Investigating Alaskan Beach & Ocean Creatures

追加: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the Saving for Parts channel. In this video, I'm trolling, but not internet trolling. We're actually trolling for fish on a boat.

[00:00:09]Today, we're catching up on more of last year's Alaska trip. Growing up on an island in Southeast Alaska, one of my favorite activities was investigating all of the different sea creatures. We also ate quite a lot of these creatures since my family lived off-grid and we relied heavily on hunting and fishing.

[00:00:25]These days, I live in Minnesota and I'm frankly a little scared to eat anything out of the Mississippi River. But, in 2025, I rented a boat with some friends and we went back to Alaska for a visit.

[00:00:35]This video is going to focus on the aquatic wildlife we encountered and some of the ones we ate.

[00:00:41]Starting off, some of the smaller wildlife that appears less frequently on the dinner table can be found on Southeast Alaskan beaches. The twice-daily tide changes reveal all kinds of stuff living in pools and under rocks. Just walking along the beach at low tide means you're guaranteed to encounter some kind of small creatures.

[00:00:59]This kind bites. Yeah. There's another kind that's cuter that doesn't bite.

[00:01:04]Tiny rock crabs, fish, urchins, snails, and a million other animals live in the intertidal zone.

[00:01:11]Many of these animals are adapted to live in partially fresh water near streams where a lot of nutrients flow out of the forest.

[00:01:18]They can also live in very little water staying just damp enough until the next tide cycle.

[00:01:23]These slippery fish are called blenny eels. They come in a variety of colors and patterns and grow to be a few inches long. These guys can go almost completely dry between tides and are still fine as long as they stay hidden under rocks.

[00:01:35]Bullheads or sculpins are very common tide pool fish and they can also be found in freshwater streams near the beach. Their larger deepwater cousins have poison spines on their heads, but these little guys' main defense is how incredibly fast they can move.

[00:01:50]Oh, yeah. Lots of little fish in there.

[00:01:55]Starfish are interesting critters coming in all sizes, colors, and numbers of arms.

[00:02:03]So, I forget how much starfish you can have and it regrows into a starfish, but this arm seems to be still alive and still uh trying to become more than an arm.

[00:02:16]>> [laughter] >> I guess it's good to have dreams, little guy.

[00:02:19]I'll put you back.

[00:02:21]So, this was pretty much our entire childhood was just wandering around on the beach, poking all the wildlife, seeing what kind of critters we could find under rocks, and yeah, that was pretty great. When my sister and I were kids, we'd come over here at low tide and look around for treasure, all kinds of interesting bottles, and stuff like sea urchin tests or kind of the the shells, the expended shells of dead sea urchins.

[00:02:49]So, there's what a a live sea urchin looks like.

[00:03:00]I don't know if I'm going to catch it on camera, but the clams are squirting.

[00:03:03]I don't remember why they do that.

[00:03:05]Here's one of the really big clams.

[00:03:07]Well, just the shell.

[00:03:10]This is more of the size we'd get for eating.

[00:03:14]I think that's a butter clam.

[00:03:16]It's been so long, I don't remember all my clam species. Got the whole shell there. The clam has long since rotted away, but uh this might be an even bigger one.

[00:03:26]There we go. Yeah.

[00:03:28]Good size clam.

[00:03:30]Think that Think that's the geoduck is the biggest one. Yeah, of course, when you're a kid, what's a clam shell but just a toy boat?

[00:03:46]Several kinds of crab can be found along the shoreline like these little rock crabs which only grow to be an inch or two in size.

[00:03:55]There are also hermit crabs which live in discarded snail shells.

[00:04:00]Rarely will find fancier species like decorators or tiny kelp crab. We would also sometimes find juvenile versions of bigger crab species.

[00:04:09]Sea anemones are fun. They catch passing critters with stinging tentacles. They come in a few different sizes. The larger ones mostly are out in deeper water and there are smaller ones that live between crevices in the rocks closer to shore. These do look quite sad if they go dry at low tide. They become kind of mushy blobs until the tide comes back in. Most of the stingers on these aren't really strong enough for a human to feel.

[00:04:32]Some slightly more rare creatures that we didn't see as often are sea slugs, sea cucumbers, and peanut worms. Some of these are apparently edible, although I've never tried one. They move pretty slowly and are usually in slightly deeper water. They're fairly defenseless if they find themselves out of the water at low tide. This was our entire childhood was poking squishy things on the beach.

[00:04:55]This one's getting me demonetized.

[00:04:57]>> [laughter] >> This is Patreon only content right here.

[00:05:01]Only clams. Only clams.

[00:05:03]>> [laughter] >> So, this is some kind of flatworm thing.

[00:05:08]And if you Actually, there's two, I think the two different colors are two different creatures. If you poke them, they'll react a little bit. They're eggs? Yeah, there's a moon snail.

[00:05:17]Chiton are a type of shellfish that I really like. They're kind of like a limpet, but with an articulated armored shell. They move around slowly on rocks grazing on algae and if disturbed, they will suction down tightly onto the rock.

[00:05:30]You have to be very fast to snatch one off of a surface before it locks on.

[00:05:35]Okay, so there's the spine of a dead chiton and the shell on the inside. That's the only rigid part of them.

[00:05:44]These guys are another one of my favorites. We called them rock lice and they're basically a giant semi-aquatic roly-poly bug.

[00:05:52]Moving higher on the food chain, otters will often eat small invertebrates like the ones we find on the beach. Sea otters like these mainly live in the ocean full-time, while river otters live on land, but will swim between islands and they'll fish near the beach. River otters love to bring their catch into the nearest human structure or boat to enjoy. As you can see in this older video from my archives, when we pulled in our skiff and found it full of crab guts, we knew who to blame.

[00:06:17]The most common type of seal we'd normally encounter are harbor seals which like to stay in protected coves and closer to shore. Farther out, we get sea lions, although we didn't see as many on this recent trip. So, how about that trolling we mentioned at the start and where are all the delicious seafood dinners? If you're not familiar with fishing terms, trolling is when you slowly drive the boat around towing one or more lines with hooks. It's completely different from trawling which involves nets. My dad made a living trolling commercially and I worked as his crew for a number of years. I was probably a terrible employee as I was way too ADHD for this job and I hated getting up early. I have a little bit of low-quality video from those days. If I'd started the YouTube channel back then, it would probably be very different.

[00:07:00]So, this is not the kind of trolling you do on Reddit. This is actual trolling on a boat for fish. So, my job up at the helm here is to keep our speed between about two and a half to three and a half knots.

[00:07:13]Pretty easy job, just basically taking it in and out of gear. So, this thing has a trolling mode, but the uh rental guy said it is notoriously unreliable. Apparently, it just puts it into slip mode on the transmission and it doesn't seem to work very well, so I'm just doing it manually. We've also pretty much been ignoring this control the entire trip. This is a fancy steering joystick thing and we've been really ignoring the autopilot. So, I've just been steering manually the whole trip which I'm used to and works just fine. Basically, just following the shore here and normally I would want to be in closer to the beach, but there's a commercial boat in there. He's got a purse seine out and he's scooping up the fish right along the shoreline, so we're we're out farther staying out of his way. So, I've got the relatively easy job here up in the wheelhouse and the actual fishing is all happening on the back deck right now.

[00:08:31]We've seen some of the little beach crab, but for eating, you'd want Dungeness, king crab, or whatever the marketing people are calling tanner crab these days. Dungeness were the easiest to catch as they live in relatively shallow water near stream mouths. You catch them with a trap or pot that has one-way gates into it and is baited with something stinky like herring or fish head.

[00:08:59]Random behind-the-scenes gear review.

[00:09:02]Get this waterproof GoPro light that came with the GoPro.

[00:09:07]Yeah, there's a lot of water inside of it.

[00:09:09]Yeah, it's flickering off and on quite a bit. I guess if you're going to buy a light, don't buy a Subtig because they are not waterproof.

[00:09:19]Lately, it's been harder to find legal size Dungeness. We caught exactly one keeper on this entire trip and we had to throw back a lot of females and undersized males. I heard people blaming otters for the lack of legal crab, but there seems to be plenty of undersized or female crab. And I saw a lot more buoys for commercial pots than I remember seeing as a kid, so I suspect they've really been overfished lately.

[00:09:47]Pretty sure you are 6 and a quarter.

[00:09:50]Just not quite.

[00:09:54]What do they have to be, 6 and a half?

[00:09:55]Crab pots can also be an interesting way to find other sea creatures that you wouldn't normally otherwise encounter.

[00:10:00]All kinds of things want the stinky crab bait, so you'll sometimes get other types of crab, big snails, starfish, or even octopus inside a crab pot. We got these big welk snails in one crab pot pull. I assume these things are edible, but they're probably a lot of work for not much food, and they're kind of fun to look at, so we ended up letting them go.

[00:10:20]Halibut are my personal favorite fish to eat. These can grow to be massive on the sea bottom and can actually be hard to kill. Normally we prefer to eat the smaller ones and leave the giant ones to make more little halibut in the future.

[00:10:32]We caught a few halibut on this trip, and they were really good eating.

[00:10:35]These things are easier to catch when you're anchored up, when you can drop your bait to the bottom and then reel it in just slightly, so it's drifting around just off the seafloor.

[00:10:43]As a side note for identifying critters in Alaska or the Pacific Northwest, I highly recommend Max's Field Guide. I bought a few of them to keep on the boat for this trip, and we jokingly called these the dinner menus.

[00:10:54]I'm not quite sure yet what we're doing for this video. It might end up being a video about fishing, or it might be just more of our trip here on the rental boat uh Stikine, this 42-ft Nordic Tug that we've rented in Alaska.

[00:11:08]Uh we'll have to see, and uh yeah, there will probably be a bunch more videos in this series either way, so stay tuned for those, or go back and check if you've missed any.

[00:11:16]Thank you to everyone for watching, and we'll see you next time.