Hunched over jagged rocks slick with seaweed on a jetty at low tide, John Conley spots a purple starfish, or sea star, in a crevice and proceeds to measure its size, calling out his observations to Shannon Phillips, who stands nearby, noting them on her clipboard.
Conley, a Port Townsend Marine Science Center (PTMSC) volunteer, uses yellow chalk to mark the rock just above the ochre star and moves on to the next as fellow volunteers do the same, scouring two 390-square-foot plots at Indian Island County Park.
“There is clearly disease here,” said Melissa Miner, a Bellingham resident who has worked for the past 20 years as a research associate with the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Multi-Agency Rocky Intertidal Network (MARINe), a consortium of research groups collecting comparable data from more than 200 monitoring sites from Southeast Alaska to Mexico.
Read the rest of this article on the PT Leader webpage.
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