Winter holidays can be frenetic with lists, activities and commitments. There is a simple antidote readily available: Leave the made world and spend time in the living world. The Vashon Beach Naturalists this weekend offer to share with you their joy and knowledge of the myriad living communities of the wild beach at the annual beach walk. Our Christmas lights will be luminaria, lanterns, flashlights, stars and the waxing moon.
Under the dock and at the edge of the eelgrass beds, we can listen to the splashing of the waves and the sucking and clicking of tubeworms and horseclam siphons. We’ll relax our minds and look with receptive eyes at the architecture of barnacles growing atop barnacles and the limpets and dogwinkles dwelling among them. We will ask questions and share our knowledge: What do the anemones eat? Why do the pretty opalescent nudibranchs look so much like anemones? And are jellyfish upside-down anemones?
What? There’s a fish that lays eggs on the undersides of intertidal rocks and then stays and tends them? And yet other intertidal creatures just toss their eggs and sperm into the water simultaneously? Some animals live in one place all their lives, like a geoduck — who may live to be 140 years old. Others, like salmon, may start out as fry in Vashon streams and then move to the shorelines to feed and hide in eelgrass or kelp, but ultimately travel thousands of miles in the open sea before returning. Some exquisitely beautiful animals, like the diamond-back triton, feed on other lovely beings such as the orange sea pens (to my initial dismay).
The characters in beach ecosystems are amoral and each species has developed its own strategies to procure food and defend itself from predators and extreme temperatures, currents or dessication. There are one thousand stories on the beach, and on every visit you find clues to just a few of them.
The Vashon Beach Naturalists are a loosely organized group of volunteers who occasionally replenish their numbers by putting on a free class series in the spring. Islanders with expertise donate their time for one or two sessions, in classrooms or on a beach. Every shared beach walk adds to our knowledge and we supplement with reading. Inevitably, beach naturalists ponder scientific evidence that human population growth and the rapid advance of science, technology, manufacturing and infrastructure have harmed shoreline and marine ecosystems. For decades, factories and sewage treatment plants discarded contaminants into waterways bound seaward, and, even now, despite regulations, the antibiotics and prescription medications we ingest find their way into Puget Sound. Acid rain has led to ocean acidification, weakening coral reefs and a reduction in the ability of clams to form strong shells. Global warming now interferes with normal seasonal winds, so that they may be absent at places and times where they traditionally caused currents of upwelling that lifted nutrients to surface waters, feeding mid-ocean food webs on which salmon and pelagic birds have depended for millennia. The warming of ocean waters stresses marine life.
It is a time when many of us want to help understand the complicated knot of issues and influences. We are glad to have opportunities to participate in monitoring studies as citizen scientists. Over the past 17 years, many Vashon folks have participated in the University of Washington’s COASST study: Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team. Each COASST participant walks his/her beach monthly, primarily collecting data on beached dead birds. Other islanders track the health of sea stars for the Sea Star Wasting Disease (SSWD) project, sample beach sites for forage fish eggs or count spawning salmon in local streams. The Vashon Hydrophone Project monitors visits to Vashon waters by orcas and other whales. Vashon Audubon sponsors annual Christmas bird counts and breeding bird surveys, and in-depth studies of various species, including cliff-nesting birds. Vashon Nature Center has conducted Bioblitzes at five different sites and involves students in assorted monitoring studies.
Maybe citizen science helps us fill a need to understand our place in time and space and appreciate the gifts of soil and water and life that we receive from a healthy and natural community.
— Rayna Holtz is a beach naturalist and former Vashon Library librarian.
