Two key marine species in Puget Sound have become symbols of resilience, thanks to Kitsap-based recovery programs and a senior at Bainbridge High School.

Efforts to restore bull kelp and pinto abalone, both essential parts of the marine ecosystem in Washington, may receive a boost after state leaders in Olympia and at the Department of Fish and Wildlife highlighted recovery efforts this legislative session.

Governor Bob Ferguson signed bill HB 1631 into law, designating bull kelp as the state’s official marine forest. The text of the law is simple and does not come with additional protections for the seaweed, but that’s intentional, explained Betsy Peabody, director of the Puget Sound Restoration Fund — the idea is to create a new state symbol.

“The basic idea is to recognize bull kelp forests as part of our identity — for our state, tribes, ecosystem, economies, communities, our way of life, and really see that,” said Peabody. “Sometimes we’re so enchanted with the things that forests support and feed — the birds, the fish, the orcas, all those wonderful things — that we don’t see the forest that makes those species possible. It really was just trying to make the forests that are foundational to all these incredible marine species more visible.”

From bull kelp to bill help

BHS senior Sebastian Ford partnered with Peabody to draft the legislation, which was sponsored by a group of legislators, including 23rd district Rep. Greg Nance. Ford has been member of the Seattle Aquarium’s Youth Ocean Advocates team for about four years, a summer learning and teaching experience for high school students interested in marine conservation. He got involved with a kelp gardening program at YOA, where he met Peabody, and together they decided to draft a piece of legislation.

“One of the interesting things about trying to create or designate a new state symbol is that you need to connect it to young people. Specifically with bull kelp forests, it’s been part of our state’s identity going way back, and it is still incredibly important to the health of our marine forests. But you have to connect to these symbols to the future, and the way you do that is with the youth voice,” said Peabody.

Ford is a particularly motivated young voice. He’s been fascinated by marine biology since he was young, and his work at the Seattle Aquarium broadened his interest, but the HB 1631 campaign gave him a platform.

“I think one thing in conservation that happens is that we don’t look at the big picture often enough. Compared to how much life was in Puget Sound when the first Europeans showed up, we live in a desert of life. I would love it if we had big bull kelp forests and the sea so full with life that the rivers would turn pink when the sockeye salmon came in to spawn. And similarly that there would be so much life that it would be hard not to notice. That would be my goal,” Ford said. “As to what would look like more reasonable goals, I just want our bull kelp forests back. We need to help our Southern Resident orcas and salmon, particularly chinook salmon.”

HB 1631 passed with unanimous support in the House and all but one vote in the Senate. Ferguson signed the bill, decreeing April 16 to be “Bull Kelp Day,” and named Ford “Washingtonian of the Day” for his contributions.

The moment was “magical,” Ford said, but the purpose of the recognition was not lost on him.

“I felt that I was being awarded for the work I was doing, rather than the person I am, which was really cool. I felt honored, and a little light-headed,” Ford said.

Complicated ecosystems

In 2020, a coalition of state agencies, nonprofits, tribes and research entities including PSRF outlined six goals to advance bull kelp recovery in the Salish Sea: understand kelp stressors; describe kelp distribution; designate protected areas; restore kelp forests; promote awareness from decision makers and deepen public understanding of the value of kelp.

The groups were responding to an alarming trend: kelp is declining at a rapid rate across the entire West Coast.

Puget Sound is home to 22 species of kelp, the greatest biodiversity of kelp outside Japan, and the rooted forests and rafts of floating kelp covered about 500 square miles in Washington until the 1970s. Much like old-growth forests, kelp creates a canopy that sustains many species, including juvenile salmon and rockfish, and creates a stratified marine environment that keeps the shoreline stable. Bull kelp is an annual in many places, growing up to 100 feet in a year, but when its life cycle is disrupted, the ecosystem starts to unravel.

Warming ocean waters make the blades of bull kelp at the oceans’ surface develop improperly, which diminishes the quality of kelp spores that fall to the ocean floor and create poor conditions for animals that use the kelp for shelter, Peabody said. Without places to hide, species like rockfish have low survivorship, and their prey, kelp crabs, start to overgraze the young bull kelp. Pollution, too, creates a feedback loop: sunlight can’t penetrate murky polluted water, which prevents young kelp and other seaweed species from sprouting, and the excess nutrients in the water gets used up by algae blooms, which die off and cover the bottom of the sea floor — blanketing high-quality attachment surfaces for kelp spores.

A 2023 assessment by the Kelp Forest Monitoring Alliance of Washington State found that the extent of “floating kelp bed extent ranges from stable to substantial decline and total loss,” with remaining stable populations on the North Coast and eastern Strait of Juan de Fuca. Forests in the South and Central Puget Sound are the most at risk, with some areas showing a total loss.

Because environmental conditions vary greatly over Puget Sound, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for kelp decline. In the north Sound, the Samish tribe has been monitoring decline near the San Juan Islands to establish baseline data. In the central and south Sound, the Squaxin and Suquamish tribes have partnered with PSRF to remove excess kelp crabs and plant historic kelp beds with germlings from the nonprofit’s seed bank, grown in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laboratories in Manchester.

The idea is to recreate the conditions that allow bull kelp to flourish from germination, without being outcompeted for sunlight by shorter kelp species or eaten by crabs, not unlike the succession process by which terrestrial forests regrow after disruption, like a wildfire.

“You need a magnitude of kelp, a critical mass of kelp in order to maintain the health of a kelp forest. So when you start to lose that, it just becomes difficult to kick-start it again. To restore a kelp forest, there’s a two-step process in order to re-establish that magnitude, that critical facilitating, dense structure,” said Peabody.

Kelp forest guardians

Humans aren’t the only stewards of the new state forest. While HB 1631 highlighted the plight of bull kelp, the state Department of Fish and Wildlife is reviewing the “endangered” status of the pinto abalone, a sensitive mollusc that grazes the rocky seafloor.

The marine snail is a choice edible of the Puget Sound and the only abalone species along the north Pacific Coast, but its population has suffered since the mid-1990s. There was never any commercial fishery for the snail, but overharvesting reduced the population density such that spawning events failed, and the pinto abalone declined 97% between 1992 and 2017. It made the state Endangered Species List in 2019.

PSRF is also behind pinto abalone restoration, rearing about 12,000 juvenile snails out of their hatchery in Manchester in the waters of Sinclair Inlet and transferring them to 18 areas around the San Juan Islands, but progress has been slow.

“While pinto abalone recovery efforts are progressing well, the species’ population trend over the past 10 years is not increasing and key criteria for downlisting to threatened have not been met,” said Katie Sowul, WDFW’s lead abalone biologist. “For these reasons, we recommend retaining the pinto abalone’s endangered classification in Washington while continuing to promote and advance our collaborative recovery efforts.”

The WDFW is soliciting public comment until June 1.

Despite the snail’s pace recovery, researchers have seen new signs of positive change. 2024 and 2025 were the snail’s most successful years since 2009, Peabody said. WDFW and partners observed several wild juvenile abalone for the first time in over a decade in 2025, suggesting that wild populations are reproducing on their own again.

That’s good news for kelp, too, Peabody explained.

“I consider abalone to be one of the kelp forest keepers, because they are grazers on those rocks where bull kelp settles — they’re our essential workers,” Peabody said. “Because what they’re doing is they’re grazing those rock surfaces, keeping them clear for settlement, so that bull kelp can attach and grow. They just have such an important, beautiful role in maintaining the health of our kelp forests, and so that is part of the story.”