About This Project

Aside from their beauty, California kelp forests provide a host of both ecological and economical benefits. Several commercial and recreational species call kelp forests their home, such as lobster, calico bass, abalone, among others. Furthermore, the very presence of kelp forests along the coast provides some relief from beach erosion due to storm surges. While kelp forests and the aforementioned ecosystem services are relatively well-studied, we know little about the California moray, a resident predator that occupies the rocky reefs within this ecosystem. The California moray, the only moray found off the golden state, is elusive and our goal is to uncover its feeding ecology and basic biology providing critical baseline data.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Despite the widespread concern for predator loss and its cascading effects at various trophic levels, we have a poor understanding of the contribution of top predators, such as moray eels, to the community structure and health of the kelp forest ecosystem.

The combination of a cryptic lifestyle and the lack of a commercial fishery has excluded morays in standard species surveys. Moreover, functional morphology studies of the feeding behavior of moray eels have shown that the pharyngeal jaws of morays enable them to swallow large prey whole. However, we lack information on moray diet, maximum prey size and how often they consume prey. In the present day southern California kelp forest ecosystem, we are unaware of any predators of moray eels which may earn them status as apex predators.

What is the significance of this project?

This proposal will contribute to our over arching goal which is to characterize the effects moray eels have on the kelp forest community around southern California's Catalina Island. Through our organized efforts over the last four years, we have been collecting data on diet, habitat depth, microhabitat preferences, growth, and movement data to provide a better understanding of the basic biology of the California moray.

Collectively, these data will not only provide a better understanding of routine predation in the southern California kelp forest ecosystem, but may be used to inform ecosystem management. Most importantly, this is the first multi-year data set collected for the California moray; it will provide the foundation or benchmark against which changes are measured in future years.

What are the goals of the project?

Our main objectives are to combine our data on moray density, dietary information, and growth rates, with bioenergetic analyses to calculate the energetic needs of the southern California's kelp forest moray population. In 2015 we plan to continue trapping morays to gain more resolution on our dietary data and to use respirometry on a wide size range of morays to determine metabolic rates for this species.

With metabolic data, we will be able to estimate the energetic requirements of the moray population in the kelp forests around Catalina Island. We predict that due to biomass alone, G. mordax has the potential to play a critical role in maintaining community structure within the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary.