Carkeek: Bre Jarrell

While going up the beach with my group, we saw this mottled sea star sitting in the sand. It didn't look the healthiest, but we were so interested in it that we decided to set up our zoning to get this sea star in one of our zones. We set up our zones to start from the water, that way we would get a zone as low as possible before the tide began to rise. This mottled sea star was found in our third zone and didn't move throughout the entire time we observed him until the tide rose high enough to make him drift away. He appeared to not be in the best health condition, so we did not touch him, so we would not spread any diseases across the beach. Starfish eat mollusks and other similar creatures, so this one plays an important part in controlling the population of the sea creatures it eats.

The sea star wasn't the only interesting creature I "saw." As I was going up the sand on the beach I stepped a little too close to where a gooey duck was buried, so it squirted me with water. I didn't know what it was, so I dug it up a bit and got squirted again more directly. I never actually saw the gooey duck, but I'd never seen one before or been squirted by one either, so it was possibly one of the most interesting things I'd seen all day. I then got squirted at by several more as I walked farther down the beach, so the gooey duck wasn't quite as interesting anymore, simply because they kept getting me wet.

I'd never seen so many different marine species on the beach at once, so I'm wondering why other beaches I've been to in Washington don't have a similar number of species.