Cub Scout Pack 793 - 2006 Tide Pool Exploration Photos

2006 Tide Pool Exploration

Our Pack took advantage of one of the lowest weekend tides of the Summer (-2.73) and went to the Alki Beach Tide Pools to do some exploring. Our Pack was lucky to have an Environmental Marine Biologist and other tide pool veteran parents who came to help the Scouts identify plants and animals as well as volunteer beach naturalists from the Seattle Aquarium who were also on hand to help tide pool visitors. We met on the boardwalk where Alki Avenue meets Beach Drive, South of the light house and across the street from the Alki sewage treatment facility.

We started out by talking about the different tide zones and learning how to care for the creatures and their habitats during our visit. We decided to walk very lightly and carefully on the beach since all of the wildlife can be damaged by being stepped on. We learned to put all rocks back the way we found them since they are homes for the creatures that live on and below them. We also decided not to take any of the sea creatures home.

We found living things everywhere we looked, and identified a huge variety of animals including barnacles, chiton, mussels, snails, limpets, Piddock clams, jingle-shell oysters, red, purple, and orange ochre sea stars, sunflower stars, sea cucumbers, anemones, sponges, tube worms, porcelain, red rock, kelp, and hermit crabs, shrimp, cling fish, gunnels, midshipman, and of course lots and lots of kelp and sea grass. Below are pictures of some of the stars of our show.

We had great success checking under the rocks	Getting a closer look at a sunflower star
We found great stuff everywhere we looked	The lighthouse is beautiful on a sunny day
Lots of sea stars in the shallow water	An exciting find!
Two sharp-nose crabs	Shrimp
A sunflower star on the move	Cling-fish
Sea cucumber	Sea cucumber
Kelp crab	A spaghetti worm and a sea cucumber
A pot of large red rock crabs	An angry red rock crab!
A Plainfin midshipman and a spaghetti worm	...and her eggs on the underside of her rock
The underside of this rock is home to a crab, calcareous tube worms, several jingle-shell "rock" oysters, and orange bryozoans.	The underside of this rock has tube worm shells, a chiton, sponge, two kinds of crabs, and an anemone.