This teen piloted an underwater robot to study kelp forests

Linden Hunter-Pinsky, 14, lives by the ocean in Santa Cruz, Calif. There, he sees kelp beds off the coast on his way to school. California’s kelp severely declined in the 2010s due to a heat wave and other factors, Linden recently learned. But some of them near Santa Cruz have begun to bounce back. That made him wonder: Was that because the recovering beds had fewer sea urchins, which graze on kelp?

To find out, Linden looked at satellite data from a site called Kelpwatch. It helped him choose two declining, two recovering and two stable kelp beds in Santa Cruz. He then borrowed a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV, from a local nonprofit. At each kelp bed, he used a remote control to collect video as he steered the ROV underwater.

No kelp bed had many sea urchins, the footage showed. These data hint that sea urchins are likely not why only some kelp beds were recovering. Other factors, such as runoff, likely play a bigger role, Linden suspects.

Kelp ecosystems are home to many species, including endangered ones. Kelp forests also protect shores from erosion and trap climate-warming carbon. So learning what allows kelp to thrive is important.

Linden did his research as a seventh grader at Gateway Middle School in Santa Cruz. His research earned him a finalist spot in the 2026 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge. This program is run by Society for Science, which also publishes Science News Explores. Here, Linden shares his science fair experiences and advice.

What was the biggest challenge of this project?

“Getting to the kelp beds,” Linden says. He couldn’t take a motorboat, because its motor could get caught in the kelp. Instead, he and his dad took out his family’s rowboat, which slowed down travel time to the kelp beds. “I was being jostled around by the waves while staring at this [ROV] controller, and I got seasick,” he says.

What was the most rewarding part?

Seasickness aside, Linden says he enjoyed seeing the kelp forests from the ROV’s point of view. “I had so much fun seeing this fish swim by and another fish swim by,” he says. “I had a lot of fun just seeing the marine life down there that I never see.”

What’s next for you?

“I would love to look more into other factors that might be preventing kelp forest recovery in certain places,” Linden says. He is thinking about ways to extend the project to the kelp forests of Chile, where he is currently living abroad for a year.

Any advice for research newbies?

“Don’t feel constrained by what you think is a good project,” Linden says. “I’d seen so many people with AI [projects], so I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, is my project not good enough?’” What matters most is whether you like your project, Linden says, and whether you want to spend time on it.