Tutka Bay and the Cook Inlet of Alaska have some of the highest tide swings in the world. Check out the difference between a super high tide and a ultra low tide in these photos. Use the dock sign as a reference. The floating dock really needs those tall pilings to accommodate the huge swings!
Sometimes when I go back through my photographs, I notice things that were happening in the picture that I had missed earlier! Here’s a good example. I totally missed that these little whelks were laying down some egg cases on the intertidal rock! 
Some of you have been asking “What’s next, Karyn?” I have some news that I can share now! During the 2015 Summer season (May-Sept) I will be a guide at Tutka Bay Lodge in Alaska.
The slideshow below highlights some of my previous visits at TBL. I look forward to sharing this amazing wilderness with the Tutka Bay Lodge guests!
Even the sand dollars are special in Alaska! These were found during a low tide kayak trip to MacDonald Spit (Kasitsna Bay).
During low tide today I found a Striped Sun Star (Solaster stimpsoni) eating a sea cucumber (Tutka Bay, Alaska).
The second photo is the underside of the sunstar, and you can see its stomach which is protruding out from its mouth (because it was eating the sea cucumber that is in the third photo). After I took the photos, I returned it to finish its meal (while it was eating a sea cucumber this time, they also eat other sea stars).
Amazing creatures!
Striped Sun Star (Solaster stimpsoni)
This is the underside, note the stomach protuding out the mouth.
This is the sea cucumber that the striped sun star was eating.
Close-up of that stomach protruding from the mouth on the underside of the striped sun star.
While I was in Kachemak Bay, Alaska, this summer I observed what I had hoped I would not find: evidence of sea star wasting syndrome. I took photos of sea stars at Tutka Bay during an ultra low tide in May 2013 and again in September 2013. Once I was back in NC, I started to read about the mortality of millions of sea stars along the Pacific coastline of the US.
Background information:
Sea stars along much of the North American Pacific coast are dying in great numbers from a mysterious wasting syndrome. As yet the cause of the syndrome is unidentified, and it’s not clear whether it’s a due to an environmental change, disease or something else. Similar die-offs have occurred before in the 1970s, 80s, and the 90s, but never before at this magnitude and over such a wide geographic area.
seastarwasting.org (the UCSC research group working on this problem)
Since last summer, scientists and tidepoolers up and down the Pacific Coast have noticed starfish dying in startling numbers. Some observers have documented sea star bodies turning to mush, others described the creatures disintegrating, while others found stars that lost their limbs and color. The name of this phenomenon: “sea star wasting disease.”
http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/03/07/what-we-know-and-dont-know-about-the-sea-star-die-off/
So, I when I went back to Tutka Bay in July 2014, I wanted to see if I would notice any difference in the hundreds of sea stars that I had observed and photographed in 2013. The short answer: yes.
Two things were very evident: many sea stars exhibited the lesions and decay of tissue that are symptomatic of sea star wasting and the populations of Pisaster ochraceus and Evasterias troschelli were dramatically diminished.
Once I started studying the photos, I sent a few to the research team at UCSC to check my suspicions. They confirmed that the sea stars in the photos did indeed show indications of the disease, and that the location was the most Northern reported occurrence of the disease in the field. They asked me to submit some more photos and observations (info for how to submit data is here: http://www.eeb.ucsc.edu/pacificrockyintertidal/data-products/sea-star-wasting/observation-log.html#track-disease
I then looked back at my 2013 photos to do a comparison. I was surprised to see that as early as May 2013 I had photographed sea stars that were diseased.
