A Steaming Pot of Wild Mussels

 

Foraging at minus tide on the Sonoma Coast

Story and photos by Cheryl Angelina Koehler

 

 

A minus tide is a low tide that falls below the average low-water mark. It’s an ideal time to explore the ocean shoreline, and we’re here on the Sonoma Coast climbing over rocks encrusted with seaweeds, limpets, barnacles, and mussels, creeping around tidepools alive with large sea stars, tiny crabs, and sea anemones of myriad colors. The latter—a group of predatory marine invertebrates constituting the order Actiniaria—look like pulsing pebble-covered everything bagels when left exposed by the retreating water. As the sea rushes in to refill the pools, the anemones turn back into otherworldly undulating flowers. Here, as everywhere, the huge, powerful expanse of the ocean—with its dizzying array of species—seems so endless and enduring…but, in fact, it’s not. The reality of the ocean’s resources as finite and fragile was a thread woven through the conversation during this March mussels foraging class with Berkeley-based foraging and ecology company Fork in the Path.

Gathering on the ocean bluff, we learn about the foray ahead of us. Fork in the Path founder Carrie Staller introduces this outing’s leader, Ricardo Romero Gianoli, a naturalist who works as a bilingual educator with the East Bay Regional Park District. They mention some pushback that had come from a local community group about scheduling a trip that might encourage unsustainable extraction of wild mussels from their natural habitat. Would participants take more than the 10 pounds that our one-day $20 fishing licenses allow us? Would we come back surreptitiously for more mussels or divulge the location, perhaps harm the environment we were clambering through by not understanding it?

 

 

While gingerly climbing down the steep cliff to the tidepools, I ponder the ease of hopping over to Berkeley’s Monterey Fish Market for some perfectly delicious mussels sustainably farmed in Washington State, but that would bypass the chance to be here contemplating the watery world of Mytilus californianus (the local wild mussel) while learning about safe and responsible foraging and sharing a feast on the beach.

Our group comes with a discernible pattern of motivations: 1) love of good food, 2) love for the ocean, and 3) a desire to learn more about marine species. A few participants arrive with impressive credentials in biology or ecology, and some of us want to know more about the crisis in the oceans’ kelp forests.

“The problem with understanding the crisis is that we can’t easily see the kelp forests. People look out at a blue sea without kelp and think it looks beautiful,” says Gianoli as we gaze from the bluff at the pounding surf.

Forks in the Path

Before we begin our descent, we learn that both of our leaders came to this work via full career changes. Founder Carrie Staller had a well-established profession in corporate sustainability and experience design when Long Covid left her with brain fog. She regained her balance through a new love—mushroom foraging—and she cultivated a place among a passionate community of naturalists and wild food experts. Surrounded by this talent, she began to envision a recreational education organization that would invite the public into communion with nature and each other. It became a reality with the formal launch of Fork in the Path in early 2024.

 

 

“It’s really the most simple thing in the world,” Staller says. “Going into nature to look for food, finding it, celebrating finding it, cooking it up together, and eating it together. At the core, it is about that relationship with nature and knowing when and where to look for food in its season—having that knowledge. But it’s also about togetherness and doing it in community.”

It was a similar jag in the path for Gianoli as a work-related injury propelled him to leave a solid career as an event electrician. He was visiting family in Southwest Florida in the summer of 2018 when a new imperative took shape. “I wanted something that would better fit my ethics and make me feel like I was contributing something to the natural world,” he says.

It was on that visit that he first witnessed a warm-water algal bloom that created a massive ocean dead zone. Two years later, he would see it again in an abalone die-off at Pelican Bluffs near Mendocino County’s Point Arena. “It looked like a dump truck had driven across the beach and just dumped all these abalone shells,” he says.

Applying for workers’ comp to fund his retraining, Gianoli realized this could be an opportunity to define a mission-based calling. “I wanted to do whatever I could to help the ocean heal, and so in 2021 I began trying to convince an insurance company that ‘kelp restoration diver’ was a legitimate career.” He succeeded and received his first training in the summer of 2023. “I started to participate in Reef Check survey dives as far north as the Salish Sea in Washington and as far south as Orange County but mainly in Mendocino and Sonoma Counties,” he says.

A kelp restoration diver is a scuba diver who travels through the kelp forest assessing the numbers and health of target species. In recent years, that has often meant harvesting (or just smashing) the overabundant Strongylocentrotus purpuratus (purple sea urchin or uni) and reintroducing Pycnopodia helianthoides, the sunflower sea star, which had disappeared. This sea star, with its 16 to 24 limbs that can reach an impressive meter-wide arm span, has a powerful appetite for uni.

“With the new total absence of its top predator, the urchin’s behavior began to change,” Gianoli explains. “Instead of hiding and eating detritus—fallen kelp blades—the urchins began to come out into the open and graze on the kelp at its holdfast and stipe, killing the entire alga in a quicker amount of time. They also began to spawn and multiply at higher rates, and this led to massive areas of kelp forest turning to urchin barrens: a state of the environment where the complex web of life that is a kelp forest is replaced with a carpet of urchins who can stay alive in a starved state for years, and who will not allow any new kelp recruits to establish themselves.”

 

 

Can Humans serve as a keystone species?

All the talk about uni brings up a craving for that rich taste, but we find no urchins on this foray. Gianoli tells us that qualified divers who volunteer to participate in Reef Check surveys can bring out plenty of uni, and one member of our group, an experienced diver, has since signed up. It’s clear that we’re all receiving a hearty invitation to engage in this class as citizen scientists and ecologists as well as foragers.

Once on the beach, we climb into a tidal garden of large rough rocks thickly encrusted with mussels. It requires full attention to maintain our footing on the uneven and slippery surfaces while also—for safety—always watching the sea. And it’s real work to twist the bivalves off the rocks as they’re firmly attached by the long silky filaments (byssi) they spin out to grip to the rocks. Still, it doesn’t take long to collect the 10 pounds of wild creatures our fishing licenses allow, leaving plenty of time for exploring, taking photos, jotting down notes, and making friends.

Among my notes is Staller’s invitation to set aside the extractive mindset and cultivate one centered in reciprocity. An obvious form that could take would be keeping up on sustainable seafood choices, and I’m happy to learn that mussels and oysters—both farmed and wild-caught—are options most highly rated by Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch and the Marine Stewardship Council.

I also make note of Gianoli’s notion that as thoughtful human beings, we have the capacity to serve as a keystone species as we harvest with care and knowledge. By standard definition, a keystone species is an organism that has a disproportionately large impact on its ecosystem by playing a crucial role in maintaining the structure and function of the community. We often hear about the concept in relation to wolves and sharks, predators that keep other species in balance. But can a human shed the impulse to take what seems ours and instead approach the harvest as an educated action taken on nature’s behalf? I hold that thought the next evening over a steaming pot of wild mussels, thinking back on that hour when the minus tide allowed us, in a way, to walk beneath the surface of the blue sea. ♦

forkinthepath.org | reefcheck.org | seafoodwatch.org | msc.org

 

This foraging adventure and feast reminded writer Cheryl Angelina Koehler of many delicious meals cooked and eaten out in the wilderness with friends. She is the publisher and editor of Edible East Bay and the author of Touring the Sierra Nevada, published in 2007 by University of Nevada Press.