On a kayak trip to South Puget Sound we circumnavigated Hope Island State Park and explored about 1/2 mile up the south side of Hammersley Inlet looking for sea stars This are was home to a large healthy community of various species of sea stars just last year. Purple, Mottled, Giant Pink, Leather and Sunflower Stars were abundant in the intertidal and subtidal. Sea Star Wasting Syndrome has hit this area hard. While we would expect to see 100's of sea stars on a trip like this in the passed but we almost came up empty this trip. In all we observed at total of 2 Leather Stars, 1 Mottled Star, 3 Giant Pink Stars, and 1 small Sunflower Star. Water visibility was about five feet so we were able to check both the exposed shore at the minus 2.8 ft. low tide and the subtidal down to about 3 feet.. All the stars seen were in the subtidal except for the small Sunflower Star. All the stars appeared to be healthy but it was difficult to know because of the visibility in the water. Some stars were likely missed due to kelp coverage in many areas, but large boulders that normally are sea star rich were totally without stars. If our survey is even close to accurate it would mean that this area has lost over 99% of the past sea star population in these species.
The images below show sea stars in the area from previous years trips and images from the July 11 2014 trip.
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| Giant Pink Pisaster 2001 |
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| Mottled and Purple Stars 2001 |
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| Mottled Stars 2001 |
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| Purple Stars 2001 |
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| Hammersley Inlet 2014 |
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| Hammersley Inlet 2014 |
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| Plumose Anemones on log 2014 |
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| Hammersley Inlet 2014 |
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| Hope Island SP 2014 |
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| Raccoon Hope Island 2014 |
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| Mottled Star 2014 |
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| Gretchen Hope Island 2014 |
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| Kelp cover Hope Island 2014 |
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| Red Rock Crab dug up by Raccoon 2014 |
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| Crab being eaten by anemone |
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| Mussels on downed tree branch 2014 |
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| Large mussel and barnacle clump on downed tree...sea star food 2014 |
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| Bering Hermit Crab in broken Moon Snail shell 2014 Hope Is. |
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| Only Sunflower Star found on kayak trip 2014 |
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| Strange clam shell with partial Moon Snail drill hole 2014 |
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| Gretchen and commercial clam diggers 2014 |
This brings back a lot of memories out of storage for me. I really love the pictures of hope-island here! It looks like you guys picked a great sunny day in Adelaide to head out for a kayaking trip!
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