By Kimberly Rivers, Ventura County Reporter

The squid landing docks at the Port of Hueneme are quiet. In recent years the summer months were busy with dozens of boats coming and going, offloading millions of pounds of California Market Squid into tanks for export to Asia for processing and then returning to be served up for fried calamari or other dishes.

The local squid fishery declined from 2014-16 in response to a warm water mass called “the blob.” The name was coined by Nicholas Bond, Alaska-based research scientist with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) at the University of Washington. Blob, as expected, is a reference to the amorphous monster from the 1958 horror classic film.

Typically ocean temperatures 50 miles off the Southern California coast are “very much in step” with the ocean temperatures at the equator, said Clarissa Anderson, executive director of the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS). The system she manages is part of a network of systems monitoring ocean conditions worldwide. “Then they diverge when the blob hit in 2014 and only come back together again for the big 2016 El Niño, then diverge again. This may be related to the perturbation caused by the blob temp anomaly that lasted so long.”

The blob was a “large anomalously warm” area of the Pacific Ocean, “spread over a broad area, resulting in major ecosystem impacts,” said Anderson.

Anderson and Bond monitor different sensor systems in their regions and look for anomalies in the oceans. She said the blob mostly impacted the area for about two years and “prevented mixing of water, caused the drought, wildfires,” and decimated the Dungeness crab industry along the Pacific Coast.

When asked whether we are seeing a blob 2.0, causing a decline in the squid fishery in the area, she said people may be “quick to call it that in homage to the past blob,” but she is not certain it’s a new blob, but might be that the blob never really left.

“We don’t have a threshold for when to call it a blob,” said Anderson. “I don’t know if we are having an actual true marine heat wave.”

Warm water prevents the normal upwelling of cool water from deeper water that contains important nutrients and food sources for species that live at shallower depths. “We have seen a lot of upwelling in the spring,” she said, noting that much of the ocean is looking like “business as usual” but with a “warmer background level of water.”