By: Kiran Reed

Hi everyone! My name is Kiran and I am entering my 2nd year as an Master’s student in Dr. Mark Steele’s lab at California State University, Northridge. My thesis seeks to quantify how giant sea bass (Stereolepis gigas) presence influence the behavior of smaller, meso-consumer fishes. Giant sea bass is one of the few teleost apex predators in the Southern California Bite and the only one that inhabits rocky reefs. The species was fished to ecological extinction in the 20th century; however, in recent years populations have started to slowly recover. Because the species was so rare for so long, there is little known about giant sea bass and even less known about their ecology.

Giant Sea Bass photo by Cesa Renaldi

Although I haven’t been able to get into the field as a Wrigley Summer Fellow this summer due to COVID, I am planning to assess how giant sea bass may change the behavior of their prey with baited remote underwater video cameras (BRUVs). My plan is to go to sites with and without aggregations of giant sea bass and set up my BRUV. This should give me an indication of if the background threat of giant sea bass is changing the behavior of smaller fish at sites where giant sea bass aggregate. After this, I will do the same thing, but will tether a model giant sea bass to my BRUV to see how having an acute giant sea bass predation threat will change meso-consumer behavior. I am aiming to set up bait at 3 distances from the center of my BRUV.

COVID era Checkout Dive

As things are re-opening, I’ve been looking into ways to modify my BRUV and, of course, build a model giant sea bass! In the COVID interim this summer I did a bit of unrelated data analysis on a long-term monitoring project my lab is a part of. I was looking at fish growth rate trends from 2009 – 2019 for 5 species on an artificially built reef compared to a natural reef. This is part of the SONGS Mitigation project. We were recently approved to start working on that project again, so I’ve been enjoying helping out in the field for SONGS as I’ve been getting things off the ground a bit more with my own project.