SANTA CRUZ — Strange wind patterns and warmer waters continue to lure southern species to the Monterey Bay.
Two puffer fish recently washed ashore near Marina State Beach, far north of their usual habitat range, according to Santa Cruz-based Save Our Shores.
Rachel Kippen, the conservation group’s program manager, spotted what she believes were porcupine puffer fish during a 20-mile walk along the coastline from Sunset State Beach outside of Watsonville to Del Monte Beach in Monterey on Oct. 18. She was scouting new places for student field trips.
“I walked right by the first, and I thought, ‘Wait a second, what was that?’ I turned around to look,” she recalled. “Then a little farther south, I saw another one, a bigger one.”
She said she’s seen the spiny fish in Baja California, but never in the Monterey Bay,
Unusual changes in wind patterns for the past year have caused the ocean off the West Coast to warm to historic highs, enticing a number of warm-water species.
Temperatures around the Monterey Bay are 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than usual for this time of year. In August, a buoy in Monterey Bay recorded the water temperature at 69 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest reported there. Normal temperatures range from the high 50s and low 60s.
“It’s a big difference. I’m seeing people without wetsuits or really light wetsuits, people swimming at the beaches, and they’re not chilled at the bone like they normally would be,” said Nate Mantua, a research scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Santa Cruz.
The ocean off California hasn’t been this warm since 1983 and 1997, which were El Nino years.
But El Nino isn’t the only driver of the warmer water temperatures, which began in July of 2014. Winds that normally blow from the north, keeping the warm water around the equator, have weakened. It’s allowed the warm water to push north.
These winds also normally sweep away ocean surface waters, pulling up cold water from down below in a process called upwelling.
“It’s a mystery. No one has a good answer for that,” Mantua said about why the winds have changed. “It’s a pretty complicated phenomenon that has opened up lots of questions about how our climate works for years.”
Fishermen in the Monterey Bay are spotting blue fin tuna, opah and bonito, which are rarely seen in these would-be colder waters. Earlier this month, bright red pelagic crabs, which are native to Baja and the Gulf of California, began washing up on beaches near Pacific Grove.
“It’s going to be interesting to see how ocean temperatures and marine life respond to the El Nino influences that are coming,” Mantua said. —— (c)2015 the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Scotts Valley, Calif.) Visit the Santa Cruz Sentinel (Scotts Valley, Calif.) at www.santacruzsentinel.com Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. AMX-2015-10-27T05:16:00-04:00
