1.

Businesses that harvest kelp to extract an ingredient used in ice cream, toothpaste, and paint,
among other things, have harvested the kelp forest aggressively this year. What happens when
part of your ecosystems’ forest disappears?

Potential Effects:

If not restored or taken care of, a lot of marine species will die. Kelps grow on rocky
reefs along a quarter of the world’s coastlines, creating an essential habitat and food source for a
myriad of species like abalone, urchins and barnacles. More than 350 different species — over
100,000 individual organisms — can live on a single kelp plant, and that’s not including the fish,
birds and mammals that depend on the whole kelp forest.

Climate change impact will get worse. Kelps rapidly take up vast amounts of carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere — up to 4,300 metric tons per square kilometer of kelp forest each
year. This is critical for climate change mitigation because in addition to reducing how much
carbon dioxide we emit into the air, we must also ramp up processes that capture and store
carbon dioxide. Kelp forests can even help protect our coastlines from storms that are
intensifying in the changing climate by slowing down waves and reducing coastal erosion.

It will greatly impact our economy and the way we live. Kelp forests support marine food
webs and valuable recreational and commercial fisheries that supply a broad range of products
including food and chemical compounds. Kelp is used widely as emulsifiers and bonding agents
in things like pills, toothpaste, ice cream, chicken nuggets and even beer. It is difficult to put an
accurate monetary value on just how much these ecosystem services are worth. In the case of
California, after the kelp forests disappeared, the state had to temporarily suspend recreational
fishing of red abalone because the sea snails, which rely on kelp, were dying off. A reported
31,000 people visit the red abalone fisheries every year, generating $44 million in revenue to
local communities.
2. There’s been an oil spill, which kills off most sea otters. Because of this, with no predator to
eat purple sea urchins, the population of urchins has exploded. They mow down the kelp forest…

Potential Effects:

3. A disease has infected the local sea lion population. They become sick, and their population
declines.

Potential Effects:

If the sea lion population declines, the sea life will become poor and other species on sea will
become less productive when it comes to increasing their population growth. Fisheries would
catch lame fishes. Sea lion help the food web to genitalize processing it normally and ordinals. If
the sea lion population would decline, more damage will occur in sea life.

4. El Niño weather brought a huge storm off the coast! Sand ran into to the rocky tide pools to
bury animals that live there. Good thing the runoff didn’t make it all the way out to the deeper
kelp forest.

Potential Effects:

5. After a week of with lots of rain, the fertilizer that washed into the ocean from the farms on
the California Coast caused by a bloom in phytoplankton. When these microscopic creatures die
after their short life, their decomposition creates an environment in the water with little oxygen,
making it toxic to small bivalves, shrimps and crabs.

Potential Effects:

The potential effect of phytoplankton killing in their short life may be poisonous fish or marine
animals that this is the effect of their decomposition to spread in water that is toxic to small
marine animals that can kill small animals sea effect of spreading toxic from their
decomposition.