When most people think of beachcombing, they think of bringing home treasures. Intriguing seashells, sand dollars, beautifully sculpted bits of driftwood – if you’re lucky maybe even a glass fishing float. There are beaches that hold precious stones – polished agates and moonstones, sometimes even fossils. With a little creativity, you might craft your finds to bring beauty to your home . They serve as mementos of special places and times.
Mementos, memories… I’ve done some memorable beachcombing for which all I have to show are memories. I spent a couple of winters in the Miami Vice days of the early 80’s in the Florida Keys. There was a different kind of treasure washing up on the beaches in those days. Sometimes you would walk the beach and find the wrack line cluttered with jettisoned cannabis. No wonder we wore t-shirts reading Save the Bales!
Four hippies from Colorado camping on the coral coast, we found our tent stakes wouldn’t pierce the rocky shore. Since we couldn’t pitch the tent, we requisitioned the shell of a shack demolished by a hurricane. We built a thatched roof over our sleeping bags Robinson Crusoe style, and stuck a mangrove branch in a buoy as a Christmas tree. For ornaments, we searched for shells. By the next morning most of our ornaments, the unexpected homes of hermit crabs, had scurried away.
It’s not just about collecting. It’s about observing. Sometimes the best treasure is a tiny glimpse of that weird and wonderful alien world under the sea. I went beachcombing at Cape Lookout State Park in Oregon recently. This is one of my favorite beaches for finding treasures, especially after a storm moves through. This time, though, I didn’t take anything home but pictures – and questions about the strange debris showing up on the shoreline.
I find a purple starfish and fling it back into the ocean, hoping it’s not already dead and has a second chance. The Pacific needs all the starfish it can get these days.
As I wander, I watch a seal fishing the surf about 100 yards offshore. All I can see is his head popping up through the waves, then down again. Birds are everywhere, gulls and crows scavenging for whatever the latest high tide has brought in. Crab for breakfast, anyone?
It looks like carnage, some horrible massacre. Crab shells and appendages are by far the most common item in the wrack. It’s not as bad as it looks, though. Crabs tend to get too big for their britches and have to shed their shells and grow a new one. Most of the carapaces I see are castoffs. If a crab does tumble in with the tide, though, chances of running the gauntlet of shorebirds back to safety in the water are thin.
The delicate pastel fronds of a tiny seaweed catch my eye. It reminds me of sea fans seen while snorkeling the coral reef in Florida. Its name, corallina, indicates I am not the only one who recognizes the resemblance. A little farther along is a tiny bit of sponge – I think. Or is it another seaweed?
Then I stumble onto something really bizarre. What ARE those weird white wormy things? Appendages to some strange jellyfish type animal? It’s so peculiar I just have to find out more. I stop in at the Interpretive Center at Yaquina Head.
This is one of the most popular tidepooling areas in Oregon and even THEY don’t know what these creatures are. We look through the field guides and ponder. A man working in the back overhears our conversation. “Oh, I know!”, he says, and pulls up an article on the computer.
They’re called pyrosomes. Like coral, each one is actually a little colony of organisms. They’re another indicator of climate change.
They usually live in warmer waters, something you might find in the seas off the coast of Southern California. They were exceedingly rare in Oregon. Not anymore.
They probably came up in a big mass of warm water that hit the Pacific Northwest during the El Nino in the spring of 2016. Last spring there was another big “bloom” of the creatures. There were so many that scientists were able to scoop up 60,000 of them in just one 5 minute tow of the net.
They caused a lot of problems for local fishermen, clogging up and damaging their nets. They may be causing big changes in the food chain, too. They eat plankton. So do copepods, tiny creatures that form the base of the food chain in Pacific Northwest oceans. It’s too soon to tell if this will prove a problem for the copepod population.
Some fish find them tasty. It seems that rockfish, who normally eat copepods, seem to prefer pyrosomes to copepods. There’s just one problem. Copepods provide a lot of fat for the rockfish. Pyrosomes don’t. It’s not like they actually harm the rockfish, but the fish don’t grow as big. Rockfish, in turn, are eaten by salmon. It’s all connected.
Strange sea animals are not all you find as you walk along the wrack line. You also find a lot of trash. Shortly after the Japanese tsunami, I found a perfectly good soup ladle. I was excited about taking it home and using it, a souvenir with a purpose, until I thought about that leaking nuclear power plant…..
A lot of that trash is microplastics, teeny colorful bits and pieces that attract fish and birds. They think it’s some new kind of food. It has less nutritional value than the pyrosomes! In fact, it’s quite harmful and can eventually kill them. The Haystack Rock Awareness Program in Cannon Beach, OR is turning that trash into treasure. They combine the bright and shiny colors, encase them in resin, and make mosaics and jewelry to help raise awareness about the health of our oceans.
It’s nice to walk the beach, white worms and all, in the quiet of an early morning before the clamoring hordes arrive. Next time you’re on the coast, spark your curiosity. Get up early and walk the beach at sunrise. Follow the tide line. You never know what treasures you may find!
