California’s Waters Have Never Looked Like This Before
The Atlantic · Joshua Partlow ·
El Niño is driving whole tropical ecosystems north.  
El Niño is driving whole tropical ecosystems north.
Up and down the West Coast, ichthyologists—professional fish nerds—can barely contain themselves. Whale sharks normally in the Sea of Cortez have been seen as far north as Malibu. Spotter planes have photographed giant manta rays flapping their way north. Sport fishermen who normally have to travel to Baja for wahoo and blue marlin are now catching them by the boatload off the coast of San Diego. And a rainbow of reef fish that are hundreds of miles beyond their normal range are poking around the piers of Southern California.
Mike Couffer, a semiretired biologist from Newport Beach, has been scuba diving nearly every day to see the mohawk-style fins of star-studded grouper, tiny iridescent orange creolefish, three-banded butterflyfish, and other exotic fish hardly ever seen in this area. “It’s just nuts, what’s going on out there,” he told me. The balmy waters produced during this year’s El Niño have essentially imported a whole ecosystem from Mexico. In recorded history, “this is the most profound movement of tropical fishes into California that anyone’s ever seen,” Milton Love, a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara’s Marine Science Institute, told me.
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