PORT ANGELES — Sea stars, pipefish, seaweed — and skateboards and iPhones?
Six Joyce middle school students participating in a Crescent School District summer enrichment program visited the Arthur D. Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles last week and — with the help of a team of divers — discovered just what lies under the water at City Pier.
Divers not only pulled up the expected — a red rock crab, sea stars and a derelict crab pot with shrimp trapped inside — but also found a skateboard and an iPhone, presumably lost by visitors to City Pier.
“Dibs on the skateboard,” one student cried out as the group realized what diver Don Laird of Port Angeles had pulled from the water.
New Crescent Superintendent Clayton Mork, who is also the principal of Crescent School, and Crescent teacher Janice Tydings led the expedition.
“Being surrounded by this, it is kind like of a huge living lab, and it’s natural to use it as a learning environment,” Mork said, referring to the natural landscape of the North Olympic Peninsula and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Students are far more engaged with learning when presented with hands-on exploration, such as Wednesday’s trip to the Feiro Marine Life Center, than when given a page of math problems and told to sit down, he said.
The sixth-through-eighth-grade students seemed to bear out Mork’s words, since they looked with rapt attention at the water in front of them.
The students learned from Feiro staff naturalist Tiffany Tate that the murky appearance of the water in late summer is the result of phytoplankton — tiny marine plants — growing in the summer sun, and doesn’t mean the water is “dirty.”
Tate pointed out a large school of salmon fingerlings feeding on the phytoplankton near City Pier.
She had watched them since July, she said, and they had more than doubled in size since then while swimming through the murky green feast.
On Hollywood Beach, the students got a closer look at sea life as Bob Campbell, Feiro facility coordinator, and his son, Tom Campbell, pulled a seine net through the water near the beach to capture the denizens of the shallows.
Students sorted the creatures from the seaweed, and put them in a bucket full of seawater.
Creatures found in the net included several flatfish, a green seahorse relative called a pipefish, shrimp and other small, bottom-dwelling animals.
The green, leafy seaweed that came up with the animals, called Ursula seaweed, is not edible, but kept the small animals moist as students gathered them and put them in a bucket to be returned safely to the water.
The center holds a special permit to gather sea creatures, Campbell said.
After their beach explorations, the group moved into the center’s building near the pier to visit the touch-tanks, where students were able to get close up and personal with several species of sea stars, sea cucumbers and hermit crab.
Feiro Marine Life Center is open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily through Labor Day Weekend.
Admission is $4 for adults, and $1 for youth age 4 to 17. Children age 3 and younger are admitted free.
Group educational visits, including beach seining and divers, Crescent School’s trip, are available by appointment.
For more information, call the center at 360-417-6254 or see http://feiromarinelifecenter.org/.
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Reporter Arwyn Rice can be reached at 360-452-2345, ext. 5070, or at arwyn.rice@peninsuladailynews.com.
