Having lived most of my life a thousand miles from the ocean and then moving to a home by the sea for retirement means that there are a lot of new things to learn about the place where I now live. With about 40% of the world’s population living in coastal areas, it is possible that there are a lot of people who know things that I am only just now discovering. Prior to moving to the coast, we often visited and I learned bits of information over many decades of being a tourist. But there are things that I now notice of which I was only vaguely aware when my experience was that of an occasional visitor.

As I child, I thought of the ocean mostly in terms of waves. We would visit beaches and play in the waves as they came crashing to shore. Even when the water was cold, we ventured into it because the way it moved was so fascinating. Besides, we were used to playing in a river that was only a few miles from the snowfields in the mountains and was always very cold. The way the water moved in the ocean, however, was very different from water in a mountain stream.

As I grew older, I began to look forward to the rich store of seafood that was available when we visited the coast. These days there is more seafood available in the middle of the country. Seafood can be frozen and transported to the interior of the country. There are also places where the seafood is iced and flown in and sold fresh far from the coast. It is expensive, but seafood is expensive on the coast, too. It is different, however, to think of salmon, rockfish, and crabs that are caught within walking distance of my home. There is a big crab derby in Birch Bay this weekend and the bay will be full of extra boats and the beachfront bars will be full of extra partiers.

One thing that I hadn’t though of much before moving here, however, is how rich the ocean environment is in terms of plants. Until recently, I though of seaweed as seaweed. It all seemed about the same to me. Walking along the shore on a nearly daily basis, however, I am learning how rich and varied the plant life of the ocean is. Those who know what they are doing can harvest all kinds of edible plants from the ocean as well as animals.

One of the things that we learned is that autumn is a season of more ocean plants washing up on the shore. Sea plants have annual cycles similar to those of plants that grow on the land. They thrive during the summer when there is more light and die back in the autumn and winter as daylight decreases. Those in the know tune into these cycles and know when to go to the beach to pick up sea lettuce and other edibles from the shore.

There are several signs of the change of seasons on land. A few trees are beginning to show colors in their leaves. The pathways have a few more fallen leaves on them. The nights are growing longer and it gets a bit cooler at night now. There is a crispness in the air that hints of autumn’s coming. Along the shore we are beginning to see the first strands of bull kelp washing up. We know there will be a lot more in the weeks to come. Bull kelp is one of more than twenty varieties of kelp that grow in the Salish Sea. It is classified as a brown kelp as opposed to a green kelp such as eelgrass. It is a very rapidly growing plant, forming underwater forests that are habitat for crabs, red sea urchins, kelp greening, kelp perch, and Pacific herring.

The kelp plant anchors itself to rocks on the seafloor and a stalk grows towards the surface absorbing energy from sunlight to sustain the plant. The upper part of the stalk is a bass-filled bulb that acts as a float to keep the top of the plant near the surface where it can increase exposure to sunlight for photosynthesis. The blades of the kelp sway in the current.

Bull kelp is an annual plant. It grows from spores in the spring and summer and dies in the winter. Fall and winter storms wash the plants to the shore. The kelp can grow to about 100 feet long depending on the depth of the water where it grows. On long summer days the plants can grow as much as 10 inches per day.

Like all parts of the earth’s complex ecology, the kelp forest lives in delicate balance with all kinds of other plants and animals.

Researchers in the Salish Sea are concerned about declining numbers of kelp forests in some parts of the area including the south Puget Sound. One of the effects of global warming is that there is an increase in a condition called sea star wasting syndrome. This has lead to declines in sunflower sea star populations. Without sunflower sea stars to keep the sea urchin populations in check, the spiny urchins consume the bull kelp forests before they can grow to maturity. Healthy bull kelp forests are critical in the cycling of nitrogen and carbon. The decline in the kelp beds contributes to rising carbon levels which leads to increased temperatures and more problems from sea stars.

All of this is new to me. I am on a steep learning curve. I take a walk along the shore, see the bull kelp washed up on the beach, and wonder about it. Fortunately for me, Western Washington University, located in nearby Bellingham has a wonderful program of marine ecology and conducts studies of the sea. The research vessel Kittiwake, operated by the University of Washington Marine Labs, studies the sea around the bay and the islands.

A walk along the beach raises all kinds of questions for a newcomer. I’ve moved too late in life to become an expert, but I can share the fascination of this unique part of the world with the dedicated researchers and students who are learning and teaching more about our environment each day.