CBS This Morning: New tactic in combating exploding sea urchin population
Off the Northern California coast, there is a crisis beneath the waves. The kelp forest – seaweed that provided habitat and food for much of life in the ocean – is gone, wiped out by an exploding population of purple sea urchins.
The seabed has become an underwater desert. "This is mostly now a lot of rock, a lot of sea urchin, and not a whole lot of anything else," said research scientist Laura Rogers-Bennett.
Since 2014, 95% of the kelp forests from San Francisco to Oregon have disappeared. At the Bodega Marine Laboratory in Bodega Bay, Calif., Rogers-Bennett has been studying the spread of the voracious urchins.
"Underneath is the mouth, and there are five white jaws in the center," she explained to correspondent John Blackstone. "They can chew through rock."