One morning a week, Stefan Kiesbye makes the drive from his home in Santa Rosa to one of the beaches around Bodega Bay, to pick up trash.After dropping his wife at an airport shuttle early Sunday morning, Kiesbye headed out to Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay. Arriving an hour before sunrise, he was greeted by a chorus of sea lions barking from the end of the jetty.At the westernmost tip of the beach, some 50 feet above the waterline, he spied a large creature out of the corner of his eye. In recent years, Kiesbye has encountered several deceased sea lions at Doran. But this was a different animal: a stranded fish, oval in shape, roughly six feet long and three feet across.Kiesbye, a novelist and English professor at Sonoma State University, wasn’t sure what he was seeing. This strange fish, its small mouth far out of proportion with the rest of its body, had neither a tail, so far as he could tell, nor “back fin.”He was looking at the body of a hoodwinker sunfish, or Mola tecta – derived from the Latin word tectus, meaning hidden – a species whose very existence has only been known since 2017. That’s when it was first described by a group of researchers led by Dr. Marianne Nyegaard of New Zealand.Keep Reading
Humboldt Bay in Northern California is experiencing the fastest rate of relative sea-level rise on the entire West Coast of the United States. Already, the streets and yards in King Salmon, a former fishing village 100 miles south of the Oregon border, regularly flood during particularly high tides. It has made preparing for and adapting to sea-level rise (SLR) a matter of local urgency. And there’s no shortage of agencies and institutions working on it.In fact, when two California Sea Grant-funded researchers recently listed every entity involved in SLR planning in Humboldt Bay, they counted over 30, including two cities — Arcata and Eureka — a regional harbor district, a county, fifteen federal and state agencies, three Indigenous Tribes as well as various academic, conservation and business groups.This plethora, however, harbors a dilemma: With so many cooks stirring the sea-level rise pot, how can a strategy evolve that is cohesive and practical and serves all those affected? When Kristen Orth-Gordinier, then a California Sea Grant Graduate Research Fellow, and Laurie Richmond, an extension specialist with California Sea Grant and co-chair of the Cal Poly Humboldt Sea Level Rise Institute, put this question to the area’s coastal professionals, most were stumped. “I don't think any of us know,” answered one.Yet, there was a “near universal agreement […] that some form of regional coordination on SLR was necessary,” Orth-Gordinier and Richmond write in a paper published this summer in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. And after formally interviewing close to four dozen coastal professionals and surveying more than a hundred, the two researchers zeroed in on what many respondents saw as some of the most promising strategies to achieve SLR-coordination around Humboldt Bay.Keep Reading
The Transportation Department on Friday canceled $679 million in federal funding for a dozen offshore wind projects, the latest attack by the Trump administration on the reeling U.S. offshore wind industry.Funding for projects in 11 states was rescinded, including $435 million for a floating wind farm in Northern California.Last week, with U.S. electricity prices rising at more than twice the rate of inflation, Trump lashed out, falsely blaming renewable power for skyrocketing energy costs. He called wind and solar energy “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve any wind or solar projects.Energy analysts say renewable sources have little to do with recent price hikes, which are based on increased demand from artificial intelligence and energy-hungry data centers, along with aging infrastructure and increasingly extreme weather events such as wildfires that are exacerbated by climate change.Read More
On Friday, Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy announced that the Department of Transportation has withdrawn or terminated $679 million for 12 offshore wind projects currently in various stages of development, essentially scuttling the promise of many in-development offshore wind projects in the U.S. in the near term.Those funds include $426.7 million for the Humboldt Bay Offshore Wind Heavy Lift Terminal (an INFRA grant that would essentially pay for the construction and completion of the project) and $8.6 million for the Redwood Marine Terminal Project planning.Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Commissioner Greg Dale told the Times-Standard that the district would continue to work toward its project goals, hoping to fund the final construction phase of the project at a later date. He said that news of the withdrawal of funds had been disappointing but not altogether unexpected.“It’s kind of a bummer, but I’m not surprised after all the rhetoric we’ve heard over the last six, eight, 10 months,” Dale said.Dale said that the shift in policy away from offshore wind, a potential growth industry that could bolster local, state and nationwide manufacturing jobs, seems misguided and that, had the U.S. invested in solar manufacturing at a similar juncture 10 years ago, the nation would be manufacturing solar panels rather than importing them.“We believe in the project. We believe in the industry, and we want to see the industry thrive, so our goal would be to continue on as best we could,” Dale said. “We’d like to get the project permitted and through all the process, and then when it comes time that we could actually build the project (Dale noted that that phase is likely a decade away “at minimum”), we will cross that bridge when the time comes …“These are large infrastructure projects. We build lots of large infrastructure projects like offshore oil rigs in America. We can do that here, and it would be a boon for the whole West Coast, not just Humboldt Bay and not just California. It would be a boon for every port on the West Coast, small and large. So I think it’s a good utilization of our resources.”Keep Reading
When the California Fish and Game Commission took the unprecedented step of shuttering the North Coast's red abalone season back in 2017 due to a precipitous decline in the population amid the larger collapse of the region's kelp forests, there was hope that the temporary moratorium would give the fishery a chance to rebound.But, eight years later, the prized mollusks — and the delicate marine ecosystem on which they depend — are still struggling in the wake of what scientists have described as a "perfect storm" of ecological events that left vast swaths of once-thriving underwater worlds a mere shadow of their former biodiverse splendor.In response, the commission voted Aug. 14 to authorize the publication of a notice of intent to push back the fishery's reopening for a third time, setting in motion the regulatory process to extend the moratorium's sunset date until April of 2036.The new proposed timeline, if approved, goes into effect one day before the current closure expires on April 1, 2026, placing the last vestige of recreational abalone diving in the state off limits for another decade.Keep Reading
