Time To Read
Date Last Modified
Place 02 · Monterey Bay · Wrap-up
The Comeback Bay
A century ago this bay had lost its otters, and seventy years ago its sardines; now people come from all over the world just to watch it.
About 20 minutes · 1 video · a full practice review of the whole bay
Look back
Seven chapters ago you did not know this
You can now
Explain why the wind turns right
Earth’s spin bends moving air and water, so in the Northern Hemisphere the surface ocean ends up moving 90° to the right of the wind.
You can now
Say why cold water is rich water
Spring winds push surface water offshore, cold deep water rises to replace it, and it brings up the nitrate and phosphate the plankton were waiting for.
You can now
Follow sunlight up a food chain
Kelp and phytoplankton capture the energy, and only about 10% makes it up each step. That is why there are so few great white sharks.
You can now
Name a keystone species
Otters eat urchins, urchins eat kelp. Take the otters out and the forest turns into an urchin barren.
You can now
Read the tides
The Moon and Sun set the rhythm, spring tides and neap tides, and every zone on the rocks lives with its own share of time in the air.
You can now
Balance a sand budget
Rivers and bluffs put sand in, angled waves walk it along the shore, and Monterey Canyon takes it out for good.
You can now
Do the math on a fishery
A population grows fastest at half its carrying capacity. Catch more than that growth, especially in bad ocean years, and it collapses.
Photos: Frank Cone, ArtHouse Studio, isaac mijangos, Kindel Media, David J. Boozer, Griffin Wooldridge, Pok Rie / Pexels
One more thing
What the bay is worth now
NOAA Sanctuaries — Get Into Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary. The bay you just spent seven chapters on, from the people whose job is to look after it.
The bay by the numbers
- 1992 — Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary designated
- 6,094 square miles of protected ocean, one of the largest US marine sanctuaries
- 276 miles of protected shoreline, from Marin County to Cambria
- 1984 — the Monterey Bay Aquarium opens on the site of the last sardine cannery
The canneries made their money by emptying the bay. Today it makes its money full: people pay to watch otters in the kelp, humpbacks lunge-feeding a few miles offshore, and a sardine school circling in an aquarium where the last cannery stood. It is not finished: sunflower sea stars were wiped out by wasting disease, urchin barrens spread, and the sardines are still too scarce to fish.
Where you can see it for yourself
Cannery Row, and the otters just offshore
Put it all together
Bay Review
Seven chapters, one bay. This review walks the whole place, from the wind to the sardines, with a few questions that tie chapters together. Retry as often as you like. If one trips you up, the feedback names the chapter to revisit, and every chapter has its own eight-question practice set at the bottom of the page.
Practice
Bay Review: the whole place
Twenty questions covering all seven chapters and this page. Aim for a clean run, then you are ready to leave the bay.
Where we go next
Next stop: the Galápagos
The Galápagos Islands sit right on the equator, and penguins live there. The trick you just learned is back: cold water, delivered by ocean currents and pulled up from below, keeps the islands cool enough for penguins and rich enough for everything that eats fish.
Photo credits (Pexels): Andre Estevez, Frank Cone, ArtHouse Studio, isaac mijangos, Kindel Media, David J. Boozer, Griffin Wooldridge, Pok Rie, Daniel Cantwell, Tori Pezzulla❤️.