SEATTLE. Beneath the docks of Puget Sound lies a hidden world of skeleton shrimp, mussels, anemones, tube worms, barnacles and sea stars, and this month volunteers are invited to document it as part of a global event called Docktober, according to a report from Oregon Public Broadcasting carried by NPR for Oregonians.
The practice of observing the marine life that clings to dock pilings, boat hulls, ropes and floats is known as dock fouling. Naturalist Luan Roberts has spent years exploring it around Puget Sound, photographing what she finds and logging hundreds of observations every month on iNaturalist, the online platform where professional scientists and amateurs document plants and animals. She has even written a how-to book, \"Dock Fouling Adventures: A Guide to Exploring Marine Life on Public Docks.\"
Roberts describes the pastime as being like birding, but more punk rock. Unlike tide pooling, there is no need to consult a tide table and wait for a minus tide, because a floating dock rises and falls with the water and brings its underwater community along. She calls the side of a dock basically a living reef, a window into an untapped niche in the ecosystem.
Every October, Roberts encourages people to join Docktober, a monthlong bioblitz in which participants visit a dock, look underneath it, photograph the organisms they find and upload the observations for others to see and identify. This year she also launched the Dock of the Month Club, which has attracted more than 150 members to meet up at least once a month at a different dock, with multiple meetups planned around Puget Sound during Docktober.
The idea gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, when dock fouling allowed a kind of asynchronous socializing, with people visiting the same places without necessarily visiting them together before eventually meeting in person. The event has since gone international. Last year, roughly 32 participants contributed nearly 1,000 observations of about 180 species, from as far away as Scotland and South Korea, and in the first week of this year's event alone Roberts counted 3,237 observations of 312 species.
All of those sightings add up to a useful baseline of data, Roberts said, one that can reveal patterns in what species are living where and in what numbers, and over enough years can show when a species appears in a location or vanishes. Participants, she said, are not just doing something for themselves; they are contributing to science.