Fecal Matters: How'd your beach do in 2017?

Curious to see how your favorite beach fared for healthy swimming last year? See how the 2017 swimming season stacked up. In the BEACH Program 2017 Annual Report you'll find the top swimming beaches for water quality, beach water quality by county, and beaches that did not meet swimming standards.

Click to View the 2017 Annual BEACH Report

See the good, the best, and the "poopy" marine swimming beaches for last year. Did your favorite beach make the list for the top swimming beaches? Or, did it make the list of beaches that were closed to recreation due to high levels of fecal bacteria?

Why does it matter?

Anyone who uses marine beaches for recreational purposes such as swimming, scuba diving, surfing, or kayaking can be exposed to illness associated with water contaminated by sewage.

Contact with fecal contaminated waters can results in gastroenteritis, skin rashes, upper respiratory infections, and other illnesses. Children and the elderly may be more vulnerable to waterborne illnesses.

How does poop get in the water? 

Fecal bacteria get into the water in a number of ways. Some of it is natural, and a small amount of fecal bacteria does not pose a threat to public health.

Water at a beach can rise to an unhealthy level for many reasons. These include septic tanks that are not properly maintained, large amounts of sewage discharged from sewers overflowing during heavy rain or recreational boaters, wild animals congregating due to people feeding them, dogs pooping on beaches, used diapers being left on the beach, and others.

Click to learn how you can help keep your beach clean for swimming

More about BEACH

The Beach Environmental Assessment, Communication, and Health program, nicknamed BEACH for short, monitors marine beaches from Memorial Day to Labor Day. This program is a joint effort with the Washington State Department of Health, county and local agencies, tribal nations, and volunteers.

The BEACH program helps keep swimmers healthy on the coast and across Puget Sound by testing marine beaches for fecal bacteria and issuing public beach closure notices if the results show the water might pose a health risk. BEACH does not test freshwater beaches located on rivers and lakes.

Click here to see if your beach is open.
Remember, many beaches are only monitored Memorial Day through Labor Day.

Stay updated about water quality at your beaches by subscribing to our Fecal Matters RSS feed, checking the beach closure map on Coastal Atlas, or joining our email listserv. Contact BEACH program manager Julianne Ruffner with questions.

Eyes Over Puget Sound: Sunny, warm and colorful

Late summer brings warm air temperatures, abundant sunshine and drier conditions throughout Puget Sound. Stream flows in the region’s northern rivers are lower than our rivers in south Puget Sound.

Click here to see this month's report

Yet, the combination of abundant spring rain and weak upwelling from the Pacific Ocean means Puget Sound waters are still fresher than at any time in the past 17 years.

While the abundance of jellyfish is lower this year, our warm water temperatures, especially in central Puget Sound, are accompanied by large rafts of drifting macroalgae. What else did we see on our Eyes Over Puget Sound overflight? Diverse blooms in colors of green, orange and red-brown in many our inlets.

We are also checking to see how if our benthic invertebrate community is changing. We are monitoring and measuring samples of these critters that live in the sediments of Puget Sound at our long-term monitoring stations. We’re gathering information so we have baselines to see if any long-term change is occurring among this sensitive part of the Puget Sound ecosystem.

This year, we’re getting great hands-on assistance from our Washington Conservation Corps intern, Nicole Marks. To see more about the project, check out the great poster Nicole has created.

Eyes Under Puget Sound: Critter of the month – Common Sun Star

Crossaster papposus; photo courtesy of Neil McDaniel,
http://www.seastarsofthepacificnorthwest.info/index.html

Getting ready for the Aug. 21 solar eclipse? Well, this month’s critter was born ready. The Common Sun Star goes by many common names – Rose Star, Spiny Sun Star, Snowflake Star – but no matter what you call it, there’s nothing common about Crossaster papposus. We think it is out of this world!

Total eclipse of the star

With its bright sun-like appearance, the Common Sun Star is one of the more beautiful creatures in Puget Sound. Individuals can be all one color but generally vary in color and pattern, with some featuring pink, white, orange, and yellow rings.

A star is born

Common Sun Stars can grow to an impressive 14 inches or 34 centimeters across – larger than a dinner plate – but they also grow slowly, taking 10 years to reach maximum size. As small juveniles, they prefer shallow subtidal habitats; as adults they migrate to deeper waters, down to 1,200 meters in depth. This explains why we rarely encounter them while sediment sampling, although they occur from Alaska to Puget Sound – as well as the north Atlantic coast).



Two Common Sun Stars with different color patterns; photo
courtesy of Dave Cowles at https://inverts.wallawalla.edu/

Well-armed

The Common Sun Star has more arms than the typical five-armed sea star that's familiar to most of us. Resembling the sun for which the family Solasteridae was named, it has many pointed ray-like arms originating from a broad central disk. Some sea stars have as few as eight or as many as 16 arms. For this species, the magic number of arms is almost always 11. It, too, can regenerate, or grow back, missing or damaged arms if the central disc remains intact.

Close up of pseudopaxillae on top surface of a
preserved Crossaster papposus specimen.

A spine in the sand

Even if the Common Sun Star didn’t have a unique shape and color, it has plenty of distinct features that taxonomists like us can use to identify it. Its dorsal – or top – surface is covered with little hedgehog-like bundles of spines called pseudopaxillae. The mouth (located on the animal’s underside) is bare and surrounded by long spines, and there are two rows of sucker-tipped tube feet running down each arm. It also lacks pedicellariae, tiny pincer-like defense organs that many other echinoderms possess. 



Common Sun Star goes into attack mode;
photo courtesy of Neil McDaniel
 http://seastarsofthepacificnorthwest.info/index.html

Here comes the sun (star)

A dominant and agile predator, the Common Sun Star scoots across the sediment at 70 centimeters a minute, using sensory chemoreceptors to “smell” when a potential prey animal is near. While the Common Sun Star wouldn’t quite beat the Sand Star (Luidia foliolata) in a race, it has several other advantages over its speedy relative. By standing on the tiptoes of its tube feet, it can make itself tall enough to cover and engulf its prey.

Can you put your stomach outside your body to eat a big meal?  Well this star can. It has an eversible stomach, which means it can turn its stomach inside out, shooting it out through its mouth. This gives the Common Sun Star the ability to handle the larger prey items it likes to munch such as sea urchins, other sea stars, and clams.  When it appears with a big hump, you know it’s enjoying a big meal.

A brighter future?

In 2013, scientists in Washington State discovered sea stars that appeared to be wasting away and dying from a mysterious disease. We now know that Sea Star Wasting Syndrome is caused by an ocean virus, and it has wiped out millions of sea stars on the Pacific coast. Although Crossaster papposus is not one of the species hit the hardest, a few cases of wasting Common Sun Stars have been documented in British Columbia, and they are listed as “likely affected.” Keeping our fingers and arms crossed that sea star populations will rebound and thrive on our coast once more.

Critter of the Month
Our benthic taxonomists, Dany Burgess and Angela Eagleston, are scientists who identify and count the benthic (sediment-dwelling) organisms in our samples as part of Ecology’s Marine Sediment Monitoring Program. We are tracking the numbers and types of species we see in order to understand the health of Puget Sound and to detect any changes over time.

Dany and Angela share their discoveries by bringing us Critter of the Month. These posts will give you a peek into the life of Puget Sound's least-known inhabitants. We'll share details on identification, habitat, life history, and the role each species plays in the sediment community. Can get enough benthos? See photos from our Eyes Under Puget Sound collection on Flickr.

Eyes Under Puget Sound: Critter of the Month – The Ice Cream Cone Worms

I scream, you scream, 

we all scream for ice cream!  

(Don't worry, worm shown above is not
actual size; ice cream cone worms

are only about an inch long!)

Summer is here, and what better way to beat the heat than to cool off with a nice refreshing frozen treat? We think this month’s group of critters, the Ice Cream Cone Worms, are some of the coolest creatures around…although maybe not quite so delicious as the real thing!

Ice ice baby

Ice cream cone worms (belonging to the family Pectinariidae) are easily recognized by their distinct
cone-shaped tubes that can be up to 5 cm (2 inches) long. Here in Puget Sound we find two species of these ice cold beauties - Pectinaria californiensis and Pectinaria granulata.

Although both of these species are widespread throughout the Sound in depths up to 230 meters, Hood Canal is where we encounter them in the highest abundances - we can sometimes get over 30 of these critters in a single benthic sample!

Lashing out

Another distinct feature that sets pectinariids apart is a pair of glistening “eyelashes” protruding from the tops of their cones. These spiky eyelashes are actually hardened hairs, called paleae.


The paleae may look pretty and delicate, but they serve a practical purpose – to help the worm burrow head-first into the sediment.

Everybody poops

A Pectinaria granulata specimen, removed from its tube

 to reveal its translucent body with visible sediment inside.

Ice cream cone worms spend most of their time face-down in the mud, with the pointy ends of their tubes turned upright sticking out just above the sediment’s surface. This allows them to use their tentacles (located near the paleae) to search around in the mud for large particles of sediment to ingest.

This strategy of picky eating is called selective deposit feeding. Anything the critter can digest that attaches to the particles gets absorbed by the worm’s gut.

The sediment grains they can't digest basically go in one end and out the other. The passed material is called pseudofeces - meaning “false poop”. It can take up to six hours to make its way through the worm’s body and out the open end of the cone. If you were to observe a living ice cream cone worm without its cone, you would be able to see this whole process through its translucent body wall.

Go your cone way

If you’re looking for ice cream cone worms, chances are you can find them in areas with a higher sand content (versus rock or fine clay). This makes sense when you think about how they build their cones.

Pectinariids construct their cones by reaching out with their tentacles to collect sand grains, shell pieces, or other small particles. These grains are tightly placed together in layers, giving the cone a smooth but speckled appearance, almost like a colorful stained glass window or a tile mosaic. The cone protects the critter, housing the animal’s soft, fleshy body in a speckled coat of armor.

A worm’s place is in the cone

A comparison of the tubes of P. granulata and P. californiensis shows the 

difference in preferred grain size between the two species.

Some pectinariids prefer large grains over small grains for tube-building, which makes it easy to tell those species apart if the cone is still intact. This is quite convenient for us taxonomists!

For example, P. californiensis chooses fine sediment granules for its straight, delicate tube, while P. granulata prefers coarser sediment for its robust, slightly curved tube. If the worm doesn’t have an intact cone, it can still be identified by the color and shape of its paleae – P. californiensis has copper-colored paleae with fine tips, and P. granulata’s are golden-colored, with blunt tips.

P. granulata (left) has blunt-tipped, golden paleae while P. californiensis (right) has fine-tipped, copper-colored paleae.

 By: Dany Burgess & Angela Eagleston, Environmental Assessment Program

Critter of the Month

Our benthic taxonomists, Dany and Angela, are scientists who identify and count the benthic (sediment-dwelling) organisms in our samples as part of our Marine Sediment Monitoring Program. We are tracking the numbers and types of species we see in order to understand the health of Puget Sound and to detect any changes over time.

Dany and Angela share their discoveries by bringing us a benthic Critter of the Month. These posts will give you a peek into the life of Puget Sound’s least-known inhabitants. We’ll share details on identification, habitat, life history, and the role each critter plays in the sediment community.

Can't get enough benthos? See photos from our Eyes Under Puget Sound collection on Flickr.