Along the shoreline behind Pier One Theatre on the Homer Spit, marine biology student Samantha Earney gives a brief tide pooling introduction to a group of curious sea creature enthusiasts.
The tide chart on Wednesday morning reads negative five, which only happens a few times a year. Tides this low provide a chance to view marine animals normally inaccessible, like sea stars, sea urchins, anemones, crabs and much more.
“Tide pools are created when the tide recedes out, and it gets stuck in the basins along a rocky shore, so that’s when the sea water is trapped in there," said Earney, who organized the two-day tide pooling event. She's also an intern with the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, an environmental education nonprofit.
"Different organisms will recede into those little pools or underneath rocks to stay moist and not dry out,” Earney added.
The day before, Earney and a colleague monitored the area during snowy conditions and found several hundred sea stars, along with other marine animals. On this day, she says there could be over 1,000 sea stars in the area’s intertidal zone, an area where ocean meets land between high and low tides.
“This intertidal actually is supporting a lot of these bigger things,” said Henry Reiske, an educator with the center. “This is also the starting ground for a lot of things that people care pretty deeply about, whether that’s crab or fish, this intertidal is supporting a lot of that. This is a really rich, diverse zone, and it’s a place that is easy for us to explore and see for ourselves.”
Boots donned and sea life identification charts in hand, more than 50 people young and old carefully step through Kachemak Bay’s intertidal zone, keeping a close eye for anything interesting. Within a few minutes, clumps of sea stars are found by the dozen. Among them, the center’s program director Katie Gavenus spots something peculiar.
“This one here has wrapped those two feet around, what looks like a soft shell clam, and is pulling that clam open," she said. "They actually push their stomach out into the clam. So imagine this, you’re eating spaghetti or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and instead of using a fork or your hands, you put your stomach out of your body, on the sandwich, eat it, and pull your stomach back in.”
Nine-year-old Eliphelet Bice is one of many children tide pooling. She loves sealife, and says her favorite thing she saw that day was moon snail eggs.
“I saw hermit crabs, decorator crabs, lots of baby hermit crabs, including sea cucumbers," Eliphelet said. "I hope to remember how far the tide went in and how many creatures I saw, and to remember the 200 count of all the starfish we saw.”
“We want to get people out, we want to get people exploring, learning about, questioning, and realizing, hopefully, the importance of what is going on here and how special of a place we live in,” Reiske said. “Hopefully we can give them some insight into how to protect these places as well. It is easy to live your life passing by everything that everybody down there just saw, without realizing that it’s there.”
Earney is a student from Florida but gained an appreciation for intertidal creatures while studying in Homer this spring through Kenai Peninsula College’s Semester by the Bay program. She hopes events like these will motivate a passion for science and safely exploring tide pools.
“I feel like with a lot of modernization, we’ve kind of been more inside and more with computers," Earney said. "For children and even people who are a bit older, it’s important to get outside into your environment and just be engaged and excited with things that are all around you.”
Even though a negative five tide is relatively rare, the center says a tide reading of negative two and below provides excellent tide pooling opportunities in places where it's allowed. You can find daily tide readings on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s website.
