Milton S. Love

• University of California, Santa Barbara

Rockfishes (genus Sebastes) are one of the most diverse clades amongst teleosts (ray-finned fishes). The genus includes more than 110 species which are distributed broadly across the North Pacific Ocean, North and South Atlantic Ocean, and Southeastern Pacific Ocean. Rockfishes exhibit particularly high diversity along the western coast of the Unit...

Offshore oil and gas platforms (OGP) have been installed worldwide and initially with limited consideration given to the nature of their positive or negative long-term interactions with the natural marine habitats. However, as OGP reach the end of their useful life, with many being decommissioned and removed, it is timely to review the growing evid...

Thousands of oil and gas structures have been installed in the world's oceans over the past 70 years to meet the population's reliance on hydrocarbons. Over the last decade, there has been increased concern over how to handle decommissioning of this infrastructure when it reaches the end of its operational life. Complete or partial removal may or m...

Offshore oil and gas platforms have a finite life of production operations. Once production ceases, decommissioning options for the platform are evaluated. The role that a platform's jacket plays as invertebrate habitat can inform the decommissioning decision. Worldwide, very few scientific surveys of marine invertebrates have been conducted at pla...

Between September and November in 1995 and 1998–2011, we conducted surveys of demersal fishes and their associated benthic habitats using direct observations from human-occupied vehicles over the Footprint, an isolated submerged ridge located seawards of the Santa Cruz Island-Anacapa Island Passage, Southern California, extending over bottom depths...

Offshore platforms, subsea pipelines, wells and related fixed structures supporting the oil and gas (O&G) industry are prevalent in oceans across the globe, with many approaching the end of their operational life and requiring decommissioning. Although structures can possess high ecological diversity and productivity, information on how they intera...

Asphalt volcanoes and other extensive hard tar seafloor accumulations are known from the Gulf of Mexico, off Angola, and in the Santa Barbara Channel (SBC), southern California. There are two major volcano features in the SBC: Il Duomo (about 20 m high, cresting at a bottom depth of 115 m) and Il Duomito (about 15 m high, cresting at 185 m). While...

A fishy tale of long and short life span Fish have wide variations in life span even within closely related species. One such example are the rockfish species found along North Pacific coasts, which have life spans ranging from 11 to more than 200 years. Kolora et al . sequenced and performed a genomic analysis of 88 rockfish species, including lon...

This paper is a checklist of the fishes that have been documented, through both published and unpublished sources, in marine and estuarine waters, and out 200 miles, from the United States-Canadian border on the Beaufort Sea to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. A minimum of 241 families and 1,644 species are known within this range, including both native and...

This paper is a checklist of the fishes that have been documented, through both published and unpublished sources, in marine and estuarine waters, and out 200 miles, from the United States-Canadian border on the Beaufort Sea to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. A minimum of 241 families and 1,644 species are known within this range, including both native and...

Anthropogenic climate change has resulted in warming temperatures and reduced oxygen concentrations in the global oceans. Much remains unknown on the impacts of reduced oxygen concentrations on the biology and distribution of marine fishes. In the Southern California Channel Islands, visual fish surveys were conducted frequently in a manned submers...

Under the influence of climate stressors, species distributions of fishes in the eastern Pacific are shifting, with many species moving poleward. Moray eels (family Muraenidae) are ecologically important predators inhabiting coastal reefs. Due to their cryptic nature and lack of commercial importance, the species distributions of muraenids in the t...

Offshore oil and gas platforms have a finite life of production operations. Once production ceases, decommissioning options for the platform are assessed. The role that a platform’s jacket plays as fish habitat can inform the decommissioning decision. In this study, conducted along the crossbeams of a California platform jacket and using an ROV, we...

We report the largest specimen from the stromateoid family Nomeidae. The specimen, measuring 1283 mm total length unpreserved, was caught on hook and line from shore in Port Hueneme, California, USA in June 2019. Despite scavenging damage, the specimen was identified as a longfin cigarfish, Cubiceps paradoxus, using morphological characters and mol...

The ability to properly identify species present in a landscape is foundational to ecology and essential for natural resource management and conservation. However, many species are often unaccounted for due to ineffective direct capture and visual surveys, especially in aquatic environments. Environmental DNA metabarcoding is an approach that overc...

There are currently thousands of offshore platforms in place for oil and gas extraction worldwide, and decommissioning efforts over the next three decades are estimated to cost more than US$200 billion. As platforms reach the end of their useful lifetime, operators and regulatory agencies will assess the environmental impact of potential decommissi...

We are pleased to present the second edition of this comprehensive identification guide encompassing all shallow water marine fishes within California waters. Keeping with tradition, this new version preserves the layout, feel, and detailed line illustrations of the original but with over 200 additional species and a water resistant cover. In all,...

What does it take to have a many-decades-long career in marine science entirely funded by contracts and grants? Why would any thoughtful person contemplate a life filled with such uncertainty? What personality flaws would lead to this behaviour? Enter my world, dear reader, and find out.

The offshore hydrocarbon basins of the world and their neighbouring countries are faced with an immense decommissioning challenge. Uncertainties in regulation and costs, coupled with limited environmental data, stifle consideration and support for alternative options to full removal. In separate regions, scientists and industry are forming partners...

This paper serves as an introduction to a symposium on the role that California oil and gas platforms serve as habitats for fishes and invertebrates. As of 2019, there are 27 platforms in state and federal waters off California, and the decommissioning of some of these platforms is imminent. Thus, consideration of whether to completely remove a pla...

The decommissioning of southern California offshore oil and gas platforms will create major economic, engineering, and environmental challenges in the next decade. Platform jackets, conductors, and shell mounds often host a diverse and productive marine community, and among the myriad considerations associated with decommissioning planning, platfor...

Reproductive output can serve as an important metric to assess the value of a marine habitat as it combines fish densities, size at maturity, and the exponential increase of fecundity with body length. California may permit some portion of the structures of offshore oil and gas platforms to remain in place if a "net benefit to the marine environmen...

A diverse assemblage of adult reef fishes and invertebrates occurs at offshore oil production platforms in the Southern California Bight (SCB). Coincident with the initiation of the decommissioning of six platforms in the SCB, the goal of this study was to examine how a platform's geographical location plays a role in its potential contribution of...

There are thousands of offshore oil and gas platforms worldwide that will eventually become obsolete, and one popular decommissioning alternative is the "rigs to reefs" conversion that designates all or a portion of the underwater infrastructure as an artificial reef, thereby reducing the burden of infrastructure removal. The unique architecture of...

Between 2005 and 2011, using manned research submersibles, we compared the fish assemblages associated with the midwater platform structures (at depths between 40 and 195 m) of two southern California oil and gas platforms, Gail and Eureka. Gail is a typical California platform, with rounded crossbeams and pilings, while the midwater jacket of Eure...

Between 1995 and 2013, we surveyed fishes living around 23 California offshore oil and gas platforms (midwaters, bases, and shell mounds) and 70 natural habitats. These platforms were distributed between about Point Arguello, central California, and Huntington Beach, southern California, had seafloor depths between 49 and 363 m, and were surveyed b...

Using video transects of oil and gas platform crossbeams off central and southern California, we characterized the structure-forming invertebrates (with a height of at least 20 cm) found around 23 oil and gas platforms at depths between 20 and 363 m. We observed 20,357 individual invertebrates, comprising 19,800 Cnidaria and 557 Porifera of at leas...

Recent pathways taken by pelagic juvenile fishes to offshore oil platforms were reconstructed from remotely sensed and in situ measurements of currents and hydrography. Juvenile fishes comprised 52.8% (16,952 of 23 species) of all individuals (32,080 juveniles and adults of 35 species) observed during scuba surveys conducted about twice per week at...

Consideration of whether to completely remove an oil and gas production platform from the seafloor or to leave the submerged jacket as a reef is an imminent decision for California, as a number of offshore platforms in both state and federal waters are in the early stages of decommissioning. Laws require that a platform at the end of its production...

It is presented a systematic literature review of artificial reef research, including 620 studies throughout the world from 1962 to 2018. The primary focus of this study was to examine long-term trends in research, focusing on ecological and socioeconomic questions, and to develop new research directions for this field. From 1962 to the beginning o...

Increasing reliance on deep-water renewable energy has increased concerns about the effects of the electromagnetic fields (EMFs) generated by submarine power cables on aquatic organisms. Off southern California, we conducted surveys of marine organisms living around energized and unenergized submarine power cables and nearby sea floor during 2012–2...

Offshore renewable energy facilities transmit electricity to shore through submarine power cables. Electromagnetic field emissions (EMFs) are generated from the transmission of electricity through these cables, such as the AC inter-array (between unit) and AC export (to shore) cables often used in offshore energy production. The EMF has both an ele...

Although the economic value of wildlife historically has been attributed to its consumptive use, the global growth of ecotourism has expanded wildlife valuation to include non‐consumptive uses. In California, the critically endangered giant sea bass ( Stereolepis gigas ) is paradoxically both a flagship species in the recreational dive industry and...

The sensory drive hypothesis proposes that environmental factors affect both signalling dynamics and the evolution of signals and receivers. Sound detection and equilibrium in marine fishes are senses dependent on the sagittae otoliths, whose morphological variability appears intrinsically linked to the environment. The aim of this study is to unde...

We analyzed fish data from 2332 trawls collected from depths between 55 and 1280 m off the coast of California. For the 732 species known from California, including 283 species (~39% of the California ichthyofauna) in this study, very few were contained by the faunal break at Point Conception, with 21% limited from the south and only 4% from the no...

When oil and gas platforms become obsolete they go through a decommissioning process. This may include partial removal (from the surface to 26 m depth) or complete removal of the platform structure. While complete removal would likely eliminate most of the existing fish biomass and associated secondary production, we find that the potential impacts...

California's oil platforms are nearing the end of their productive lives, and therefore will be decommissioned in the near future. These structures have been shown to be important habitat for both settlement and growth for reef fishes. Important information on the biological effects (i.e. loss of biomass and production) of different decommissioning...

Sagitta otolith shape was analysed in twenty sympatric rockfishes off the southern California coast (Northeastern Pacific). The variation in shape was quantified using canonical variate analysis based on 5th wavelet function decomposition of otolith contour. We selected wavelets since this representation allow the identifications of zones or single...

Significance Secondary production is the formation of new animal biomass from growth for all individuals in a given area during some period of time. It can be a powerful tool for evaluating ecosystem function because it incorporates multiple characteristics of a population or community of organisms such as density, body size, growth, and survivorsh...

The Christmas tree coral Antipathes dendrochristos is a recently discovered black coral species that represents a habitat associated with numerous sensitive taxa in the Southern California Bight. We evaluated whether broad-scale oceanographic features influence coral density and size by selecting from among generalized additive models (for density)...

There is concern that offshore oil platforms off Southern California may be contributing to environmental contaminants accumulated by marine fishes. To examine this possibility, 18 kelp bass (Paralabrax clathratus Girard, 1854), 80 kelp rockfish (Sebastes atrovirens Jordan and Gilbert, 1880), and 98 Pacific sanddab (Citharichthys sordidus Girard, 1...

Recently, the relative exposure of Pacific sanddab (Citharichthys sordidus) to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at oil-production platforms was reported, indicating negligible exposure to PAHs and no discernible differences between exposures at platforms and nearby natural areas sites. In this report, the potential for chronic PAH exposure i...

Recently, the relative exposure of Pacific sanddab (Citharichthys sordidus) to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) at oil-production platforms was reported, indicating negligible exposure to PAHs and no discernible differences between exposures at platforms and nearby natural areas sites. In this report, the potential for chronic PAH exposure i...

Many of the oil and gas platforms off California harbor high densities of young-of-the-year (YOY) fishes, primarily rockfishes (genus Sebastes). One decommissioning option for these platforms is "topping," cutting the structure some distance below the water line and leaving the rest of the jacket in place. Questions have arisen regarding how this o...

All offshore oil and gas platforms have finite economic life spans. One of the decommissioning options for these platforms is complete removal, requiring the use of explosives to dislodge the support structure from below the seafloor. Off California, this decommissioning option would kill large numbers of platform-associated and commercially import...

To determine the environmental consequences of decommissioning offshore oil platforms on local and regional fish populations, contaminant loads in reproducing adults were investigated at seven platform sites and adjacent, natural sites. Specimens of three species (Pacific sanddab, Citharichthys sordidus; kelp rockfish, Sebastes atrovirens; and kelp...

A biogenic structure ecosystem of extensive worm tubes of Chaetopterus sp. harbouring different fish species was investigated at Anacapa Island, southern California to determine the numerical abundance, species composition, body size, and seasonality of the ichthyofauna associated, and their relation with the worm patch size. Bimonthly, a 30-m swim...

Community interactions alter the management actions necessary to recover overfished species using marine reserves. For example, in communities where a larger species preys on their juveniles' competitors, overfishing of the larger species may cause prey population expansion; subsequent increased competition for the juveniles of the over fished spec...

Geographic variation in ecological and environmental factors may lead to intraspecific differences among populations. For the California sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher), an important predator in kelp forests and a target of commercial and recreational fisheries, we evaluated the degree to which different populations exhibited variation in density...

Bocaccio (Sebastes paucispinis) has been one of the most important species of rockfish to both commercial and recreational fisheries in California Current waters over the last century. Actions taken to rebuild the stock of bocaccio residing off of California have been responsible for dramatic changes on both commercial and recreational groundfish m...

We examined variability in otolith chemistry of wild caught fish in relation to in situ temperature and salinity within the California Current System. Barium, magnesium, and iron from the most recent growth zone in otoliths differentiated pelagic juvenile shortbelly rockfish (Sebastes jordani) residing in water masses with distinct temperature and...

Using quadrat sampling of video transects obtained by the submersible Delta, we characterized the larger invertebrates living on the shell mounds surrounding 15 oil and gas platforms (in waters 49-365 m deep) off southern California. The sea stars Patiria miniata (Brandt, 1835), Pisaster spp., and Stylasterias forreri (de Loriol, 1887); sea anemone...

Marine debris is a global concern that pollutes the world’s oceans, including deep benthic habitats where little is known about the extent of the problem. We provide the first quantitative assessment of debris on the seafloor (20–365 m depth) in submarine canyons and the continental shelf off California, using the Delta submersible. Fishing activit...

Farnsworth Bank is a relatively small, semi-isolated feature composed of sharp pinnacles and located on the seaward side of Santa Catalina Island, southern California. Despite its heavy colonization by the rare purple hydrocoral Stylaster californicus (verrill, 1866), and its popularity as a fishing and diving site, no complete fish survey of this...

Between 1995 and 2006, manned submersible fish surveys were conducted on the sea floor throughout the Southern California Bight. A total of 401 dives (comprising 1,015 transects and 14,373 habitat patches) were made in waters between 19 and 365m deep. All natural habitat types were included, although both soft sea floors and rocky reefs were survey...

Phylogenetic divergences have recently been included in analyses that aim to elucidate patterns of biodiversity in space and time. We introduce a generalized framework for two widely used phylogenetic diversity (PD) indices: Rao’s quadratic entropy (QE) and Faith’s PD. We demonstrate how this framework can be used to partition diversity simultaneou...