Killer whales have joined the rare club of animals that can make and use tools, for the first time being observed crafting a kind of brush out of kelp and then using it on fellow pod members. The feat ...

Oceans, rivers and lakes are chockful of thousands of underwater plants and algae collectively described as seaweed. Demand for seaweed — kelp, specifically — has exploded as scientists have confirmed ...

Fossils of kelp along the Pacific Coast are rare. Until now, the oldest fossil dated from 14 million years ago, leading to the view that today's denizens of the kelp forest -- marine mammals, urchins, ...

In order to help monitor and protect the endangered Southern Resident orcas in the Salish Sea, scientists are turning to help ...

The Santa Barbara Channel’s kelp forests and its sandy beaches are intimately connected. Giant kelp, the foundation species of rocky reefs, serves as a major part of the beach food web as fronds of ...

"The nutritional quality, or the amount of nutrients in the kelp tissue seems to be changing," said the study's lead author Heili Lowman, a biogeochemist with the University of Nevada, Reno, who ...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was co-published with Scientific American and supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center. MONTEREY — It’s 1988. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is four years old, and so am I.

There's a rallying cry at various bays and beaches up and down the West Coast; it's "Help the kelp!" The towering brown seaweed with the floating bulb on top is in steep decline. That's alarming ...

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- Over the last 10 years, an ecological disaster has taken place along the coast from San Francisco north. Bull kelp forests, which provide some of the most productive habitat ...