From the state of California’s infancy, our relationship to San Francisco Bay, the most urbanized estuary in the United States, has been a complex one.
Video: Saving San Francisco Bay
June 17, 2008 •
The Bay
The San Francisco Bay is our region's dominant geographic feature.
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Invasion of the New Zealand Mud Snail
April 1, 2008 •
The scientists and volunteers with the Coho and Steelhead Monitoring Program don’t yet have to deal with New Zealand mud snails. Barely larger than a grain of rice, this snail from Down Under has invaded water bodies all over the … Read more
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In the Wake of the Oil Spill
April 1, 2008 •
Not long after the cargo ship Cosco Busan ran into the Bay Bridge last November, it was clear that the resulting spill was only the beginning of a much longer story. Volunteers flocked to shoreline parks and beaches, hoping to … Read more
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The Grunion’s One-Night Stand in the Sand
April 1, 2008 •
Solstice is nigh, the tide is high, the full moon illuminates the midnight beach, and before us, thousands of glimmering fish wiggle out of the surf to spawn in the sand. In Southern California beach culture, the annual return of … Read more
Plastics in the Ocean
January 1, 2008 •
Nurdles bobble but they don’t go down. Nurdles are industrial-grade plastic pellets that get melted to make all manner of plastic products, but in the process of packaging and transportation, the nurdles often escape and make their way through storm … Read more
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A Shore Thing
October 1, 2007 •
The East Bay shoreline is strung like a necklace with more than a dozen parks, from the bluffs of Point Pinole near Richmond to the sandy beach and shallow waters of Alameda’s Crown Beach to the salt marshes near Coyote Hills. The place where water meets land is a magnet for life of many kinds, and these parks are no exception: recreational destination for joggers, swimmers, and windsurfers; home for leopard sharks, bat rays, and crabs; wintertime smorgasbord for thousands of shorebirds. Turn back the clock a few decades, and you would have found garbage dumps or dynamite factories here. Skip back a few more decades, and you would find thriving aquatic ecosystems. You can still see traces of all of this and more at the shoreline parks of the East Bay Regional Park District.
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Artificial Reefs for Oysters
October 1, 2007 •
In our October-December 2004 issue, Bay Nature reported on efforts to restore once-thriving Bay populations of the West Coast oyster, Ostrea conchaphila, which were devastated by a complex mix of Gold Rush-era sedimentation, Bay fill, pollution, and over-harvesting. In the … Read more
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Mercury Clean-Up in San Francisco Bay
October 1, 2007 •
In July, the State Water Resources Control Board approved a plan to clean up mercury in San Francisco Bay, fulfilling a mandate set in 2002 when the Bay was placed on the impaired list under the Clean Water Act. According … Read more
San Francisco Bay Oil Spill Resources
October 1, 2007 •
The November 7 oil spill in San Francisco Bay has us all looking for information on how to help. At this point, most of the immediate clean-up work is done, but there are still a number of reources available online, … Read more
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Marsh Gumplant
July 1, 2007 •
Defining the edge of a shifting body of water like San Francisco Bay, whose exact extent changes with every tide, every season, every storm, can be tricky business. In our region the regulators sometimes fall back on a botanical criterion. … Read more