California’s Underwater Forests Are Being Eaten by the ‘Cockroaches of the Ocean’
California’s Underwater Forests Are Being Eaten by the ‘Cockroaches of the Ocean’ By Kendra Pierre-Louis Oct. 22, 2018 ALBION, Calif. — Early on a gray summer Saturday, an unusual assemblage — commercial fishermen, recreational boaters, neoprene-clad divers — gathered for a mission at Albion Cove, a three-hour drive north of San Francisco. “Our target today is the purple urchin,” said Josh Russo, a recreational fishing advocate who organized the event. “The evil purple urchin.” Top, the bull kelp found off Northern California Josh Russo, left, organized a group of divers and boaters to remove purple urchins from Albion Cove. Credit: Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times Five years ago, assigning wickedness to the purple urchin, a shellfish the size of a plum with quarter-inch spikes, would have been absurd. That was before the urchins mowed down Northern California’s kelp forests. The underwater forests — huge, sprawling tangles of brown seaw...