That's Bull Kelp!

A sentinel for the sea

What's That Plant?!

Jan 13, 2024

ALSO KNOWN AS: Wawadi, Nasqulut, Nereocystis luetkeana, bull whip kelp, edible kelp, ribbon kelp

Not Giant kelp, with its smaller, pear-shaped floats

Or bladder wrack. Though they do have bladders, their own form of floatation device.

How you know:

Simple: A bulb, a head

A wash of the longest, seaweed hair

A long thin tube of a body, a stipe.

a luminescent brown, a burnt gold

https://seagrant.oregonstate.edu/visitor-center/found-beach/bull-kelp-and-sea-palm

At one point in my life I could let a wave take me. I would come out from the white water with cuts, bruises, and bumps with a wild smile. I don’t feel like this about the ocean any more. I don’t know about you, but I am always thinking about the fact that we have brought little machines to Mars, but we have only studied about 5% of the sea. When I look at the ocean it’s like looking at earth: the true earth, the heart of earth, that beats and makes everything move and live. We are small creatures protruding like the barest tips of icebergs compared to the ocean. I don’t care how many times we have seen drawings and images of the oceans of this planet. They are bigger than we imagine.

The first time I really saw this immensity was in the Pacific Northwest where the ocean has been known to throw boulders, like the one launched into the lens of the Tillamook lighthouse in 1934. Here, the ocean works the land like a blacksmith. These windswept beaches have tsunami warnings alongside vacation tents - for the earthquake that will come: when the ocean will return. On these beaches are alien figures, washed up on the shore.

From a distance they look like something between a mermaid and a squid, with big heads and long tails that can go trailing for feet to the fringes of the waves.

Giants are real, and they may take the form of these kelp that can grow up to 120 feet tall. A stone’s throw past the breaking waves, where the water takes its breath in, there is a forest many don’t swim far enough to know about. This is the zone between the sea and the shore, where the kelp forests live and the bull kelp reigns supreme. Bull kelp are endemic to waters from Alaska to Central, even southern, California. Thriving where the seas are between 40 and 60 degrees fahrenheit.

It is an annual, growing to its massive size from a single spore in one year. If you were underwater long enough you could see it grow: up to ten inches in a day. It’s hard not to sound mythical when describing these plants, for the simple fact that they grow in a different realm from the one we see on a daily basis. Kelp forests are home to a huge range of biodiversity where animals are protected, hunted, and where oxygen is made. These strange and watery places impact us each moment.

Kelp makes up 50%-80% of the oxygen we breathe.

Long smooth tapering bodies which glow a golden brown, are called stipes. They reach up through the sunlit water towards the light with bobble heads, pneumatocysts, filled of carbon monoxide. These heads will keep growing, so they reach up and up, until the skin becomes too heavy and will fall to the ground trailing the blades - the hairs filled with spores - along with it. In their maturity these waving tendrils creates a canopy as they take in the sun’s light and provides food and shelter for many marine animals from kelp crabs to seals, to orca whales, these plants are the foundations of ecosystems. They even calm the waves so seals are not pushed off boulders.

Bull kelp do not have roots like land plants. They have fingerlike structures called ‘holdfasts’ or haptera whose sole purpose is to keep the plant locked to the rock at the bottom of the ocean. Similar to the way ferns produce, the gametophytes fall off of the blades and find places where there is some current or minimal wave activity to hold so that they not covered with sediment as they grow. Sometimes the entire plants themselves are wayward and can travels for hundreds of miles with the current. During these trips they will clutch the rocks in their holdfasts, with abalone or sea urchins in tow.

Walk the shores of the Pacific Ocean in late fall and winter and see the season has pushed up onto the beach, long bull kelp who have lived, died, spread their spores, and followed the water to land.

I’ve spoken to Californians who have talked about the pleasure in breaking the bladder “they pop like a zit. Nature’s zits.” One said say. Does nature not ask us to play with it sometimes? The jewelweed asks to spring its seeds with a single touch. The bull kelp asks to pop.

Climate change is dangerously affecting bull kelp. The rising temperatures and acidification of the ocean stresses these forests. The domino effect is occurring with the decline of sea otters, sees the rise of purple urchins who eat the kelp mercilessly with no predator to manage them. Kelp grow in a single year and so they need the first part of their lives to be protected, and this urchin species has in the recent years multiplied sixty fold, making it very hard for the equilibrium to return in northern California specifically. Restoration and care for one plant usually involves a multivalence approach. To save kelp forests marine animals like abalone, sea urchins, and the surrounding marine life.

These savior approaches only do so much in the face of rising ocean temperatures, so universities like UC Davis are starting to engage in novel approaches of creating “socio-ecological” solutions to support kelp ecosystems to become more resilient.

Kelp in general is medicinal, but bull kelp has been used for thousands of years as a blood cleanser. It helps with the health of skin and nails and may treat gastrointestinal ulcers.

It has up to 70 micronutrients and is regularly used for fertilizer. It is also food for abalone, which is a powerful industry that is contributing to the overharvesting of bull kelp. Kwakwaka'wakw of the Pacific Northwest include bull kelp in stews. The fiber of the stipe can be made into ropes and nets, and the heads, rubbery and hollow, are placed under the ground of the Big House to make it, the entire place, a musical instrument for the dancers. Bull kelp is also used to make miyeok-guk (Korean kelp soup), for pregnant women as a blood cleanser. In Korea it is traditionally eaten on one’s birthday.

Myth for bull kelp

The sea had seven daughters.

Each was in her own realm. One cared for the fish; one for the whales and dolphins, one for the shelled beings; one for the sands and the stones; one for the smallest creatures; and one for the sun, the birds, and the mists that danced on the waves.

The last did not know who she was meant to care for, to protect, and she spent her days close to the shore where the waves break. Her soul felt like it had no meaning at all. Until, one day she found there was an edge to the ocean. She lifted it and walked out.

It was at that singular moment that the whole world was shocked to life becuase all the world was barren, life did not know how to use their lungs. The last daughter of the ocean exhaled and gave us all air to breathe.

In thanks to the seventh daughter of the sea, the creatures of the land brought offerings in the form of roots and seeds, they brought stories about the plants, and there the seventh daughter made forests in the ocean. She made sentinels of the sea. The bull kelp calms the waves so that they will not crash too hard upon the shore, and they are the guardians of gates between the lands of the ocean and the soil for all who pass through them, they must know first the forests intersecting the worlds.

Forager Friendly:

Yes! Learn how to use it, learn how to protect it. These plants have been used for food and tools for generations.

Sources

https://www.kwakiutl.bc.ca/Our-Land

https://www.instagram.com/shinnecockkelpfarmers/

https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/bull-kelp

https://www.seadocsociety.org/bull-kelp-facts

https://oceanographicmagazine.com/features/saving-forests/#:~:text=The%20waters%20along%20the%20Southern,life%2Dsustaining%20oxygen%20we%20breathe.

https://marinescience.ucdavis.edu/blog/kelp-californias-coastal-forests

https://www.lenfestocean.org/~/media/legacy/lenfest/pdfs/springer_underlying_report_0.pdf

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2tVDhoYo9ZdMTQEE2LcEQJ

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?contenttypeid=19&contentid=Kelp#:~:text=Kelp%20may%20improve%20sensory%20receptors,Kelp%20may%20treat%20gastrointestinal%20ulcers.