Human Impacts

The marine ecosystem i visited was Mukilteo Beach. It is beach on the Puget Sound pretty close to Edcc. It is where you can take a ferry to Whidbey Island. One human impact on the ecosystem would be the ferry itself. It not only releases gas and other chemicals into the water, but it can be very loud, causing noise pollution. A visible effect of the ferry is simply the space that it take sup. The terminal is big and could be in the way of habitats for marine life. Long term effects could be animals leaving Mukilteo because of all the noise, and chemicals coming out of the ferry. Another example of a human impact on the ecosystem was a storm drain that i saw on the beach. At high tides it is under the waves, but at low tide you can actually see it which is really cool. A visible effect was that it provided a habitat for lots of barnacles as there were hundreds of them all over the drain. A long term effect it could have would be polluting the water due to the runoff that it puts into the water. A hypothesis could be "the larger amount of harmful chemicals coming out of the storm drain, the less amount of organisms will live by it". Something to do to address these human impacts could be to watch what kind of chemicals you are letting get on the street, because street runoff can lead right to the ocean through these drains