I hadn't taken many photos of the beach critters, being more taken that day with the shapes of old stumps. But I found a couple, for comparison.
 |
| 8 or more crabs, 2 (at least) hermit crabs, several limpets, a tribe of periwinkles, assorted clamshells, and barnacles, all coated with green algae. In a couple of hand-breadths of the gravelly spit. |
 |
| Helmet crab carapace. |
 |
| Looking south towards the spit in 2010. The previous two photos are from this area. |
Over on Facebook, Fred Schueler was suggesting possible causes for the disappearance of all that life:
It could be from abrasion after really severe storms, maybe combined with winterkill - we were on Haida Gwaii for two winterkills-1985 and 1988 - and the first was mostly big rock-clinging invertebrates and the latter mostly fish and crabs - in 1985 folks were eating Octopus, and in 1988 Dungeness Crabs - the big slow-growing invertebrates just hadn't had time to recover in 3 growing seasons.
...or maybe rather than abrasion the spit had been buried in sand for a couple of years?
Or it could be just a feature of that tiny area of the beach. Or everything has dug in deep because of the weather. Or a slight change in the average temperature; climate change, in other words.
More investigation is needed.
I don't go to the beach much to watch for changes, but at the cabin it's easy to see little things that come and go. This year I noticed something green with lots of "fingers" growing on the steel cable at the back of the cabin. I've never seen anything like it before. After a search of photos on Google I think it's a freshwater sponge. I still need to get it posted to see if others have a better idea. - Margy
ReplyDeleteWorrysome .... I hope the answer is a natural cyclical occurrence.
ReplyDelete