Having worked on this really obnoxious case study for nearly 2 months now, a major theme emerged in all the things that I had been reading: California’s Intertidal is not monitored closely enough for policy to actually be enacted.

All over the coast despite regulation preventing the collection of many different species, sizes of many different gastropods have been decreasing (among these was the Owl Limpet, hence the relation to my case study… I wasn’t just reading journal articles for fun again, don’t worry) despite 2 of the four species not being edible (Article here).

If they aren’t harvested for food why are they declining in size? Could it just be from visitation? The study found that in places where visitation was strictly monitored, sizes had not decreased from historical levels. This leads me to think that maybe individuals are being destroyed simply because there is such a huge amount of people visiting the areas described in the article. I mean, these areas border some of the largest metropolitan areas in California let alone the United States. I would assume that a lot of those people living there go to the beach occasionally.

Can we prevent people from visiting the tide-pools and would that solve the problem? That could be a crushing blow to many communities around the intertidal who rely on tourism to bring in a major portion of their economy. Would this mean that places like West Cliff Drive for example in Santa Cruz, Ca would have to be fenced off at the edge of the cliff so people couldn’t access the beach and therefore couldn’t access the rocky intertidal?

The article recommends more enforcement, with with an economy that is already in the dumper and just an overall lack of funding for any programs these days, you would think that would be  impossible.

Where do we go from here?