Could the LA Wildfires Harm Marine Life in California?

Could the LA Wildfires Harm Marine Life in California?

0:00:01.3 John Sheehan: When the wildfires in Los Angeles raged, I had this experience, like a lot of people, of helplessness. I checked on my friend who lives on the outskirts of the Palisades and just watched TV as the fires continued to spread.

0:00:14.3 Noelle Bowlin: The Palisades fire still largely uncontained, and it's already the most destructive fire in LA County history. One local official says five...

0:00:20.5 JS: And at one point I remember feeling relief that the Santa Anas were blowing the fires toward the ocean. Like that was at least a barrier preventing more destruction. Though, I pretty naively hadn't considered the additional impacts to the ocean and coastal habitats. This is Dive In With NOAA Fisheries. I'm John Sheehan and today we're going to hear how scientists who were working in the waters off Coastal California took action when it was clear that the size and scale of these wildfires was something unprecedented.

0:00:53.8 NB: The scientists need to know, like, how did it travel the plumes? How is that moving through the atmosphere? What's making it into the water? You know, those were the kinds of things that we needed to be able to answer and we needed the samples to do it.

0:01:05.7 JS: This is my guest, Dr. Noelle Bowlin of NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center and the director of the CalCOFI monitoring program, which was in progress when the wildfires began.

0:01:15.7 NB: CalCOFI is the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations. We have been monitoring the ecosystem for going on 76 years now. We are the longest running and most complete ecosystem monitoring program in the world.

0:01:29.2 JS: CalCOFI is crucially a collaborative program.

0:01:32.5 NB: We work with our partners, that's Scripps Oceanography and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, sampling the biology and the physics of the ocean. My aspect of the program that I that I lead, the fisheries component, we look at particularly larval fishes, the early life history stages of fishes because they are ever present in the water.

0:01:52.2 JS: CalCOFI runs quarterly surveys and its winter survey vessel had left San Diego on January 3, 2025.

0:02:01.1 NB: We were in the Southern California Bight when the wildfires broke out. Our ship was offshore of Santa Monica when the wildfires were starting to rage, truly rage. And the reports I was getting back in real time from our chief scientists and other scientists on the boat was that 100 miles offshore you could see this giant plume of yellow smoke, a 100 miles is pretty far. They were working their way inshore towards Santa Monica Bay doing routine sampling. They could see what looked like snow. I mean, they knew it wasn't snow, obviously. They said it was really beautiful to see, just, you know, just taking it out of context to see things falling and they said it was very devastating and dramatic and tragic knowing that the snow or ash that was falling was people's lives. It was their homes that was falling all around them. And that was, umm, it got really heavy, they said, and quite dense about 15 miles offshore. And we we know that the winds, the Santa Ana winds, were blowing those particles even farther offshore.

0:03:08.8 JS: Of course. And let's acknowledge for a moment that, you know, while we're talking about the impacts on coastal waters, you know, obviously, we were all, you know, watching the devastating impacts on on Los Angeles. Umm, and, you know, for me, thinking about this, about this topic now, it was this sort of added layer of despair that things were so bad in Los Angeles and oh, right, it didn't stop at the coastline. Those fires had an impact in the water, too.

0:03:44.4 NB: That's right. To say that it's tragic and devastating, that doesn't even capture the beginning of what this means for that community. I'm a person that's from that community. My family's affected by this fire. My friends, certainly, and other loved ones. But, yes, the the folks on the boat were reporting that it was a very surreal experience to be doing their routine work at sea collecting samples and then the boat drives right into it, and it's all being blown offshore out into the water. And they said it was really, it it was not only falling around them, but it was floating all around as well. It's people's homes, it's people's lives that have burned up, blown offshore, and is snowing around them.

0:04:28.3 JS: Yeah. My gosh. And so as director of the program, and you're getting these reports that the environment that you're working in is being so devastated, what you, what do you do with the program? What was your, what was your reaction to what to do with CalCOFI?

0:04:45.5 NB: Yes, that was. So the first question was, you know, we're collecting, putting our nets in the water, and they're just coated to completely coated by soot and ash. And, you know, the concern of, should we be sampling? Should we be doing this? Can we do this? And, you know, of course, everybody on the boat was like, well, yes, we have to do this, but what's the best way to do it? And I'm so thankful that with modern technology, we're in real time on the phone figuring this out. Another researcher at Scripps Oceanography, her expertise is in aerosols and pollution. She's like, let's sample. Let's keep sampling. I was like, fantastic. We'll just keep doing that. Maybe we can, all of us together were like, maybe whatever we can find out from the samples we're collecting can help with who knows what. Maybe it helps with remediation crews understanding what pollutants are in the air versus what makes it to the water, how far away it gets from the epicenter of the fires. Maybe, we can help with that. We didn't necessarily have more sophisticated goals than that in the moment, but it was very much like, well, let's do what we do best. Let's collect this information, reach out to other experts in wildfire science and toxicology, and see what we can do to help with the efforts to understand what happened and how to remediate.

0:06:04.8 JS: Wow. Can you talk about some of the other ways that you you adapted to the conditions?

0:06:10.1 NB: Yes. So then what we did was we thought, okay, well, the ship is here. The ship is right in Santa Monica Bay at our routine sampling sites as the fires are raging. We had quite the grid to continue sampling all the way up to San Francisco Bay. And these are the funds used to do this work are allocated by the federal government, by taxpayers, and there are mandates we have to meet. Right? But we looked at the schedule, we worked with the captain and the navigation officer and figuring out, okay, well, if we take this route, if we do the samples this way, let's get back there. We had enough time, we could go back and resample so that we can say what happens a week later. Let's get back there. So, I wrote a quick proposal to my leadership and I said, can we do it this way? This is our immediate rapid response plan. Can we divert this NOAA ship off course and go back and sample? Because we think that we can provide some helpful information down the road and collect valuable samples. And immediately my director was like, do it. Go. And so, we had, uh, a scheduled stop to bring the ship in near San Luis Obispo to resupply some things.

0:07:16.9 NB: But in that time, it was okay. Now we need to get equipment to do specific additional sampling that we were not set up for on the ship. There was a lot of scrambling for myself and then a couple of other technicians here on my team, we put it on the truck with the Scripps folks, and then we drove it. My teammate drove it up, and then the small boat from the the NOAA ship came in. And then we're taking multiple runs to bring all this equipment out on the boat. And then they headed immediately to Santa Monica Bay to to to sample the area. So we were resampling with our traditional CalCOFI methods, the net sampling, the water sampling. And then we had this additional equipment that got added when we knew we could send the ship back to look for trace metals, to look for aerosols, to track, that kind of thing.

0:08:03.4 JS: That is so intense.

0:08:05.6 NB: Yes, it was very intense. I can only imagine what it was like for my teammates at sea, the scientists, the ship's crew. Everybody was involved in what my chief scientist told me. My my colleague, my teammate, he said to me, it was a beautiful moment because the way we run ships is we run them 24 hours. There's a crew in the day and then a crew at night. So you sleep opposite of the shift that you're working. And he said the entire science team, everybody woke up, everybody wanted to help. Everybody wanted to have a part in making sure that we got everything we could get to provide information that could hopefully help the community and the scientists that are gonna try to explain this. Because this is what I learned as we were making the plan. A colleague at Scripps, who is in our CalCOFI group, she reached out to some other colleagues that are wildfire scientists and toxicologists, and they said, this fire is very special, not only because of its size, 'cause there's multiples, right, so it's encompassing a big area. But the fuel for this fire is different. It is not vegetation.

0:09:14.4 NB: It is predominantly urban structures, which is terrifying because it's a lot of toxic material, heavy metals, plastics. And so, they said it is critical that we try our best to get the information that we can to understand what in science what we would call the fate and transport of these materials. And how how how is it making it through the the food web if it's going to? We don't know for sure. Because another thing that they stressed to me was, again, I'm a larval fish ecologist. I study the biology of fishes. And these folks study toxicology and wildfires. And they said, "Just because something's toxic for nurses are human, doesn't mean it's toxic for something else in the environment." So that's another reason we need to know all of the chemical structures of the things that are going into the ocean.

0:10:04.1 JS: Yeah, absolutely. Umm, can you give us a sense? And I know it's still early days, but what kinds of things are you seeing in the water column? I mean, I imagine there's things like asphalt, there's plastics, there's fire retardants. The the number of awful things you don't want to be in the water. They're all in the water now.

0:10:29.0 NB: Right. Precisely. And presumably a number of those chemicals make it to the water on a routine basis, but not with this kind of frequency or density or concentration, right? So what do we know? Remember, we we we diverted the ship, we sent it back to sample more, but then we had to finish what we were doing. That just finished at the end of last week. And our samples got shipped from San Francisco back here to the Southwest Fishery Science Center just last Saturday. We've only had them in hand for not even a full week. And so now we are planning, for instance, our typical way of doing this is to bring a plankton sample. So putting those nets in the water to collect the plankton and the larval fishes. Now those samples are full of ash and soot. And so now we are working with the wildfire scientists and toxicologists to figure out, how do we parse this properly? What is the best way to handle it? And I have to be honest, we're being very cautious with it because I, we don't routinely handle samples like that. Like, one one of my teammates sent me a picture from the ship.

0:11:34.0 NB: If you can imagine a mason jar and say 2 inches of the bottom are, it's 2 inches solid of anchovy eggs. Recently, spawned anchovy eggs floating at the top are 3 inches thick of burned material. And so, winter moving into spring, that's peak spawning season for the anchovies that occur off of our coast. And anchovies are incredibly important prey for so many animals. And so, when they sent me that picture, they're like, "Noelle, look at this. This is insane. What does this mean? What does it mean for the other eggs that are out there? Will they be impacted by this? Maybe, maybe not. We don't actually know that." You know, so these are the kinds of things we can look at over time, especially when we went back to resample 'cause there were eggs and there will be hatched out larvae as well. And we're gonna be back out there at the third week of March to do our, again, routine sampling. But we will go to this area and those recently spawned eggs, they'll be baby fishes out, presumably. And with CalCOFI, we have, this is the power of long-term monitoring. We have the context to say, okay, well, let's compare the winter and spring samples from this year to the winter and spring samples from previous years. Is it different? Will there be a change? Maybe. Will it be detectable? Maybe. Will, we we look to our record to find out. That's how we'll do it.

0:13:00.2 JS: You mentioned you spoke with wildfire experts. Umm, what kind of, what kind of insights could you, could you get from them?

0:13:08.0 NB: So the wildfire experts I learned so much. It was a crash course, if you will, on the different types of chemicals that we should expect in the different types of heavy metals, which were very scary to me. What they said was they are very interested in this. Again, like all of us, our motivation is to help, but also because it is such a unique situation. One of the the scientists said that in any recent history, the most similar event which is very, still very different was the Lahaina fire. And he he said to me, we are just now learning about the structures that burned, how much made it into the the ocean. And whereas, it's quite different. The habitat right off Lahaina, those are coral reefs there. And so, a lot of ash and soot and material sunk down onto the reef. We don't have a reef here off California, but we are in a eastern boundary current area with upwelling. And so, what goes down ends up coming back up. Will that also be materials from the fire? I don't I don't know, but I know that we will find out.

0:14:14.7 JS: You mentioned how the Lahaina fire was kind of one of the most comparable events,
have you taken samples during other wildfires? Wildfires that have been maybe more contained in in just like, brush or uninhabited areas?

0:14:43.5 NB: Well, good question. I know that there have been other fires and our cruises have been out during those times. Nothing like this one. Nothing like what we just saw. So, yes, in the CalCOFI record, there I think from 2006 or 7, I I don't recall, we had a cruise out during a fire here in San Diego. And so, we will be looking to that. But again, it's not, it wasn't nearly as dramatic in terms of the the samples. Very devastating for people that are affected by it in their neighborhoods. I I just simply mean in terms of what the samples look like. Nothing like what we saw. Our nets that we put in the water, they're white, and my teammates were sending pictures back to me. They are coated black. They're just coated. And then, they're not, you know, this isn't just like a butterfly net that's really small. These are big nets and they are coded. So the type, these kinds of samples, where I've I've not seen this in our record before.

0:15:43.1 JS: You know, because this is so fresh and you're only now getting samples back and being able to sort of look at this, like, mountain of data that you, you've collected. I I I don't wanna ask you to to make any kind of prediction. That said, what can you say about how long you're gonna be sort of dealing with these impacts?

0:16:07.9 NB: Boy, that's a great question that we all want the answer to. I don't know. I don't know. I do think that, you know, this is something that all of us have talked about in terms of thinking about how to sample, how to talk with the right people about the right ways to analyze the samples. The generation times at different trophic levels will matter. So the effects could be on the order of days, like phytoplankton 'cause their generation time is so quick. But then, you know, we have other trophic levels. So you can go from days, you could go to weeks. So like the anchovies, within weeks we should see what the anchovy larvae look like. The babies, the ones that hatch those eggs that were, were freshly spawned during the time of the fire. That's gonna be weeks, there will be months, it could be years. For something like a long lived large animal that migrates in and out of the system like a a marine mammal, like a whale, or like birds who are diving for fishes and eating them in the area. Like we just, we we we don't know. We are looking though. We are working together because we owe it to the people to provide the answers. And it is our responsibility to answer to the people and provide the information to help keep them safe. That's our job.

0:17:22.4 JS: Mm-hmm. Umm, and I just have to say that, you know, I am I am so sorry for for you and your family and your, the community out there. And I am so glad that you're doing this work.

0:17:40.1 NB: Thanks, that's very kind of you. I wish we could do more. It feels like not enough. Yeah, it's really hard. It's hard to see those pictures, you know, seeing my, well, the rubble, the ash mounds from my aunt and uncle's house. It's friend's house. It's it's like a bad apocalyptic movie that you just don't wanna be a part of. But we are, the whole community is and we're all affected. It's it's hard and and we're so thankful that that so many people came together to help fight it and save people and whatever precious memories in their lives they could take with them as they were fleeing. We're so thankful for that. This is such a hard situation for everybody.

0:18:23.4 JS: Uh, Dr. Noelle Bowlin, thank you so much.

0:18:25.4 NB: You're welcome. Thank you for being interested in this and and for your your thoughtfulness in asking the questions and understanding that we don't yet have the answers, but we are working towards them. Thank you for your interest in our program. It means a lot, it truly does.

0:18:38.2 JS: Dr. Noelle Bowlin is the Director of the CalCOFI Ecosystem Monitoring Program. CalCOFI stands for California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations and is a collaboration between NOAA, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Dr. Bowlin is program lead for NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center. You can learn more about the program or any of the other regional surveys at our website, fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan and this has been Dive In With NOAA Fisheries.