It’s a dance as old as the tides. Long before whales sang or seabirds wheeled through salty air, forests rose from the seafloor, unfurling blades toward the sun. Over eons, kelp evolved exquisite ways to bend to the sea’s rhythms, but its ballet is no mere performance. With stipes stretching up to 100 feet or more, kelp forests produce oxygen, store carbon, prevent coastal erosion and shelter a vast array of marine life.
These vital ecosystems now face unprecedented threats. As ocean waters warm and voracious grazers like purple sea urchins multiply, California’s lush kelp forests have declined by up to 90 percent. Pushed to the brink, kelp is altering its choreography.
The two primary species off the West Coast—bull kelp and giant kelp—employ distinct survival strategies. Bull kelp, an annual, releases spores just once. However, emerging research suggests that in times of environmental stress these tiny reproductive cells can lie dormant, like a terrestrial plant’s seed bank. Giant kelp, a longer-lived species, releases spores repeatedly but can delay or extend its reproductive stages as conditions vary. Both rely on a pause—an intermezzo—but their dance goes on.
These adaptive strategies intrigued Mei Blundell, a doctoral candidate in population biology at UC-Davis. Using mathematical models of the kelp life cycle, she adjusts the strengths of the intermezzi to analyze the responses of a simulated kelp bed to challenges such as a marine heat wave.
“The models help me understand how the strategies, both separately and together, contribute to kelp’s resilience,” Blundell explains. As a lifelong dancer, she also recognized parallels between kelp’s rhythms and musical phrasing and choreography.
Supported by a Bilinski fellowship, awarded for projects that bridge science and humanities, Blundell collaborated with composer Max Gibson, a Ph.D. candidate in UC-Davis’s music department, and choreographer Linda Bair to bring kelp’s hidden drama to life. The result: …all dripping in tangles green, a 16-minute music and dance performance piece.
This Spring, on a seaside bluff under shimmering skies, six women from the Linda Bair Dance Company (including Blundell), dressed in shades of green and brown, transformed into underwater trees. Their supple, strong bodies mirrored kelp blades swaying in ocean swells. When the music surged to a visceral, almost violent shriek, depicting a devastating heat wave, the group of dancers fractured. Strips of “drift kelp” fluttered away—protective “big sisters,” as Blundell calls them, luring predators from healthy kelp.
The performance closed with a rousing anthem as, after another discordant heat wave, vulnerable spores flicked toward the surface—symbols of hope and resilience soaring from the deep.
Though the dancers embodied kelp, the emotions they conveyed transcend species. “What does stress feel like, for an individual or a community?” choreographer Bair asks. “What does agitation feel and look like? I couldn’t think like kelp, but to understand their movement, I had to fall in love with them a little.”
Perhaps we all need to do the same—to protect these timeless dancers and to embrace the lessons they impart. Theirs is a choreography of survival, shaped by adversity and adaptation. Like the kelp, we too must learn to bend without breaking, pause without surrendering, bide our time and rise again–and again–from troubled waters to reach for the sun.
Watercolor: “Bullwhip Ballet” by Alix Watson, photo: Jessica Lee/UC Davis
