September 26, 2024 — Parts of the warming Gulf of Maine have become inhospitable for kelp forests, according to new research from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay.
Between 2001 and 2018, a team led by senior research scientist Doug Rasher combined dive surveys of kelp population and data on ocean temperature to compile the first detailed census of Maine’s kelp forests in nearly 20 years.
The results were startling, Rasher said. Maine’s kelp forests were devoured by a green urchin overpopulation in the 1980s and 1990s, but rebounded around the turn of the century.
“We anticipated that with the rise and fall of the sea urchin fishery and the absence of sea urchins in the ecosystem, that kelp forests should have been widespread and pretty healthy across the coast of Maine,” Rasher said.
But that’s not what his team found, according to the results of their research published in the journal Ecology. Kelp forests persisted off Maine’s northern coast but south of Casco Bay they had almost disappeared.