Posted by Max Bottomtime on January 14, 2003 at 14:50:30:
In Reply to: Re: Boring Subject "Sea Urchin" posted by Steve on January 14, 2003 at 13:21:11:
I would agree to some extent. However, in the mid 1970s there were only a handful of single kelp stalks on the Palos Verdes peninsula. Dr. Wheeler North and about 100 volunteers made many dives around P.V. smashing the urchins with hammers. It took less than one year before we had healthy kelp forests again. Ten years after that, I found a small reef that was nothing more than purple urchins, rocks and a few senoritas. I made 35 dives there, doing nothing but smashing urchins. Within a year, there was a very healthy reef system. Fish were everywhere. I even had a "pet" abalone that I would feed on every dive. I stopped diving there to let the reef take it's natural course. I was very dismayed the next time I visited the reef two years later. It was an urchin barren once again. My ex-wife used to refer to smashing urchins there as weeding her garden. 90% of my dives the past decade have been wreck dives, which I love for many reasons, most of all being that there are no urchins that deep.