This article was originally published in UCSB's ' The Current '.
The Santa Barbara Channel is a hotbed of biodiversity, thanks to the many species whose ranges meet and overlap in the area. As a transition zone between the cold water of the California Current and the warmer seawaters of Southern California, the channel hosts a variety of fish, birds and marine mammals that live in, feed in and travel through it.
“There’s a hidden biodiversity in our reefs. By ‘hidden,’ I mean the great number of small species that we generally overlook,” said UC Santa Barbara marine ecologist Bob Miller , who directs the National Science Foundation-supported Santa Barbara Coastal Long Term Ecological Research (SBC LTER) program , focused on kelp forests and their connections to the shoreline and open ocean.