Not….considerable fresh water from Greers Ferry Lake laps up on the banks of the peninsula at South Fork, but this is an Arkansas lake shore and not the ocean. A Florida sea shore is much different.

Don Culwell has spent considerable time walking in the surf of the white sand beach around Destin, Florida and he has boxes of beach wrack (shells, mermaid purses, seeds, sand dollars, etc.) that washed up on the beach by action of the tide. This evidence of ocean life tells about yet another ecosystem that is found after a long day’s drive south of Arkansas down on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico.

Don Culwell

Highlights from “The Living Beach” biology class:

• Mermaid purses: square, black, inflated skate egg cases with a hook on each corner…each purse just had a skate break out and swim away…hundreds of these lie at the high tide line among the washed up Sargassum brown algae, marine worm tubes and shell wrack…

• Blue crabs, speckled crabs, hermit crabs, ghost crabs…

• Coquina clams, small, pink, yellow, or cream colored bivalves we see burrow down into the wet sand (a major source of food in the tidal ecosystem), Venus clams of several sorts…

• Sand dollars all broken into pieces, but one can see “petals” on the tops of the pieces where hair-like tube feet once projected to take in oxygen while other tube feet moved food particles to the mouth opening below…

• Gastropod shells, thick and strong, are all broken where some hungry crab used its powerful claws to crack into the hard shell for a soft bodied gastropod lunch…