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 Journe

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