This post was originally published on this site
Spend time on any Seattle shoreline in the summer and you’ll run into the regulars: the gelatinous toilet-plunger-looking egg collar of a moon snail, the vibrant sea stars, the spiny rock fish, and a crew of baseball-capped guides from the aquarium, the Beach Naturalists.
For the last 25 years, when low tide hit 11 different Puget Sound beaches, you’d find the Beach Naturalists educating beachgoers about their local ecosystems. The program was a fixture every summer. Until this one.
Due to layoffs at the aquarium this January, the Beach Naturalist program this summer became a shadow of what it once was, say former part-time workers and volunteers who spoke to The Stranger. The layoffs also affected volunteers and staff with Beach Naturalist’s sister program, the Cedar River Salmon Journey, that happens every fall.
The aquarium told workers and volunteers that a combination of cost overruns from the newly-built Ocean Pavilion and falling revenue forced its hand. The volunteers don’t buy this reasoning, pointing to the grant funding that supports the programs. The aquarium didn’t provide a clear answer to The Stranger. The first time we asked, it gave the same reasoning it gave to the laid-off workers. The second time, it said falling revenue wasn’t to blame, but rather it couldn’t keep up with the size of the program.
Around 300 trained volunteers chipped in each season. The aquarium employed nearly 24 part-time “beach captains,” or leads, to manage operations. Two full-time employees operated the programs year round. Both of them are now gone.
The people who loved these programs, many of whom have been there from the start, can’t participate anymore. They cherished their time on the beach, speaking to people, sharing their knowledge about the sea and what dwells inside it. They brought the aquarium to the public, without the $40 entrance fee, and formed a community with each other and regular beach visitors. Without the program and the authority the aquarium vest and hat provided, they feel they can’t connect in the same way. But, nothing will keep them from the beach.
The Naturalists
These people love the sea, the shore, and everything in between. They’re not hired for how much they know about salmon or the beach, but for their ability to connect with people. (Though, knowing salmon facts doesn’t hurt.) A good Beach Naturalist can get people excited about conservation and protecting local habitats, volunteers say.
Kellie Stickney, a public relations professional and a volunteer with the Beach Naturalists for seven years, always had a passion for marine biology. The program scratched that itch.
Stickney says she spends a typical shift at the beach—usually Carkeek Park—surrounded by kids. They would ask her one question, receive her answer, and follow her around like enthusiastic, excited ducklings for the rest of her shift.
“They’d say ‘What’s this?’ ‘What’s this’?” Stickney says. “To watch people’s eyes open with that wonder is amazing. Like, they never saw a shrimp before, and then all of a sudden they see them everywhere.”
Bill Rogers moved to West Seattle from Virginia decades ago in part because of the access to the water. “Just the fact that there’s whales and salt water right down the street was awesome,” he says.
His whole world is watery. Rogers’ earns his money as a pond-scape artist at Puget Sound Ponds. He owns several fish tanks. But that wasn’t enough. He “immediately” started volunteering with the Beach Naturalist program. He spent those summer days—usually on West Seattle beaches—educating the public on the creatures living on the beach or in the tide pools and on how to be a “better Seattle beach resident” and protect those creatures.
After a year of volunteering, Rogers wanted more. He became a lead, earning just above minimum wage managing volunteers. His position was cut earlier this year. But that was left out of public messaging. Over 20 other captains were let go as well, Rogers says.
“What the aquarium will say is that we still have a program,” Rogers says. “In my opinion, it’s been destroyed.”
True to Rogers’ hunch, the aquarium maintained the program was intact. Aquarium spokesperson Emily Malone says the beach captains weren’t “cut.” They were seasonal jobs, like camp counselors, she wrote. The aquarium decided not to rehire them, or anyone else for the same job.
But Rogers says the seasonal layoffs from the aquarium only started last year. Though the aquarium asked him and a few other leads to take a few shifts during winter low tide nights so he was kept on staff until his firing in February.
“Everything was changing,” he says. “Policy was changing, culture was changing. Things were changing for no good reason.”
The “Bomb”
Financially, the aquarium was in a bad way. The new Ocean Pavilion cost upwards of $175 million, including new costs tacked on earlier this year. A $34 million loan from the City of Seattle barely chipped away at that. Despite visitations increasing by nearly 200,000 people last year, as reported by the Seattle Times, the aquarium came up $4.37 million short of revenue goals.
Rogers says the “bomb was dropped” out of nowhere during a staff meeting weeks after the aquarium publicly announced it was laying off 12 full-time staff, Rogers says.. He and his colleagues were “shocked” about the lack of care for part-timers who’d worked there for years.
“It was not the norm for how the aquarium was run,” Rogers says.
After 15 years managing volunteers for the Beach Naturalists and the Cedar River Salmon Journey programs, Lawrence Reymann learned about his layoff in an email.
“We get an email that says the crime is paid money,” Reymann says. “It reminded me so much of the music business. It would always be the same way. ‘We’re bleeding money. Do more with less.’”
Reymann worked for Columbia Records for 20 years, taking harried calls from his basement in Renton.
“When somebody from New York called at 7 a.m. because Jessica Simpson lost four spins in Boise, screaming ‘What are you gonna do? What are you going to do?’ I could go out and hike May Creek in Kennydale,” Reymann says.
It was stressful work. Getting out to the creek, onto the beach, and into nature saved his sanity.
“There’s an old Jefferson Starship lyric, ‘It don’t mean shit to a tree’ and that would help me regain some of my perspective,” he says.
Andrea, a young coast Salish woman who works in environmental education and spoke to The Stranger using a pseudonym also heard the news via email.
When she learned the news in late winter, she couldn’t help but associate the aquarium cuts with the federal cuts from Donald Trump’s administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. It felt like their program was getting DOGE’d, leaving behind a shell of what it was—and, not the cool kind of shell.
“The email was like, ‘Oh, the beach naturalist program isn’t going away. It’s just changing,’” she says. “But then that change is gutting the entire program and firing my boss.”
The Money
Daoud Neil Miller started volunteering with the Beach Naturalists after stumbling upon volunteers at Carkeek Park in 1999. He’s been heavily involved ever since. He knows where the money comes from.
The aquarium isn’t funding the Beach Naturalists and Cedar River Salmon Journey programs completely out of pocket. They’re supported by county-level grants from Water Resource Inventory Areas (WRIAs), or entities that govern individual watersheds. For instance, WRIA 8 encompasses the Cedar River Watershed, while WRIA 9 includes the Duwamish. For years, both have awarded the aquarium grant funding.
Public records show that between 2022 to 2024, WRIA 8 gave $13,500 to the Beach Naturalist program, and $38,500 to Cedar River Salmon Journey, and has been awarding grant funds to each program since 2005 and 2015 respectively. WRIA 9, which gave the aquarium $88,500 to support the Beach Naturalists between 2019 and 2024, has funded the Beach Naturalists since 1998.
“It’s the dumbest thing,” Rogers says. “We were kind of self financed.”
The aquarium would not share specific budgets for both programs, but spokesperson Malone wrote in an email that grant funding only covered a third of the cost, and it foots the rest of the bill. As the Beach Naturalist program grew, the aquarium couldn’t keep up, even as local grant funding remained consistent, she says.
“Associated expenses grew substantially during the past 10-plus years—beyond what is sustainable for the aquarium to cover,” Malone wrote. “We needed to right-size the program so that it can continue sustainably long into the future.”
This differs from what the aquarium first communicated, both to its staff and to The Stranger.
Tim Kuniholm, a spokesperson for the aquarium, initially told The Stranger rising costs and funding shortfalls contributed to the problem.
“We have been impacted by cutbacks from federal grants and others,” Kuniholm says, “and we have subsidized those where we needed to to help maintain these programs and keep a visibility on the beach and Cedar River.”
The WRIA funding is not tied to federal money, but, like most good things in our ass backwards state, tied to a King County property tax levy.
But grants aren’t just handed out— they’re applied for and there are constraints for how that money is spent. The money is pegged to the specific programs. Funds allocated in 2024 are meant to be spent in 2025. If the scope of the work changes in a major way, grant money may need to be sent back.
A spokesperson for WRIA 8 says, given all the changes, it has already been in touch with the aquarium about its 2024 grant. The aquarium has kept the funding, WRIA 8 says.
But according to a spokesperson for WRIA 9, the aquarium did not even apply for grants in 2025 “due to significant changes in the program.”
Aquarium spokesperson Kuniholm said the programs haven’t changed, even if those leading them on the ground have. The specially-trained, part-time beach leads like Rogers, Reymann, and Miller may be gone, but volunteers are still in charge.
“The shape of the program is a little bit different,” Kuniholm says, “but it generally has landed where it’s been in the past.”
The Big Ebb
According to Miller and others, in practice, the program is at low tide. Beach Naturalists simply don’t cover as much shoreline as they used to.
Low tides steer the shifts. They happen across 11 beaches and at odd hours—not just weekends. Usually, there’s three to six volunteers and one beach lead per shift.
Last year, they volunteered on 22 different days, amounting to a total of 242 shifts on the 11 beaches. This year, it’s been scattershot. According to the aquarium, the Beach Naturalists only had 28 shifts on 10 beaches.
Stickney headed out to Carkeek Beach on a July weekend to catch “a negative two low tide, which is a great low tide to be out in,” she says, and she didn’t see a single Beach Naturalist.
Volunteers for the Cedar River Salmon Journey worry their program will face the same fate once it starts in the fall.
“We used to reach tens of thousands of Puget Sound residents, tens of thousands,” Miller says. “There’s no way that can happen now.”
Rogers is starting up his own group called the West Seattle Tide Pool All Stars.
Most of the Beach Naturalists are finding ways to get out on the beach again as well. It’s because, as Rogers says, “Beach naturalists are beach naturalists.”
Still, it’s different now. Their groups are smaller, their reach more limited. Without the authority of the aquarium, the naturalists feel muzzled.
Amy, a former beach lead who talked to The Stranger using a pseudonym, described the layoffs as “a stab in the heart.” Amy decorated her hat with new pins—new ones each year, and some from a relative who volunteered at a different aquarium before they died.
“It’s just a part of me,” she says. “I like being out on the beach and talking to people and telling what I know.”
Amy still goes out on the beach and wears her hat, but she covers the aquarium logo now. Stickney, the seven year program veteran used to children tailing her during a shift, still goes out on the beach, but without the official vest and hat. She feels like she has to bite her tongue. “Without being credentialed it feels a bit awkward to start talking to people and answer questions they might have,” she says.
Sometimes, though, a Beach Naturalist can’t help it.
“I did get into it with a guy who had filled an entire bucket full of red rock crabs,” Rogers says.
