The Patch of Sea Floor That Regrew a Bay: Julia Platt’s Remarkable Legacy

Monterey Bay in the 1930s stood at the nadir of its ecological fortunes, having sustained every imaginable indignity that mankind’s boundless greed could inflict upon it over the course of a brutal century. In the 1800s and 1810s, Russian and American traders destroyed the otter population of the California coast in an attempt to cash in on the Chinese fashion craze for otter pelts. When those had all been wiped out by the 1830s, merchants turned to killing the whale population of the Bay starting in the 1840s, until by the late 1860s the gray and humpback whale populations were so depleted that further hunting was no longer worth it. 

Having stripped the sea of its otters and whales, individuals from the Chinese community gathered at China Point on the south side of Monterey Bay realized that they could make a good living from the abalone that carpeted the floor of the Bay, setting to work in earnest in the 1850s and having wiped out the population within a couple of decades. Meanwhile, the lack of otters, whose prodigious appetites kept the sea urchin population in check, meant that urchin populations exploded, and proceeded to cut a path through the rich kelp forests that played such an important role housing and feeding the fish population of the Bay, destabilizing the entire marine ecosystem. 

And then they came for the sardines. Starting in the early 1900s, and reaching a crescendo of unchecked destruction by the mid 1940s, the canneries of Monterey Bay, adeptly applying political pressure through the flexing of their economic might, earned for themselves the authorization to pull all of the sardines out of the sea that they could grab, and soon a population that seemed limitless, capable of producing untold millions of pounds of fish, was all but gone, while the failed canneries left in their wake a Bay reeking from decades of dumping 100,000 pounds of fish offal into its waters every day, and devoid of any of the ecological infrastructure needed for recovery. 

Well, almost. One woman, trained in science and forged in the fires of politics, saw the disaster coming, and employed every ounce of her influence to create a place safe from the carnage, a couple of small plots of seashore that could not be despoiled in the mad pursuit of a buck. Her name was Julia Platt (1857-1935). She was forty-two years old when she came to Pacific Grove in search of work in marine biology, though her training had been on the East Coast as an embryologist. Her family hailed from Vermont, but for some reason she was born in San Francisco, and days after her birth her attorney father died and her mother relocated the family back to Vermont. She attended the University of Vermont in 1879, but was only able to receive an alternate, though theoretically equivalent, Bachelor’s degree on account of her gender, whereupon she went to Harvard as a researcher of embryology carrying on graduate studies, but importantly not as an official graduate student, as it would not be until the 20th century that Harvard gave women students official status within its halls. Here she began her research into chick embryo differentiation that would lead to her first paper in 1889. Working at Wood’s Hole she completed a survey in 1890 (published 1891) of a thousand Acanthias vulgaris (spiny dogfish) specimens in different stages to investigate the process of skull development. She then headed to Europe, as did many women seeking doctorates who were unable to obtain them in the United States, and furthered her studies of the development of the cranial nerves of the Necturus maculosus (mudpuppy), results which she published in German in 1894 and in English in 1896, and which challenged some reigning theories about the formation of jaw cartilage. 

Back in the United States, opportunities to employ her skills professionally were in scant supply on the East Coast, so Platt made the decision to try her luck back in the state of her birth, California, where railroad baron Leland Stanford had poured funds into the foundation of Stanford University, which opened its doors in 1891, and in turn resulted in the founding of the Hopkins Marine Station in 1892 in Monterey Bay. In 1899 Platt settled in Pacific Grove, a community that had been formed in the 1870s as a Chatauqua-type religious retreat for Methodists on the Monterey shoreline, but had in the ensuing decades become a tourist destination for inland Californians seeking to beat the heat for a weekend. Platt had hopes that the more liberal academic scene of the West Coast would give her scope to use her scientific abilities, but was soon disabused of that notion as she made no headway finding work at Hopkins. 

Foiled in the furthering of her scientific career, Platt directed her prodigious energies to the improvement of Pacific Grove. At first, this involved locking horns with the city council over acts like limits on the number of chickens allowed to roam free, and the citizens’ right of access to the seashore (this latter cause famously resulted in her going to war with a landowner who attempted to fence off sea access, compelling Platt to personally destroy the fence each time it was erected until they relented), but as time went on Platt saw that the real threat to the prosperity of her adopted home town lay in the industrial-level depredations being wrought by the canning industry. In 1931, she ran for and was elected mayor, and set about using that power to lobby state officials to transfer authority over the Monterey seashore from the state to the town of Pacific Grove. 

Her steady lobbying bore fruit, and once empowered by the state legislature, she set about the work of declaring the waters outside of Hopkins Station off limits to all collecting except for scientific purposes, and then established the Pacific Grove Marine Gardens where all commercial species collection was restricted. She knew that the canneries were too economically and politically powerful to fight on a Bay-wide level, that they would keep draining the sea of its fish and dumping the waste back into the waters, creating a choking stink that had killed the once bustling tourist industry of the region, but she believed that the creation of a few protected zones, however humble in scope, would provide the foundation for a future rebirth of the region, once the canneries had inevitably driven themselves into the ground by their imprudent stripping of the sea. 

That rebirth did come, and in a manner that would have exceeded Platt’s greatest hopes, but she herself did not live to see it. She passed away of a heart attack in 1935 and, as a grand cap to a lifetime filled with flaunting proprieties and gender expectations, her last wish was to be buried at sea, which compelled the town council, who always acted as pallbearers at the funerals of mayors, to accompany her body on a wildly pitching boat the twelve miles out from shore where sea burials were allowed to take place, a fact which doubtless would have delighted her. By the 1940s, overfishing to meet the needs of the war effort, and cyclical cooling of the waters of Monterey Bay combined to tank the sardine industry, which bottomed out in 1947. Then, something miraculous happened. Sea otters, who had survived in remote regions of the Big Sur coast, started making their way up the shore over the course of the 1950s, finding their way at last to the protected zones that Platt had established decades earlier. Here, they found in abundance the foods that they liked best - abalone and sea urchins - and as they settled in and reduced the urchin population, the kelp forests at last had a chance to regrow, and as they did, they brought fish populations back with them, which in turn allowed seals and birds to return to the region, sparking a spectacular renaissance that was all but perfectly timed for the opening of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in 1984, which today ranks as one of the world’s most awe-inspiring aquariums, teaching millions of individuals each year about the importance of sea conservation while wowing them with glimpses of the otters, sardines, kelp forests, sharks, and coastal birds whose reappearance and flourishing was made possible by a resolute act of ecological faith made a half century before by a woman who could see past the grim present to a future where humanity’s drive to destroy was overcome at last by its instincts to preserve, protect, and honor.

FURTHER READING:

Stephen Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka’s 2011 The Death and Life of Monterey Bay is a fascinating account of the waves of punishment visited on the region, and the efforts not only of Platt to provide a seed of future rebirth, but of ecologists like Ed Ricketts to determine the larger causes of ecological change, and entrepreneurs like David Packard to provide funding for large educational ventures that would teach future generations about the intricacies of the natural world. Platt’s scientific papers of the 1890s are largely available without paywalls (though that paywalls exist at all for science articles from a century and a half ago is absurd - I’m looking at you, Journal of Cell Science).