In the early 1990s, a bull kelp forest at a place the Suquamish Tribe calls dxʷqigʷəc — Point Jefferson, near Indianola on the Kitsap Peninsula — quietly disappeared, along with most of the other kelp beds in central and southern Puget Sound. Bull kelp is an annual species; it grows from spore to towering canopy and dies back every single year, which means losing a forest isn't like losing a stand of old trees. It's losing the whole lineage, year after year, with nothing left to reseed it.
A kelp forest that vanished in the 1990s is now reproducing entirely on its own — no replanting required.
Starting in 2019, the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF) and the Suquamish Tribe began hand-planting kelp at the site. The first payoff came in 2020, when kelp from the pilot planting reached the surface of Puget Sound for the first time since the early 1990s. But the real test was whether the forest could keep itself going without divers reseeding it every year. Six years into the project, PSRF's dive teams are now documenting second-generation growth — kelp that grew from spores released by the kelp the teams themselves planted, not from a fresh round of hand-seeding.
A Forest Reproducing Itself
PSRF, a nonprofit founded nearly 30 years ago on Bainbridge Island, runs the West Coast's first conservation hatchery in partnership with NOAA and has separately outplanted more than 25 million native Olympia oysters and nearly 100,000 pinto abalone across Puget Sound. Executive Director Jodie Toft's team is now tracking whether Point Jefferson's kelp can sustain itself indefinitely — the difference between a one-time planting and an actual forest. The project has also drawn in the next generation of advocates: Bainbridge Island high schooler Sebastian Ford led a successful 2025 campaign to get bull kelp forests officially designated as marine forests under Washington state law.
Nobody at PSRF is calling this a finished recovery — one site regenerating a second generation is a proof of concept, not the return of Puget Sound's lost kelp beds, and the team is still watching to see whether the pattern holds through future years. But after three decades with no kelp at Point Jefferson at all, watching the forest reproduce without help is the clearest sign yet that the underlying conditions can still support one.
Read the full original reporting at the Bainbridge Island Review →
Image credit: Bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) in Puget Sound, Washington