing plant in Sacramento County. Sterling Caviar is one of only two companies in California, and a handful around the country, that are raising sturgeon for caviar and meat. (Sterling Caviar ships most of the meat overseas, though some ends up in Brooklyn, where it’s prized by the Russian community).

If you’ve ever wondered why caviar is so expensive (an ounce of Sterling’s highest-grade caviar goes for close to $90 on its Web site), one reason is that even in the best of circumstances, you can only harvest a small amount of it, said Struffeneger. It takes eight to 10 years for Sterling’s female sturgeons to produce eggs. The other reason for the high price, said Struffeneger, is caviar’s unique flavor.

“Maybe a hint of the ocean to it, but not an overbearing saltiness,” he said. “It should hit your taste buds and it actually explodes and you get this ‘wow’ sensation.”

Working with Serge Doroshov, a University of California, Davis, scientist who pioneered sturgeon farming in California, Sterling Caviar has figured out ways to farm sustainably. When the company started out, in the early 1980s, it got permits from the Department of Fish and Game to take white sturgeon from the Sacramento River. But in 1994 the company figured out how to spawn its own females, and since then it hasn’t taken any fish from the wild. And Sterling’s sturgeons are fed fish meal made from sustainably fished sardines and menhaden from Peru and Chile, he added.

For Struffeneger, who has degrees in marine and fisheries biology, the United States isn't doing enough to encourage aquaculture. As a result, he said, the country imports 82 percent of the fish we eat.

Fish farming is the only way forward, he said.

“You can’t increase the supply out of the oceans without doing what happened to sturgeon, destroying the resource,” he said. “One hundred years from now we’ll look back at this as a very transitional period in which we’ve really changed from a hunting-and-gathering society for our seafood to a farming-and-ranching society for our seafood.”

SEATTLE, Wash.—Nothing excites whale researchers and whale fanatics more than seeing a new calf born into the pod. However, researchers have learned that calf survival rates are incredibly low, especially for the orca’s first born. The mother’s young calf often dies because of something the mother passes on to her offspring—PCBs.

What are PCBs?
Polychlorinated Biphenyls, commonly known as PCBs, are manufactured organic chemicals that were primarily used as insulating liquids, such as coolants and lubricants in electrical equipment, but were also used in other common materials such as paints, cement, adhesives, and even the flame retardants used in some children’s clothing.

PCBs enter the water through spills, leaks, damage to equipment and improperly disposed trash. Though production of PCBs was banned in the 1970s because of its harmful effects to the environment, the chemical still presents a significant environmental threat today.

PCBs thrive in fish and marine mammals
What makes PCBs unique from other toxins is that its molecules are extremely fat-soluble, meaning they accumulate easily in fats.

They thrive in fish and marine mammals and can reach levels thousands of times higher than the levels of PCBs in the surrounding water, essentially making fish and marine mammals a PCB Petri dish.

Most of the PCB concentration in Puget Sound orcas is the result of PCB build up in their primary food source—Chinook salmon. These tiny toxins lower orcas’ immunity to diseases, decrease sperm count and disrupt many hormonal, developmental and reproductive processes.

Do the PCBs ever leave the orcas?
Unfortunately, once they’re in the orca, the toxins don’t go away. PCBs are considered a Persistent Organic Pollutant (POP) because once ingested, they persistently build up in the fatty blubber of the orcas. As PCB concentration increases, it severely decreases the orca’s lifespan, further threatening the existing members of an already endangered species.

What does that mean for the orcas?
Only sexually mature females have a chance of getting rid of any PCBs. One of the hormonal processes the PCBs disrupt is calf development. The toxin actually imitates the hormone that is the main form of estrogen involved in reproduction.

As a result, a small amount of the PCBs are transferred as the offspring develops. Even more toxins are excreted through the mother’s breast milk which is extremely rich in fat. In fact, studies show female blubber samples have one-third the levels of PCB toxins found in male orcas. Essentially, the offspring increase the mother’s chances of survival by taking some of her PCB concentration.

The trade off is that PCB levels in the developing calf, especially the firstborn, often lead to its premature death. It sometimes takes multiple attempts for female orcas to have a calf with low enough PCB levels to survive. Meanwhile, each time the mother gives birth, she has a better chance of surviving with fewer PCBs in her system.

This tragic cycle, paired with toxic effects of lower sperm counts, higher susceptibility to disease, depletion of the salmon supply and other factors, have resulted in the southern resident orca reproduction rate to drop significantly in recent years.

Orcas do not reproduce in litters or even on a consistent basis. Females begin breeding when they are around 15 years of age and give birth about every three to four years. Around age 40, most females stop breeding and their PCB levels rise at a greater rate.

Without these environmental setbacks, females could produce four-to-six surviving offspring during their reproductive years. Instead, orca survival rates are greatly outnumbered by mortality rates.

What can be done?
Unfortunately, there isn’t a quick fix. Although it’s been more than 40 years since PCBs were banned, their persistent properties cause them to stick around. In fact, researchers predict that PCB concentrations may not decrease to a safer level for at least another 30 years.

The task for humans now is a simple one we’ve all heard before: be kind to the environment. As individuals, dispose of trash properly, purchase environmentally-friendly household supplies and help spread the word about the challenges orcas face and ways to protect them.

See the related Video, Science on the SPOT: Sound Waves – Listening to Orcas:

San Francisco's Pier 39 is home to only a few sea lions this summer.

I spent Saturday sightseeing in San Francisco with a friend visiting from out of town, and I thought I’d check in on the sea lions at Pier 39. Just a few years ago, there were about 1600 of them, slithering on and off the wooden docks, basking in the sun, and barking at one another. Then in 2009, most of them swam away, as QUEST blogger Amy Gotliffe explained. The sea lions’ favorite food, herring, was in short supply, so they went to Oregon to feast on anchovies and salmon. Now the herring are making a comeback—will the sea lions return too?

This weekend the floating wooden palates at Pier 39 were mostly bare; there were perhaps a dozen sea lions. We would expect the sea lion numbers to be low this time of year, herring or no herring. In the summer, sea lions travel down south (the Channel Islands, San Diego, Baja) to breed. But there were still fewer sea lions at Pier 39 than in summers past.

Sea lions will eat a lot of different prey items: octopus, squid, small sharks. But their bread and butter is herring, which have been hard to find in recent years. The herring fishery is the only fishery still in operation in San Francisco Bay, and it closed during the 2009/2010 season (December through April), because there were so few fish. This year, the herring fishery opened again, but with a lower quota than in the past, to allow the fish to recover.

There are a few hypotheses about why the herring numbers dipped so low in 2009. First, herring lay their eggs in the brackish waters of the estuaries around San Francisco Bay. Each female fish can lay up to 50,000 eggs, which are a prized commodity in Japan. However, the years leading up to 2009 were drought years, so the estuaries were saltier than usual. That may have affected the herrings’ spawning success. Second, the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill may have affected herring health. Researchers found oil-soaked embryos, which were deformed. Third, herring declines may be the result of climate change. As surface waters get warmer, there is less mixing with cold, nutrient-rich water from the bottom of the ocean. There are also big patches of the ocean that have very little oxygen. These hypoxic zones are deadly to their inhabitants, and are affecting many marine species.

However, the herring appear to be making a comeback, possibly because the past few years have been wet and the estuaries are sufficiently fresh, or because the spilled oil has been flushed from the Bay. Time will tell whether the sea lions follow their food and return to Pier 39. I hope they come back—along with the twists and turns of Lombard Street and the Golden Gate Bridge, the Embarcadero’s sea lions are one of my favorite San Francisco treasures to show off to visiting friends.

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Pacific sardines at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Photo: Adventures in Librarianship.

It’s back to school—for students, and for Pacific sardines. Pacific sardines, Sardinops sagax, were once wildly abundant along the coast of California, Oregon, and Washington. From the 1920s to through the 1940s, they supported the largest fishery in the United States—millions were caught in and around Monterey Bay. (In fact, the Monterey Bay Aquarium was once a sardine canning factory.) Though the Pacific sardine population crashed in the mid-1940s, it’s on the rise again.

While overfishing may have played a role in the population crash in the 1940s, oceanographic conditions were also very influential. The size of the Pacific sardine population fluctuates; their numbers increase when water is warm, and decrease when water is cold. This has been happening for quite some time; fish scales from sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin show that the sardines have been going through a boom-and-bust cycle for the past 1700 years.

In recent years, Pacific sardine numbers have been increasing steadily. Fishing started up again in California in the 1980s; by 2000, fisheries had been re-established off the coasts of Oregon and Washington, too. These days, Pacific sardines are doing fine. The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide lists sardines as a “best choice.”

However, another schooling fish, Atlantic Herring isn’t doing quite as well. Many species of schooling fish are caught not for human consumption, but to feed poultry, livestock, and fish in the aquaculture industry. They’re processed into fishmeal and fish oil. This is a bit of a problem. Schooling fish (called clupeoid fish, for all of you aficionados) are an important part of the food web. They eat plankton, and in turn are eaten by larger predatory fish, marine mammals, and birds. Taking schooling fish out of the ocean, so they can be food for our other food, has serious repercussions for the marine food web.

Fish swim in schools to protect themselves from predators. But this strategy doesn’t really work when humans are the major predator, with our purse seines and spotting planes. Pacific sardines have recovered because of good fisheries management and favorable ocean conditions. Hopefully other fish will have a similar opportunity to go back to school.

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Humboldt Squid. Photo: NOAA/CBNMS.

Large numbers of Humboldt squid, deep purple-red and up to six feet long, have propelled themselves into Monterey Bay mid-summer since 2002. They spend the fall and early winter here, probably to feed, and then spend spring further south. But this year, the squid have yet to arrive. No one knows if the squid are behind schedule or if they’re not going to show up at all. Humboldt squid isn’t the most popular item on the menu in North America, but it is very big in Japan, making it the world’s 14^th largest fishery by weight. And, their absence leaves a hole in Monterey Bay’s food chain. The Humboldt squid are voracious predators, feeding on anchovies, sardines, rockfish, market squid, and crustaceans. The delayed arrival of the Humboldt squid is a mystery, and it could have consequences for the underwater ecosystem—in Monterey Bay and all along the coast of California.

Humboldt squid haven’t been in our waters forever. Check out QUEST’s TV story The Fierce Humboldt Squid for the full story. Historically, the Humboldt Squid have lived in equatorial waters of the Pacific, from Chile to Mexico. In the 1930s, their range extended further north, and they were caught by fishermen in Monterey. Then they disappeared, only to return briefly in 1997. But they returned again in 2002, and have every year since.

There are a few hypotheses about why the squid come and go. Maybe they are responding to changes in their food supply. Or, their populations may grow when there are fewer predators—Humboldt squid are eaten by tunas, sharks, and sperm whales, some of which are in decline. Another possibility is the warming of northern waters, caused by El Niño. Trade winds usually blow from east to west across the Pacific, piling up warm water near Indonesia. During an El Niño, the trade winds die down, and warm water moves eastward, towards North and South America. The typically cold waters of Monterey Bay become unusually warm—warm enough, scientists think, for the Humboldt Squid to move in. The squids returned in 1997 and again in 2002—both were El Niño years. After 2002, the warm El Niño waters didn’t stick around, but the Humboldt squid kept coming back. This year, the squid are absent, and this is surprising because it seems to be an El Niño year (remember all that rain we got this past winter?).

Julie Stewart, a grad student at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, is researching the migration and movement of Humboldt squid for her dissertation. (Her advisor, Professor William Gilly, is featured in the QUEST video.) Julie has data from thousands of hours of underwater video, filmed on MBARI’s submersibles, which she’s using to estimate squid populations over the past decade. She’s put satellite tags on squid, to see where they go and how deep they dive. She wants to find out whether the squids' movement is in response to food supply, predators, ocean conditions, or other variables.

Julie wondered if the squid were here, but in small numbers, making them harder to find. Or, if the squid were just very far offshore. So last week, she spent five days aboard a Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary research cruise, looking for squid. The primary purpose of the trip was to do marine mammal and seabird surveys, which happen during the daytime—the captain let her search for squid at night. Julie and other crew on the boat used jigs—glow-in-the dark lures with spikes—on fishing lines. They jigged at 10 stations near the Davidson Seamount, about 80 miles southwest of Monterey Bay. And they found exactly zero squid. Even far offshore, the squid were nowhere to be seen. Julie and her colleagues have been talking to fishermen up and down the west coast, from southern California to Washington, and no one has seen squid this summer.

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Oil on the surface of the San Francisco Bay in November 2007. Photo: NOAA.

We have no idea how much oil gushed out of BP’s Deepwater Horizon well into the Gulf of Mexico—estimates vary from 92 million gallons to over 320 million gallons, according to the NewsHour’s widget. By comparison, a much smaller amount of oil—53,000 gallons—was spilled into San Francisco Bay when the container ship Cosco Busan ripped its hull open on the Bay Bridge in November 2007. The volume of oil spilled in the Gulf is several thousand times what was spilled in San Francisco Bay, and obviously the environmental consequences of the Gulf spill will far exceed what we’ve seen here. But the ecological studies conducted in the wake of the Cosco Busan spill give us an idea of what we can expect in the Gulf.

After the Cosco Busan spill, scientists looked at the effects of oil on different coastal habitats, and on individual species. A year after the spill, the QUEST radio story Oil Spill Anniversary discussed a study that revealed the negative effects of oil on Herring embryo development. Other studies looked at the impact of oil on intertidal areas, eelgrass beds, native oysters, Brown Pelicans, Marbled Murrelets, and more—a full list of studies that assessed damage to natural resources is at this NOAA site (click on “Case Documents” on the right to download the list as a PDF). Not all organisms fared poorly; the snowy plover, a bird that lives on beaches and is already a threatened species, was fine. They build their nests far enough from the water to be buffered from oil contamination.

Research about impacts and restoration in the Gulf is just getting started. The official US government website about the oil spill switched from a mindset of emergency response to one of restoration, reflecting the huge challenge that lies ahead—provided the oil doesn’t start flowing again. Some government agencies, like the EPA, are sharing the data that is being collected as you read this. My hope is that these research efforts will involve extensive long-term monitoring; the effects of oil spills can last for decades, and we need to understand how ecosystems function over time, with and without oil. We have the opportunity to learn a lot from this disaster, and hopefully we’ll have the money to fund it. The company that operated the Cosco Busan was fined $10 million, $2 million of which is slated for environmental efforts. If BP is fined in proportion to the volume of oil spilled, billions could go towards ecological research.

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California's Marine Life Protection Act planning process is mammoth. When it's all said and done, it will have spanned more than a decade, involving dozens of public meetings and hundreds of stakeholders. The result will be one of the most robust conservation networks in the world, stretching across 1,100 miles of coastline.

Right now, two regions of the California coast have marine protected areas (MPAs) in place – the Central Coast and the North Central Coast, which spans from Mendocino to the top of Santa Barbara County.  "Marine protected area" is catch-all phrase for the different kinds of reserves that are set up in this process. Some are strictly "no-take" zones where fishing isn't allowed. Others are recreational areas where fishing is limited. In all, about 350 square miles have been protected, or about 18% of the state waters in these study areas. (Here's a QUEST TV story we did just after the first MPAs were created). The two remaining sections of the coast are at the very northern and southern ends of the state. Each has its own challenges (check out this California Report story about the north coast region for more on that.)

The first group of MPAs went into effect three years ago, but in May, 21 new MPAs went into effect off the coast of San Francisco.  As part of this story, I spoke with the game wardens at the California Department of Fish and Game. They're on the frontlines of patrolling and enforcing these new reserves.  The California budget crisis has certainly had a impact on the department. California has the lowest number of wardens per capita in the nation. The ones patrolling the MPAs are responsible for both other coastal regulations and several counties inland. However, public-private partnerships are playing a big role. Foundations and non-profits stepping in to help out and fund some of the monitoring activities.

One of the big questions yet to be answered is whether the MPAs are having in impact on the marine life they're designed to protect. Mark Carr, a UC Santa Cruz professor, said it will be a few more years before their surveys show results. Unlike some tropical marine ecosystems, the ones off the California coast are slow-growing. If they are successful, Carr says the results could be seen both in and outside the MPAs. The goal is to see bigger fish and more fish all over the coast.

Listen to the Protecting Marine Reserves radio report online.

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Producer Chris Bauer filming over the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary in NOAA's Twin Sea Otter plane.

Much of the ocean waters off the coast of California, from Bodega Head to Cambria, have been set aside as national marine sanctuaries. The primary objective of the sanctuaries is to protect our delicate ocean resources while allowing people to use the areas in a sustainable way. While most recreation, commercial fishing, and shipping are still allowed within sanctuary waters, some activities are now strictly regulated or prohibited.

But how do you manage such an enormous area? And how do you keep tabs on what is going on out there? QUEST producers Lauren Sommer, Jenny Oh and I hitched a ride to find out.

On the windswept tarmac of the Sonoma County Airport, a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration takes to the skies to patrol large portions of the Cordell Bank, Gulf of the Farallones and Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuaries.

The mission of our Twin Otter flight crew, pilots Bradley Fritzler and Jason Mansour from NOAA Corps, along with sanctuary observers Sage Tezak and Michael Carver, is to conduct abundance surveys of users in the sanctuaries, counting boats and recording what they are doing and where.

We start out crossing Bodega Bay, flying multiple transects, back and forth, across the rolling seas of Cordell Bank. The engine noise is deafening in the unpressurized cabin. We scan the whitecaps from a mere 1000 feet, going only about 90 knots. The rugged aircraft bucks in the turbulent wind coming off the water. Flying this low and slow would give some pilots the jitters but for the Twin Otter flight crew it’s just a walk in the park. As we reach the Farallon Islands, I pop the back window to get a better camera angle of the “Devil’s Teeth,” and in the process pray our camera doesn’t get sucked out into the abyss. From the Farallones we bank south and head to Ana Nuevo Island. From there we’ll circle back up the coast, past Half Moon Bay and San Francisco, over Pt Reyes National Seashore and return to Sonoma County. Total flight time: 3 hours. In addition to surveying boat use in the sanctuaries, the observers and flight crew will document any other sightings, such as whales and keep a look out for maritime violations.

California has recently established new marine protected areas along the coast. These MPAs will have strict restrictions and some will essentially be closed off to all major use, including fishing. While the State is in charge of enforcing the new regulations, coordination between government agencies may provide additional help with an eye in the sky.

As much as the folks at NOAA might chafe at this description, it’s easy to think of these Twin Otter Survey Flights over the marine sanctuaries as a kind of “cop on the beat.” They’re not out there actively tracking down bad guys as much as they are a presence, keeping an eye on things and making sure everybody is on the up and up. And in that role, they don’t need to be flying everyday combing the ocean, monitoring everyone and every thing, every minute of every day. They may only survey the sanctuaries once every couple weeks. But knowing that today might be the day they are flying over, may help keep users of the marine sanctuaries in line. “Nothing to see here, move along.”

We’ve crossed these waters many times before for QUEST, but always traveling out into the deep blue on small, sea-sick inducing boats. I can tell you for certain, flying over the rough seas and into the wild blue, is a lot more pleasant and efficient. And seeing the Farallones from the birds eye view was clearly inspiring.

Watch the Marine Sanctuary Patrol Flight television story online.

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