Walking Out to Haystack Rock

I haven't posted here for more than two years, and honestly, I don't think about this space much any more. Life has moved on. I don't seem to have the time to get out on naturalist walks like I used to do. But yesterday I had the wonderful opportunity to experience one as the student, and it was inspiring and rejuvenating and wonder-inducing.

Part of that was certainly the work of Stephen Grace, who was our guide for a 90-minute exploration of the tide pools around Haystack Rock off Cannon Beach, Oregon. He was incredibly passionate about the place and the life it supports, and inevitably his excitement fed our own. I was also truly fortunate to be in a group of Sea Grant communicators and extension agents, my new professional life again reconnecting me with my love for environmental education.

I'm in Astoria, Oregon for a meeting of Sea Grant employees from around the country, and for the end of our first day we got to choose from a number of field trips, all of which sounded interesting: a walking tour of the town, a trip to Cape Disappointment, testing a new Oregon Coast Quest at the Columbia River Maritime Museum. But I settled on Haystack Rock because of the opportunity to spend the time with a naturalist learning about the unique environment. The description noted that participants would have time to go into the city of Cannon Beach after seeing Haystack Rock or could stay and learn more. Among the many reasons I love my new job: no one went into town, preferring to explore the tide pools.

Steve met us at the entrance to the beach, and we set out towards the rocks at a good clip. As we crossed the beach, he started to explain how the 235-foot-tall rock, and others like it up and down the Oregon coast, came to be. Even after the explanation, I still can't quite comprehend the answer. Fifteen million years ago, an eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano resulted in a lava flow that reached the Pacific, where it submerged under the soft sands and then re-erupted from newly formed secondary volcanoes. Haystack rock and other basalt formations like it are the remnants of those secondary volcanoes.

Unlike many of the other formations like it, however, you can walk out to Haystack Rock at low tide - even around it on really low tides - which provides an opportunity to explore intertidal habitat where remarkable sea creatures have adapted to live in areas that are submerged in water and exposed to air twice each day.

Steve led off this topic by making some reference to Clone Wars, which fell a little flat, possibly because, if everyone were like me, we were wondering if he was really talking about Star Wars. (He was, and in retrospect, this is a brilliant gambit to start kids' trips.) The first small rocks from the intertidal zone, exposed during our walk, were covered in aggregating anemones, which have both asexual and sexual reproduction. They clone themselves and cover every inch of rock unclaimed by another animal, until they run up against another group of cloned anemone. Then the anemones on the edge become warrior anemone, using special appendages to strike their opponents and claim or defend territory. (Steve worked in a Shakespeare reference later, noting that like the Montagues and Capulets, even as the two groups of clones battle on the front lines, the colonies will release gametes into the water so the warring anemones end up creating new genetic lines with each other, helping to avoid the perils of cloning for reproduction.)

You can see in the photo the way the anemones close themselves up while out of the water to hold in the moisture. When looking more closely, you can see they also hang on to pieces of shell and other detritus that they can use to help protect themselves.

The aggregating anemone isn't the only anemone species in the tide pools. We also saw giant green anemones, which are a vivid, nearly florescent green in the water and can eat a dungeness crab if one strays into its tentacles.

Both species of anemones could be increasingly pressed for space in coming years, though, because of sea star wasting disease. While our initial focus was on the anemones, the most accomplished competitor for space on the intertidal rocks is actually the California mussel. Populations of mussels are kept in check by sea stars, which I had learned from an outreach packet including this really effective poster (scicomm geek moment), but I didn't realize until this trip that the research showing the vital importance of the sea star as a top predator also helped introduce the idea of a keystone predator into the field of ecology at large. We've come to think of the idea of top-down impacts on an ecological system as almost self-evident, and if an example comes to mind, it's probably the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone. But as with everything we learn and think is obvious, someone else had to figure it out first.

At any rate, a couple of years ago Haystack Rock had a massive die-off of sea stars, and they have not recovered. So it is something of an open question whether they will recover or mussels will advance further down the rocks, into areas where sea stars would previously have eaten them.

As it turned out, for everything we were seeing in this intertidal habitat walking on the beach, there were six to 12 more feet below the sand. Because along with the nearly unfathomable creation of the rock formations millions of years ago, the geological influence on the site happens on a seasonal basis. Every spring and summer, sand washes into the region and buries these ecosystems for months at a time, only to be swept out and up the coast by winter storms each year. And these same extraordinary animals survive that burial just as they survive the air.

While the anemones close themselves to retain moisture while exposed to the air, some fish in the tidepools have evolved to be able to obtain oxygen from the air through their skin. These sculpins can actually be in better shape (for a limited time) out of water rather than in an oxygen-poor, shrinking tide pool. They can also camouflage themselves as octopus do, making them hard to spot.

By the time I had seen some sculpin, it was nearly time to return to the bus. As the group walked across the beach back to town, Steve shared a bit about the seabirds that nest on Haystack Rock, including common murres and tufted puffins, giving me a reason to try to return between April and August.

Much more information about Haystack Rock and its ecology is available through the Haystack Rock Awareness Program, an environmental education project run by the City of Cannon Beach to protect the area.