Artifcial reefs like the oil platforms off Huntington Beach and Long Beach offer a place for sea creatures to live. Photo: Bob Wohler

An artificial reef off San Clemente has created a place for ocean wildlife, a project that will be expaned next year. Photo: Southern California Edison.

Sound The gallery will resume in seconds

The wildlife underewater at oil platforms like these off Huntington and Long Beach offer some of the most diverse communities in artificial reefs. Photo: Bob Wohler

An underwater photo shows tires placed under water in Newport Beach, a controversial underwater reef that was removed about a month ago. Photo: California Coastal Commission.

An underwater photo shows the ocean life using the Wheeler North reef off San Clemente, a reef expected to be expanded into the north end of the city as a way to mitigate affects by SONGS. Photo: Southern California Edison.



A photo shows kelp above an artificial reef called Wheeler North Reef, a project expected to be expanded in 2018 into the north end of the area.

A crew about 1,000 feet off shore north of the Wedge are working to get rid of an estimated 1,500 tires on the ocean floor in Newport Beach, California, on Thursday, October 19, 2017. The tires that were dropped into the ocean off Newport Beach in the late 80s, a hotly contested artificial reef experiment between the Newport Harbor entrance and the Balboa Pier. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Oil platforms off of Huntington and Long Beach offer some of the most diverse communities on artificial reefs in Southern Calfornia. Photo: Bob Wohler

6,000 TONS: A transport barge loaded with 6,000 tons of rocks quarried on Santa Catalina Island waits to be unloaded near the derrick barge Long Beach. The Long Beach will be offshore creating an artificial reef until October.

A crew about 1,000 feet off shore north of the Wedge are working to get rid of an estimated 1,500 tires on the ocean floor in Newport Beach, California, on Thursday, October 19, 2017. The tires that were dropped into the ocean off Newport Beach in the late 80s, a hotly contested artificial reef experiment between the Newport Harbor entrance and the Balboa Pier. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)



The goal was to create a safe haven for sea life off the coast of Malibu so, a few decades ago, people chucked a few hundred toilets into the ocean and called them a reef.

In Newport Beach, just a short distance from a harbor filled with million-dollar yachts, the same goal prompted people to build an artificial reef of their own, using thousands of plastic pipes and 1,500 old tires.

Legend says trolleys dumped off the coast of Huntington Beach help waves break exquisitely when the right swell hits, an artificial-reef-turned-surf-spot dubbed “Box Cars.” Light poles stuck underwater are said to be a popular place anglers catch fish; oil platforms off Huntington and Long Beach have become hot spots for sea life.

Look out at the ocean’s surface off the coast of Southern California and you’ll see nothing but blue. But beneath the surface, in many spots, you’ll find a diverse and intricate network of man-made reefs, many built with the idea of boosting sea life and making up for the negative things humans have done to the water. And while most of these reefs are constructed out of big rocks and boulders, others, including many that were sunk prior to the 1970s, use more unexpected materials.

Some of the more harmful stuff — things like tires and old toilets — has been pulled back out of the ocean after people realized they did more harm than good. But other artificial reefs, like the six street cars in the waters off of Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes, are believed to remain untouched.

Now, the state is evaluating what should stay, what should be added, and what still needs to be hauled up.

“Over the years, the ocean was seen as a repository for a lot of… waste. I think the effort in recent years was well-intended, and there was a view that any kind of material would provide good material for reef and marine organisms,” said Cassidy Teufel, senior environmental scientist for the California Coastal Commission.

“We’re evaluating the material that’s been discarded and the repercussions of putting this stuff in the ocean,” Teufel added. “There’s some really negative consequences.”

Reviving reef studies

What exactly lies beneath is anyone’s guess. Over the decades, some reefs may have been swept away by currents or buried under sand.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife this year held a series of workshops to solicit feedback on the region’s artificial reefs, focusing on the need for a baseline study of what exists along the Southern California coast.

“There is a lot of interest there,” said Becky Ota, Habitat Conservation Program Manager for Fish and Wildlife. “We really need to have a consistent, scientifically-sound plan moving forward on how (artificial reefs) should be used, where it makes the most sense and why. Should they all be created and developed in the same way, or different, or does it matter? That’s what we’re trying to get going right now.”

But answering those questions requires financing that, for this project, the state doesn’t have.

“We’re trying to track down money wherever we can,” Ota said.

There are a number of reasons why artificial reefs are such a hot topic. If done properly, they can create a community for fish and stimulate kelp growth, creating a place anglers can have reliable catch. Reefs like sunken ships can become draws for recreational divers. And in the surf world, the idea of artificial reefs creating new or better waves generates excitement.

Many reefs are put in place as an effort to mitigate human impacts on the marine environment. The massive rock reef put offshore in San Clemente, called Wheeler North Reef, is a specific offset for the negative consequences created by the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

A two-year plan to expand the reef into the city’s northern end could happen next year or in 2019.

Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at Cal State University, Long Beach, just finished a two-year project at the existing Wheeler North Reef, south of the pier. Lowe and his students used acoustic transmitters to find out whether tagged fish stay on the artificial reef or travel between natural reefs.

The findings showed that the fish that live in the artificial reef don’t like to move to natural reefs, and vice versa.

Other studies show the current reef isn’t living up to expectations, the reason why Southern California Edison wants to extend it into the northern part of San Clemente.

“After years and years of study, it showed it was under performing, specifically not producing the volume of fish through the permit. To respond to that, Southern California Edison has agreed to the expansions of the reef,” said Teufel.

Lowe, a decade ago, also studied the artificial reef habitat along 27 oil platforms off of California’s coast, eight off Long Beach and Huntington and the rest near the Santa Barbara channel. Those reefs, he said, are some of the most productive habitats in the world.

“For me, it was like this laboratory that we could use to learn how fish decide what’s a good home,” Lowe said.

The addition of artificial reefs, especially where there’s nothing but sand, can create places for sea life to gather, settle and, eventually, thrive.

“It’s like finding an oasis in a desert,” Lowe said. “If it’s just sand, there are only certain species that can use it. But if there’s a structure there, it becomes someone else’s home. You start to create communities.”

Dana Wharf boat captain Todd Mansur said he hopes more artificial reefs will be added further out into the ocean, where there’s no existing structures, to create new places where mollusks and migratory fish like sand bass might congregate.

“An artificial reef built in deeper water would support a strong ecosystem,” he said.

Toilets and tires

One of the oddest jobs boat operator Glen Dexter has ever tackled: removing about 500 toilets from the ocean in Malibu about a decade ago.

“They piled it up on top of rock reef, and it buried the rock, and it really hurt a good reef,” said Dexter, who works for the California Lost Fishing Gear Recovery Project.

“If (the toilet reef) was on sand, no one would have cared and they would have left it there.”

Ota said many “interesting” choices were made by people who made artificial reefs years ago.

“In some cases, it was a way to get rid of stuff,” she said.

About a month ago, Dexter oversaw another removal project, pulling about 1,000 tires from the water off Newport Beach. They’d been sunk in the 1980s by a hotly-contested artificial reef experiment that was constructed between the entrance of Newport Harbor and the Balboa Pier.

The reef was the brainchild of Rodolphe Streichenberger, who also used 2,000 plastic jugs and 100, 20-foot PVC pipes along 10 acres of ocean floor. The thinking was that mussels would grow on the artificial structure, kelp would flourish, and wildlife would flock to the area.

But studies by the California Coastal Commission, which opposed the project, showed it didn’t create the diverse underwater world once envisioned. Dexter said the only thing found were thousands of dead clams stuck inside the tires.

After looking at what works and what doesn’t, scientists now believe is that the closer an artificial reef can get to replicating the natural environment, the better.

“The more you can replicate a natural system, the more likely it will function as a natural system,” Teufel said. “The further you get from a natural material, the more likely there will be differences in how the community is behaving.”

For now, Ota said, the Department of Fish and Wildlife isn’t supporting new man-man reef structures — at least not until they can figure out what exists below the ocean’s surface.

But experts believe the reefs that do exist could be giving sea creatures a bit of needed help.

“In Southern California, we’ve trashed a lot of our habitat. Recovering that habitat is hard,” Lowe said.

“But we can replace lost habitat in form of artificial reefs.”