Shrouded by darkness, federal researcher Camryn Allen perched on
the bow of a skiff in the shallows of San Diego Bay last week
scouting for green sea turtles. She pulled up a net that was
submerged near the shoreline hours before as part of a decades-
old research program on the South Bay’s turtle population. No
luck. Wet and muddy, she motored back toward the recently
shuttered South Bay Power Plant where nearly a dozen colleagues
settled in for a long night of waiting. The hulking facility
once sucked in huge volumes of bay water for cooling, then
discharged the heated effluent into a narrow channel that
biologists called “the Jacuzzi” or “the bedroom in the bay”
because turtles regularly warmed themselves there. Researchers
use a skiff to check two turtle nets in the shallow water of a
channel near the shuttered South Bay Power Plant. For decades,
the turtles enjoyed the plant's warm effluent, which heated the
channel water by several degrees. Jeffrey Seminoff, a federal
turtle researcher in La Jolla, said