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- We would see even more negative impacts
to kelp abundance throughout the nearshore
as we continue to have warming waters.
I think it would drastically change
how we see our nearshore coastline.
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With an arch, the center stone is called a keystone,
and it's the one piece that really holds that arch together.
So, in ecology, a keystone species is an organism
that really helps maintain an ecosystem to exist
in the form we would expect it to,
and if we lose that species,
that ecosystem will change dramatically,
or even cease to exist.
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Kelp forests are extremely important,
really in so many different aspects of the world.
They provide nursery habitat
for other fish and invertebrates,
which leads to food sources,
so other marine mammals and seabirds
also will use the kelp forests
when they're in that healthy cycle.
They absorb carbon,
so in terms of climate change,
they play a really important role with that.
And when they're healthy and abundant along our shoreline,
they'll protect the coast when we have large storms.
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In areas where sea otters were present,
they were consuming lots of urchins.
This helped control that population
and allowed the kelp forest
to be healthy and flourish.
In areas where the sea otters were not present,
the urchins were able to kind of expand
their population unchecked,
graze on the kelp as their food source,
and to the point where we no longer saw kelp forest.
It was what is often referred to as an urchin barren.
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Kelp forests also provide a barrier of protection
from those white sharks.
So, areas that have healthy kelp forests
will have lower white shark-related mortalities.
And that also protects, you know,
by having that help forest absorbing that carbon,
that can help mitigate some of the impacts
we're seeing of climate change.
So, by sea otters helping maintain that kelp forest,
they're helping themselves in terms
of those larger impacts as well.
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We, as humans, need to do a lot of work
to help protect our environment,
and one of the ways to do that is to restore an ecosystem
so that they can continue to do their work
and help us do that as well.