Oceana and Blancpain Conduct Ocean Expedition Around the Channel Islands 

Interesting, colorful, and weird sea creatures and corals take shelter around the rocks that border the Channel Islands. But not many Santa Barbara County residents get the chance to glimpse them (some are pretty great at camouflage, after all). 

However, between Monday, April 29, and Friday, May 3, national nonprofit Oceana — in partnership with the Swiss watchmaker Blancpain — embarked on a five-day ocean expedition around the Northern Channel Islands to explore and document this region’s unique biodiversity. In the process, they took some great footage of these funky ocean-dwellers. 

Southern California’s undersea geology is “unlike any other off the U.S. West Coast,” Oceana says, as it is marked by a series of faults, banks, and underwater mountains (seamounts).

“This geology, combined with cold nutrient-rich waters that upwell from the deep, make this region a global biological hotspot supporting diverse ocean life and habitats,” said Oceana spokesperson Ashley Blacow.

“These ocean waters include migratory routes for large whales — including endangered humpback whales — nurseries for great white shark pups, breeding and foraging habitat for California sea lions and giant sea bass, gardens for colorful deep sea corals, and canopies of giant kelp forests, to name a few.”

For the expedition, researchers partnered with a San Diego–based company to use a remotely operated vehicle intended for military purposes as a seafloor-mapping tool for the first time. 

Additionally, they collected and analyzed water samples to detect what animals inhabit and traverse the island’s waters by the DNA “footprint” they leave behind in the water colony; conducted scuba dive surveys to document the diversity of fish and habitats and assess what may be at risk due to human impacts; and identified individual giant sea bass (a fish that can weigh more than 500 pounds and was overfished in the 1900s) and their aggregation sites to get new insights into their movements and potential for conservation, in partnership with UC Santa Barbara scientists and their “Spotting Giant Sea Bass” research project. 

“The groups plan to utilize the imagery and scientific information gathered at sea in support of protecting ocean biodiversity by reducing entanglement of ocean animals — including whales, sea lions, sharks, and other fish — in set gillnet fishing gear,” Blacow said.

This scientific expedition is the first of three voyages Oceana and Blancpain have planned in partnership to explore ocean biodiversity off California through 2025.

For more information about the expedition, visit Southern California Expedition 2024: Oceana U.S.A.