The corer was pushed into the substrate, then extracted with the hole at 

 the top of the handle covered. The core sample usually remained in the corer 

 until the sample was placed in a bag, but at the deep sites the open end was 

 covered to prevent the sample from washing out. 



Four biological samples, each sample consisting of two combined cores, 

 were taken at each site. Samples were placed in prelabeled plastic bags, 

 stored at 1° to 4° Celsius, and returned to the laboratory for processing. 

 An additional core sample was taken at each site for grain-size and chemical 

 analyses. 



6. Biological Sample Processing and Analysis . 



A magnesium chloride (MgCl2) and seawater rinsing technique was used to 

 extract the organisms from the ocean core samples (Cox, 1976) ; rose bengal was 

 added to a 4 percent formalin solution to aid in the sorting. All organisms, 

 0.5 millimeter and larger, were separated and species identified and counted. 

 The coring and extraction techniques used for the sound samples were identical 

 to the methods used on the ocean samples, but tapwater was substituted for 

 the MgCl2 seawater solution. The resulting data were analyzed for community 

 structure statistics according to methods described previously in detail by 

 Diaz (1977) and Boesch (1972) . Cluster analysis was performed on the data 

 according to methods detailed by Boesch (1977) . 



Animals in all samples were identified to the lowest possible taxonomic 

 1 eve 1 . 



7. Sediment Sample Processing and Analysis . 



Sand particle diameter and size distribution were determined by the use 

 of U.S. standard sieves. Taylor series sieves (phi interval) and ROTAPR 

 shaker were used for grain-size analysis. About 50 +. 2 grams of material 

 was sieved on the R0TAP R shaker for 10 minutes. Material retained on each 

 sieve was weighed and the mean, sorting, skewness, and kurtosis statistics 

 were calculated according to Folk (1968) . 



The total organic content of each sediment sample was determined by the 

 incineration method and the total carbonate content of each sediment sample 

 was determined by the hydrochloric acid (HC1) method (Carver, 1971) . 



III. RESULTS 



1. Ocean Beach . 



a. Physical Environment . For a given collection period, the temperature 

 was fairly consistent between transects. There was also no variation in the 

 temperature with depth, except in July, when deeper sites on the transects had 

 slightly lower temperatures (Table 1) . 



The salinity was also consistent within a collection period, except in 



November when a range of about 1 part per thousand was observed. There 



seemed to be no pattern to the salinity variations during any one season. 



For the entire study the total range of salinity was only 31.8 to 33.7 parts 

 per thousand (Table 2) . 



