(birds squawking) - The Oregon coast is a rugged and very dynamic place.

No two days on the Oregon coast are the same.

It's just constantly changing and it kind of constantly keeps you on your toes.

I grew up in the Northeast in both New York City and Pennsylvania, and came to the Oregon coast about 12 years ago and just fell in love with the ecosystem as a whole.

(upbeat music) I grew up with two chef parents, and we would go foraging for mushrooms and things like that, but living on the Oregon coast, there's just so much food around us.

I studied marine biology and did not know that I was going to end up back in the world of food and teaching people specifically about food, but being able to really see food in its natural ecosystem and knowing how to harvest it sustainably and ethically is very empowering.

(upbeat music) We have these dark, really murky waters, and the reason that our coastline is so dark is it's full of micronutrients, it's full of microalgaes and plankton and all this stuff that is fueling the life on our shores.

(upbeat music) Foraging is how we've gotten food forever.

From mussels to clams to crabs, it's kind of just like a classic pastime of being on the coast, and it really helped me learn way more about this ecosystem than I had already known.

Mussels are really abundant on the Oregon coast.

They live in this mid-tide zone, so you don't need the lowest tides to be able to access them, but you definitely need a low tide.

They are attached to the rocks and attached to other mussels with these little threads.

If that thread is still in the mussel, the mussel is still alive, so in terms of freshness, cutting that thread so that it's not getting ripped out of the mussel is a really good idea.

And then you always have to pay attention to the water so that you don't get swept away.

(water flowing) (wind blowing) If you notice when you're scanning the rocks, and if you think about the way that the tide works, the ones on the top are getting food less often, so you tend to find smaller mussels at the top and you find really, really big mussels at the bottom.

Some of these mussels have an entire ecosystem living on top of them, so this one shell, for instance, has six gooseneck barnacles, a snail, 20 other barnacles growing on it, and if you can find mussels that have almost nothing else growing on them, do that so that you're not taking from this whole ecosystem even more than we need to be.

You're allowed to harvest up to 72 mussels per day, and you are able to harvest shellfish recreationally all year.

It's just a matter of knowing what the tides are doing and then being safe and not putting yourself into a risky situation.

All right, we probably have enough mussels for a little meal.

The nori is this dark green, almost brown seaweed that hangs off the rock in these long strands.

We have a lot of bigger brown kelps, like this laminaria, so you see other algae, maybe microalgaes growing on the surface of it, so it's a little bit rougher and darker and you can feel almost a texture to it, and that might not necessarily be the best piece that I would want to eat, but these other pieces that are cleaner and smoother and don't have that growth on them are great.

(water flowing) I've worked in environmental education for about 10 years now and have found doing research and working in labs that really, the education and the communication side of science is kind of where my heart and soul is.

How's it going?

Good.

Welcome.

- Thank you.

- I love taking people out into this environment and actually getting out into the field and experiencing these places.

You guys want to go to the beach?

Okay, cool.

So we're going to spend a lot of time just walking around and looking at all the little critters and seeing what we can find.

That anemone wall is incredible.

You can see the top of the tide line and that green, what looks like moss is actually an algae, a seaweed.

You see different zones in the intertidal, and we call this zonation in biology and ecology.

Below the mussel bed is the low tide zone.

You get to see areas that are not normally exposed to air at all.

Sea stars are very, very heavily munching on this mussel bed and kind of keeping it in check.

They will hug a mussel shell, and with those suction cup-like tube feet that they have, they'll pry the mussel open about a centimeter, and then they take their whole stomach and they stick it into the mussel shell and digest it, and then they pull their stomach back into their body.

- Like, take Captain Monster Mussel.

- Yes, yes, yes, yes.

- Like the beast.

- Yeah.

- How old will they- - They can live about 60 years.

Yeah, a mussel can live about 60 years.

So this is the chiton, the thing with the plates, but this is a different species and it's right next to two baby starfish.

A lot of people just haven't fully immersed themselves in these environments or have experienced them, but haven't actually dove deep into what everything is and how everything's interacting, so it's always just very fun.

They're called sculpin.

- Oh yes.

- Tidepool sculpin.

I think that there's so much that people don't know and people don't realize about food and food systems.

And when you do forage your own food and you become more attuned to your environment, I think it does inspire you to make better decisions around food and look into really what it takes to get food onto your plate.

(water flowing) (utensils clattering) I have just always been in the world of food and really also studying the oceans, and it's been very fun to find a way to merge the two and get people out into our coastal ecosystems, but also learning about how to harvest your own food and just connecting with our coast in various different ways through foraging and surfing and meeting farmers and fishermen.

It's really hot.

The work that I do in my day-to-day life is so in tune with what the tides are doing, and it has just been a really fun way to live that I can look at how high the river is and know if I have to go to work soon because the tide's coming in or the tide's going out.

It just feels very special to be working so closely with the natural ecosystem.

I just feel very lucky.

- Getting inspiration for your next adventure.

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