Heal the Bay Blog

Most of my July was spent wading through our local Santa Monica Mountain streams, assessing the biological communities and habitat within them. Despite some of the less glamorous aspects, such as battling poison oak, stinging nettle, and the occasional tick, I relished in the opportunity to get out of the office and immerse myself, literally and figuratively, in the streams. I get to see secret spots in the Santa Monica Mountains that few folks know about and see critters that largely go unnoticed and unappreciated.

Thanks to Heal the Bay staff, interns, and volunteers, we surveyed eight streams this year. Our primary goal of this yearly survey is to assess the biological community living in the stream. When I say “biological community,” many people think of fish, birds, and amphibians –-and these are all biological communities that use and depend on the streams – but I mean the bugs. These aquatic bugs are also called benthic macroinvertebrates: organisms with no backbone that live on the bottom (benthos) of the stream and are big enough to be seen with the naked eye. They include things like snails, worms, crayfish, and insects.

Many of the insects found are the larval stages of dragonflies, damselflies, black flies, and mayflies. The type and quantity of bugs that you can find in a stream tell you a lot about the quality of the water and the habitat. Depending on the community of bugs that we find, we can give our streams a rating on their biological health. We currently use a scoring system called the Index of Biotic Integrity or IBI score. The score can range from 0 to 100, with scores of 0-20 indicating very poor conditions, 21-40 indicating poor conditions, 41-60 indicating fair, 61-80 indicating good, and 81-100 indicating excellent conditions.

The streams that we assess show a wide range of scores – the best being Upper Cold Creek with an average score of 77 and the worst being Triunfo Creek at Kanan Road with an average score of 13. Bugs can be thought of as an indicator species (or more appropriately, “indicator group”), which means that they are a sensitive group and their presence can be used to indicate information about the health of the stream. Indicator species can also be used as an early warning system; if they show a decline or problems, there is likely to be a greater danger to the ecosystem or other species.

Besides bugs, another group that is typically thought of as an indicator group are amphibians. They are very sensitive to pollution and habitat degradation and sometimes the first organisms to show evidence of a problem – along with bugs, they are considered the “canary in the coalmine” for the aquatic world. This year during our biological assessments of the streams, we saw many native amphibians, including the Pacific tree frog (Pseudacris regilla), California tree frog (Pseudacris cadaverina), California toad (Bufo boreas), and the California newt (Taricha torosa). We saw lots of metamorphs, which are frogs that have just metamorphosed from tadpoles and they are very small and extremely cute. Since I described some of the cool bugs that we find in the streams last year, I thought I’d describe some of our local amphibians.

• The most common native frog in the Santa Monica Mountains is the Pacific tree frog; it is distinguishable from other frogs by a dark stripe that runs through the middle of each eye. These frogs are variable in color and typically are green or brown, and always with an eye strip.
• Their sister species, the California tree frog is less common and tends to be found in rocky streams where they blend in to gray rocks. These frogs are more warty and gray or washed out in color (like a cadaver, hence their name P. cadaverina) with no eye stripe. Their call sounds like a duck quacking whereas the Pacific tree frog sounds more cricket-like.
• The California newt is another cool amphibian – they are dark orange/brown on top and bright yellow/orange underneath. That bright coloration is to warn you that they are highly toxic! Newts contain a potent neurotoxin, called tetrodotoxin, which repels predators. Newts live on the land most of the year then become aquatic during the breeding season. Male CA newts fight over access to females and if you’re lucky, you might see a newt mating ball in the spring.
• California red-legged frogs used to be common in southern California but now are found in only one spot in the Santa Monica Mountains and are listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. We were not lucky enough to see them but had to take extra care and caution when we visited a stream where they have been documented. The National Park Service is planning to reintroduce the frogs to other locations in the mountains.

Unfortunately, many of these cool native amphibians are declining due to loss of habitat and invasive, non-native species that prey on eggs and larvae of amphibians, such as bullfrogs, crayfish, and introduced fish.

— Katherine Pease,
Heal the Bay Watershed Scientist

You can help amphibians by never releasing unwanted pets or animals, removing invasive crayfish from Malibu Creek with Mountains Restoration Trust, and protecting their habitat through our monthly restoration events.

Find out more about Heal the Bay’s Stream Team.

The stars of Disney Channel’s Teen Beach Movie lend a helping hand to clean the beaches with Heal the Bay leading up to Coastal Cleanup Day.

Last year, Heal the Bay speakers reached more than 40,000 Angelenos across Los Angeles with our message about solutions to pollution.

How the heck did we do that? No cloning was involved, just hours of time donated by our Speakers Bureau volunteers, Heal the Bay’s elite pollution fighting team!

We thank our longtime cadre of dedicated speakers who fan out to schools, clubs, cleanups and all kinds of events to help us raise awareness about how to protect the ocean. This week we “graduated” and trained 21 new Speakers Bureau volunteers – a record number for Melissa, our Speakers Bureau coordinator.Thanks  to our new class! We look forward to partnering with you in the months and years to come.

Thank you also to Buca di Beppo, which donated food to fuel our new speakers.

We also thank our neighbors Jersey Mike’s and Fresh Brothers, as well as Just Chill for providing refreshments to our Corporate Healers, volunteers and staff these past few weeks.

Learn more about how you can reach out to – and improve– your own community via one of our volunteer programs.

Exhilarating! That’s how I describe my recent expedition with the Pacific American Volunteer Association (PAVA) to Korea. Our mission was to explore some of the many water spaces the Koreans have transformed over the past two decades. Beyond the adventure of seeing a new land and exploring a culture quite different from my own (this being my first trip to Asia), I had the opportunity to glimpse what potentially awaits so many of our own local water spaces.

For those of you unfamiliar with this story, I mentioned a few weeks back that one of our community partners was taking me on a journey with them to Korea to hear and see the story of how different cultures and civilizations deal with water in the environment. For the past three years, the students of PAVA Jr have joined me on an educational exploration of water in the environments throughout Los Angeles, and this year was about taking those lessons one step further.

Some of the highlights of my trip:

• Mallipo Beach in Taean County, where a 2007 oil spill devastated a beach tourist community, leaving local marine ecosystems coated in 290,000 tons of thick sludge and local residents in a thick economic and very personal depression. But, in the face of such an overwhelming catastrophe, community members from throughout the region joined forces to volunteer in one of the world’s largest single efforts, bringing together just over 1 million people to help clean the beaches and remove oil. Now, Taean Love (a local organization) continues to keep Mallipo beautiful, and after five short years of recovery, the city has seen tourism return to normal. As we prepare locally for Coastal Cleanup Day, I can feel swell with excitement at what can happen when people join together to volunteer.
• Oncheoncheon River near Busan, Korea’s second largest city. Here, in a dense urban center, what once was a creek polluted beyond recognition from local development and nearby industrialization, is now part of a green belt through the city, providing much needed recreation and habitat space for both people and animals to enjoy. A bicycle path, park space, and outdoor sports fields fill the outer reaches of the floodplain, while riverside reeds, shrubs, and native birds fill the shores and banks. Again, standing in this space so far from home, I couldn’t help but think of the Glendale Narrows section of our own Los Angeles River, where for the first time in 80 years, people have been allowed to recreate this summer, I can only be excited by the possibilities! 
• Suncheon Bay, an extremely well preserved coastal wetland complete with quick little red crabs that dart in and out of holes when you’re trying to take pictures of them (I myself have no pictures for this site as my camera died right when was I was trying to capture the  moment). At just over 6,000 acres, Suncheon Bay boasts the widest reed bed of all of Korea, and is also home to several rare and endangered bird species, including the Hooded Crane and the Chinese Egret. This space was my favorite of the whole trip, if only because standing in such a wide and open wetland with reeds dancing in the wind all around you feels like you’re floating in a sea of green. Here too, I can only think of our own Ballona Wetlands could become, once restoration begins.
• The Cheonggyecheon in Seoul, the heart of South Korea’s capital for 600 years. This river provides  local freshwater for drinking and cleaning, and well as food from fishing and trapping. After the Korean War, when hyper industrialization began to drive population inwards from rural settlements to the urban center, the Cheonggyecheon became home to shanty towns built unsteadily over the creek space. Later, when the city’s need became transportation, a freeway was built over the space to provide a thoroughfare from east to west for the bustling city. Much like our own Los Angeles River, the Cheonggyecheon became the victim of urbanization and growth, hidden beneath concrete and impaired beneath a city that no longer saw it.

Then, in the mid-90s, Korea began to change its environmental tune, investing time, money, and political and social capital in revitalization their urban waterways. The Cheonggyecheon was daylighted from beneath its concrete enclosure, and once again brought into the city’s daily life. While it is not the greenway that the Oncheoncheon in Busan is, nor the sprawling eco-preserve that Suncheon Bay, the Cheonggyecheon offers the hustling and bustling city a return to calmer times. Walking along its banks, I felt a sigh of relief from the skyscrapers and traffic that detail so much of life in Seoul, and the exhaustion from my trip gave way to soaking my feet in the water’s cool flow while watching several ducks bathe themselves. I can only hope that when the Los Angeles River is made anew, it will offer up this same urban getaway.

And thus my travels ended in Seoul. I will say my experience in Korean waters is but a glimpse of the potential that we strive for here in our own city. It’s true that the students and I saw many visions of the future and of potentially cleaner waters on this trip, but most of all we received a renewed sense of drive to protect what we love in our own home town.

—  Eddie Murphy, Heal the Bay’s Watershed Education Manager

Discover the wide range of Heal the Bay’s public education resources.