STATE'S PROTECTED TIDE POOLS IN PERIL : IGNORANCE, POACHING DESTROY COASTAL LIFE.

Byline: Tom Knudson and Nancy Vogel Scripps-McClatchy Western Service

Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck loved the Pacific Ocean, and particularly tide pools.

In 1948, he wrote:

``There are good things to see in the tide pools and there are exciting and interesting thoughts to be generated from the seeing. Every new eye . . . may fish in some new beauty and some new pattern and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing.''

If he were alive today, he might have a different perspective.

``You have to hunt to find life in the tide pools now,'' said Donna Frye, a longtime San Diego resident. ``If you see a starfish, it's a big deal. There used to be an abundance of life. Baby octopus. Pretty shells. Thousands of crabs.''

``We should have everything here,'' said Cathleen Cannon, a marine scientist in Petaluma. ``Our shore, the Northern California shore, is one of the richest in the world.

``But I've never found a sea urchin. I find the holes urchins have dug, from twisting their spines in the rocks. But not the urchins. And I've always wondered why.''

Tide pools are special. They are the ocean's jewelry boxes - pockets of kaleidoscopic snails, sponges and sea stars. And few tide pools on Earth are richer than those of the Northeast Pacific - including the California coast.

But tide pools are in trouble - threatened by trampling, illegal collecting and greed.

``It's just a strip of tissue that runs down the coast,'' said William Hamner, director of the Marine Science Center at UCLA. ``It's so vulnerable. It doesn't take much to wipe it out.''

Ironically, California's marine life refuges are part of the problem - because they attract so many people.

``The number of users can be extremely high,'' said Steve Murray, professor of biology at California State Fullerton. ``At the Dana Point Marine Life Refuge, we have counts of more than 1,000 people visiting the shore in a three-hour period.

``People will overturn rocks, examine and look at organisms, and walk over exposed critters,'' said Murray, a tide pool specialist. ``These kinds of activities are well known to be damaging.''

Collecting in reserves is illegal, of course. But with few wardens patrolling the coast, violations are common.

``I just found a person with a large bucket of kelp snails,'' said Murray. ``He had about 30 animals. I asked him, what are you doing? He said he was going fishing at an inland lake, for bass. He was going to use them for bait. This was in a state refuge.

``We've been studying eight refuges for 2-1/2 years. In all that time, we have zero sightings of (state) Fish and Game wardens.''

Biological research is being hurt, too.

``I've seen people poaching baby octopus with Clorox,'' said Paul Dayton, a marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. ``It's not uncommon all over Southern California. There are places where we personally have a vested interest in protection of (tide pool) resources, and we've given up.''

``It used to be intertidal zones had interesting scientific projects. Now the animals are largely gone,'' Dayton said. ``I don't think you can find intertidal habitat in Southern California that isn't poached once a month.''

At Point Fermin Marine Life Refuge, near Los Angeles, visitors come in groups of 10 or 20 - to eat it.

``We were down there with a class this spring,'' said Hamner, the UCLA marine biologist. ``And there were these women, clearly Southeast Asian immigrant women, with huge bags chipping off everything. They're chipping off every mussel. They're taking all the barnacles. They're feeding off the rocks.

``In another 10 years, there won't be any mussels,'' Hamner said. ``They'll be all gone. The Palos Verdes Peninsula is starting to get eaten alive. Pretty soon, this coast is going to look like the coast of China.''

The influx of seafood-loving Asian cultures and damage to tide pool life are a touchy subject. And they raise old wounds. A century ago, state and county lawmakers passed many discriminatory, anti-Chinese statutes, including one that forbade nonresident Chinese ``from fishing in the state's public waters.''

Some California Asian-Americans still feel slighted.

``Fish and Game hasn't made enough of an effort to get the word out to the non-English speaking,'' said Mimi Lee, an Alameda woman whose aunt and uncle were fined for purchasing illegal abalone from state undercover agents at a Santa Rosa restaurant. ``If you don't let people know what the laws are, how can you abide by them? If the literature was out in various languages, I think it would help.''

Jane Lubchenco, a marine biologist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the issue is not discrimination but education.

``We have the same problem here,'' said Lubchenco, a professor at Oregon State University. ``There's a cultural difference. Most people don't look at our intertidal areas and see food. Yet, people who come from other cultures do.''

``Education is a problem,'' Murray said. ``We have done an abysmally poor job of making it clear to folks that these kinds of collecting activities are illegal. And enforcement is a problem. Even people who know better don't feel they're going to be apprehended.''