The fierce El Niño forecast for this winter may well be hard on the flippered and scaled creatures that share our beaches and waters.
Yet some headlines are hopeful, even awe-inspiring. Take the account of a giant, gentle whale shark gliding through the blue waters off the Southern California coast.
I wondered if these dots could be connected, so I turned to experts and The Times’ extensive coverage to try to break down what El Niño means for local ecosystems. Here’s what I found out.
1. What we know for sure
El Niño is a climate pattern triggered by unusually warm waters in the tropical Pacific, which in turn affects weather around the world in different ways. Long, planetary waves push the warm water to our coast and also raise the sea level, according to Clarissa Anderson, director of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“We can always say that waters will be warmer and that they will be higher,” she said. But predicting how ocean life will respond is tricky, she said, because animals often don’t react to environmental shifts in straightforward ways.
This time, El Niño arrived amid a marine heat wave, which can make it harder to tease out what can be attributed to El Niño alone.
Despite those caveats, El Niño has some common effects.
2. That doesn’t belong here
The whale shark spotted swimming between Malibu and Santa Barbara Island is indicative of an El Niño hallmark. The warmer waters often invite tropical and subtropical species. Past visitors include different types of tuna that have delighted sport fishers, and open-ocean red crabs that can change the poop color of birds that feast on them. Different types of plankton can also show up.
Commercial fisherman Carl Sbarounis said he photographed the whale shark about 30 miles off the coast.
(Carl Sbarounis)
This year’s event might have been responsible for something unprecedented. In September, not one, but two, olive ridley sea turtles laid eggs miles apart in Seal Beach and Huntington Beach. Those are the first-known sea turtle nests on the country’s West Coast, as my colleague Corinne Purtill reported. Since the historic laying, the eggs have been moved to an aquarium in Long Beach for safekeeping.
Anderson said this could very well be the work of El Niño. “Things that are maybe coming up from Mexico may be kind of being pushed or moved around with currents that are pretty strong moving to the north,” she explained.
3. Change in food supply
On the West Coast, upwelling typically occurs in the spring and summer when winds push warm surface water offshore, allowing deep, cold, nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface. Food becomes plentiful, making it an ideal time for seals, sea lions, seabirds and dolphins to give birth.
But El Niño can disrupt the winds, dampening upwelling and reducing the food supply.
“Adult animals can usually figure it out,” said Dave Bader, chief operations and education officer for the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro. “They can swim further. They can go out to find where the food is. The young animals just don’t have that same physiological capacity, perhaps, or just not the long-term knowledge … so they end up stranding in droves.”
Bader worries history could repeat itself: Between 2013 and 2016, during another El Niño and ocean heat wave, thousands of California sea lion pups were found underfed and in distress.
An elephant seal is released at Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro as volunteers from Marine Mammal Care Center look on in late August.
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
4. The down low on domoic acid
In recent weeks, dozens of sea lions suffering from domoic acid poisoning have turned up on beaches from Monterey County to Sonoma County — and some fear this is only the beginning. Domoic acid is a toxin produced by algae and typically sickens animals that feed on open-ocean fish.
Scripps’ Anderson, who studies harmful algal blooms, said such events do appear to be “more connected” to El Niño on the Central and Northern California coastline.
One possibility is that it’s due to warmer waters, but it could be more complicated. “We know that the plankton that produce domoic acid respond to stress if they don’t get enough of the right kind of nutrients,” and El Niño and marine heat waves can create that stress, she said.
5. Kelp isn’t happy
Giant kelp thrives in cool, nutrient-rich waters, so it’s perhaps not surprising that it fares poorly under the opposite conditions. Due to changing storm patterns, the kelp forests are also battered by more damaging winter swells, according to Scripps associate researcher Ed Parnell. When kelp doesn’t do well, the animals that depend on it — such as rockfish — similarly suffer.
“I am greatly concerned that with continued ocean warming and the increased likelihood of severe and possibly more frequent El Niños, much of Southern California’s kelp canopy could disappear within my kids’ lifetime,” Parnell wrote in an online article.
6. Shifting baseline
The past is no longer the best teacher because years of sustained warming have changed the landscape, according to Anderson. We might not be able to glean much from, say, the monster El Niño of 1982.
“This is a totally different world and a totally different ecosystem now,” she said.
Even more El Niño news (and one opinion piece)
And a few things in environment news
California is on track to meet its goal of conserving 30% of its land — but not its waters — by 2030, reports my colleague Noah Haggerty. Since Gov. Gavin Newsom established the “30×30” initiative in 2020, virtually all of the increase in protected waters came from a single marine sanctuary.
Gov. Gavin Newsom was busy signing bills as yesterday’s deadline closed in. Among them:
Assembly Bill 1448 strengthens California’s protections against offshore drilling amid escalating efforts by the Trump administration to open up the coast to new oil and gas operations. It essentially says that oil operators in federal waters — three miles offshore and beyond — can’t use pipelines and equipment that lie in state waters.
Senate Bill 1135 brings back a program aimed at reducing conflict between wild animals and people. It arrives as the state’s rebounding wolf population continues to cause concern among ranchers.
P.S.
Sea Otter Awareness Week wrapped Sept. 26. But sea otters have not ceased to be adorable — or a keystone species. So enjoy a photo of one “having a ball.”
A non-releasable sea otter swims in an enclosure at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach in 2014.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
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And be sure to tune into the Boiling Point Podcast, where this week host Miranda Green convened a panel of hopeful and determined thinkers to talk about a warming world at NYC Climate Week.
For more wildlife and outdoors news, follow Lila Seidman at @lila_seidman on X and @lilaseidman.bsky.social on Bluesky.
