Keep your friends close… and your anemones closer
By Sabine Wilson
for the TODAY
Of the many treasures the Oregon Coast has to offer, the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve is one of the most magical. And from now through August, free tide pool tours are available for anyone interested in exploring the ocean during the lowest tides of the year.
The reserve, located between the towns of Yachats and Florence, is the largest in Oregon and contains a marine reserve, two Marine Protected Areas and a seabird protection area.
“The rocky shores of the marine reserve and north MPA host some of the most biologically diverse rocky intertidal habitats found anywhere in the Pacific Northwest,“ said Tara DuBois, communications coordinator of Cape Perpetua Area Collaborative, which organizes tours of Yachats State Park, Bob Creek Wayside and the Cape Perpetua Marine Garden.
I attended the Yachats tour, where the day began with a briefing on safety guidelines by our guide, Jamie Kish: never turn your back to the ocean, remember the area is very fragile and slippery, move slowly and lightly, mindfully step on the bare spots so as to not hurt the plants or animals and do not remove animals from the rocks, as they can be easily injured.
We were also given a field guide to identify the northwest coastal invertebrates that we might see on the tour.
Embarking into the rocky intertidal zone, we saw an area booming with life — first of which were gooseneck barnacles that I learned live upside down, cemented to the surface, eating with their feet.
The bright and beautiful ochre sea stars, or common starfish, were easily visible digesting mussels on the exposed rock. Kish taught us that starfish eat up to 80 adult mussels per year and endearingly referred to them as “silent killers.”
Why this nickname you may ask? Well, to eat their food they slowly open the mussel’s shell before forcing their stomach out of their own mouth and into the mussel, where they take up to two to three days to digest the unfortunate creature. Once it is fully digested, the sea stars retract their stomachs back into their bodies.
And we thought we were complex.
And just as the discussion of death ended, we were led to a “nursery wall,” which is unrecognizable to the untrained eye.
This wet wall is the home to many baby species such as juvenile mussels whose lives are just beginning.
The space represents organisms that were here 100 years ago as well as organisms that will, hopefully, be here 100 years from now.
But sea life is not the only rich history in this place — we were also exposed to big white patches along the cliff, referred to as “shell middens.” These mark the history of the coast’s indigenous peoples, who followed the seasons of the food discarded shells from all the different seafood they ate into a pile. Some of these shell middens have been radiocarbon dated from 100 to 5,000 years old.
While shell middens exist in many places along the coast, it is illegal to interrupt this mark of history in any way.
While we moved through the vast space of biodiversity where past, present and future meet, we learned about kelp, the curiosity of crabs, giant green anemones and why they are different from the warm water anemones in “Finding Nemo;” how the rings on the shells of mussels suggests a passage of time like rings on a tree trunk’ and how seals sometimes have purple bones because of all the sea urchins they eat.
I was reminded of a wall at the Monterey Bay Aquarium that shows a quote from Loren Eiseley: “If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.”
For the first time I began to profoundly understand that being an ambassador for ocean life goes farther than the beach cleanups I’ve attended. It’s about respect and connectedness where, instead of thinking “I love nature” you understand that you are a part of it.
DuBois said it best:
“An ideal tidepool ambassador enjoys the natural environment and has a deep appreciation for the ocean and its diverse marine inhabitants. Tidepool ambassadors will want to protect the ocean’s health for future generations by supporting laws for strong ocean protections.”
Right now, there are a lot of problems in the ocean because of human intervention. “The biggest problems are plastic pollution, ocean development, climate change, overfishing, destruction of habitat and sea temperature rise,” DuBois said.
To begin my journey of living up to the Tidepool Ambassador sticker visitors are given at the end of the tour, my small goal is to abstain from sushi for at least 30 days and educate myself further on how to do my part to respect the ocean. Because a world with an ocean is one worth protecting. And, as an individual who consumes what almost seems like enough sushi to fill the reserve, I figured I could use a bit more education on giving back to the ocean from which I take so much.
For more information about the Cape Perpetua Marine Reserve and to sign up for a tour, go to capeperpetuacollaborative.org.