Kelp is disappearing from parts of the West Coast. These scientists are trying to save it

Early in Chris Neufeld's scientific career, he studied creatures that depend on the kelp forests of the wild West Coast: native snails, invasive crabs and the barnacle's legendary penis.

The kelp itself was "really just the backdrop," floating at the surface in photos of his fieldwork, he said. 

Until it started disappearing.

"Since 2016, that kelp forest that's in the background of the photo I often show is gone," said Neufeld, a research scientist at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre in Barkley Sound on Vancouver Island where he's now project lead on the Kelp Rescue Initiative.

The problem is bigger than one kelp bed, or even one coast. Marine heat waves — including the longest ever recorded, nicknamed "the Blob," which heated up the northeast Pacific from 2014 to 2016 — are making it harder for cold-water-loving kelp to survive, with major losses documented from California to Australia.

A recent study by Neufeld and colleagues published in Ecological Applications looked at giant kelp and bull kelp forests in Barkley Sound that had been stable for at least four decades. Since the Blob, they found 40 per cent of those kelp beds have gone "locally extinct" — and not grown back.

"It's been really hard to see these things happening within our lifetimes," Neufeld said.

Far from a backdrop, kelp forests provide shelter and food for dozens of species, including iconic ambassadors of marine life like whales and sea otters. Salmon hide from predators among the fronds; herring lay their eggs. Where kelp has disappeared, important fisheries like abalone have collapsed. 

Last week, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Hoesung Lee, spoke about the "high risk" to kelp forests of "irreversible phase shifts" and biodiversity loss as global warming makes marine heat waves more frequent and intense.

The Kelp Rescue Initiative is among the groups studying what we can do now to help the kelp — especially as people look to the algae as a possible ally against carbon emissions.

Not everyone shares the passion for the brown, slippery fronds that sometimes wash up on shore. 

But look below the surface, where the giant canopy-forming kelps tower in cold, dark water, and there's an undersea forest that's full of life that, for divers like Jackie Hildering, inspires awe.

"You are truly in this otherworldly place," said Hildering, co-founder of the Marine Education and Research Society in Port McNeill on Vancouver Island.

"It's the equivalent of a church or cathedral in the sense of the largeness and importance it has."