Guide to Seashore Animals of Alaska Available Online: Common Seashore Animals of Southeast Alaska

 

 Aaron Baldwin on the seashore. Photo by Lisa Ward.

The 2015 edition of Aaron Baldwin's online guide to seashore animals is now available and well worth browsing through.  Common Seashore Animals of Southeast Alaska covers the Alaska coast in the area immediately adjacent to British Columbia--the Alaskan Panhandle.

Aaron says:  "Southeast Alaska...is an ecologically diverse region that extends from Yakutat to Dixon Entrance south of Prince of Wales Island. A complex of several hundred islands, fjords, channels, and bays, SE Alaska has over 3,000 miles of coastline....The marine life of SE Alaska is exceptionally diverse for several reasons. One is simply the amount of coast, over twice the amount of the coastline of Washington, Oregon, and California combined! Within this enormous coastline there is an incredible variety of habitats, each with their own ecological community."

"Another reason for SE Alaska’s marine diversity is that we are in an overlap zone between two major faunal provinces. These provinces are defined as large areas that contain a similar assemblage of animals. From northern California to SE Alaska is a faunal province called the Oregonian Province. From the Aleutian Island chain to SE Alaska is the Aleutian Province. What this means is that while our sea life is generally similar to that seen in British Columbia and Washington state, we also have a great number of northern species present." 

Aaron Baldwin is author of many of E-Fauna's marine invertebrate checklists, and has contributed hundreds of photos of sea life to the atlas.  He is a fisheries biologist in Alaska. 

View Aaron's photo gallery here.
View Aaron's online guide here.