“The goal for today is to make it all the way to the thirty-mile marker,” said Jace Tunnell, as the tangerine rays of the sun rose over the entrance to Padre Island National Seashore, painting the flat ocean and tawny beach in terra-cotta. “There’s a signpost down there where the creepy dolls are.”
For the past eight years, Tunnell has traveled the shoreline of Corpus Christi each week by four-wheel-drive truck or electric bike, searching for sea-soaked treasures. Every Friday, he shares his finds—from jellyfish to messages in a bottle to, yes, creepy baby dolls—with online fans around the world. The strange and fascinating items he discovers, both natural and man-made, garner delighted—and sometimes grossed-out—comments from avid followers of his popular YouTube series and Facebook page.
They’ve also grabbed the attention of the media beyond the Gulf Coast. A recent post about fireworms, bristly segmented annelids that deliver a nasty sting, was featured not just here in Texas Monthly but also in People and The Washington Post.
But it was the creepy dolls that got everything rolling, explained Tunnell, who is fifty and works as director of community engagement at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi’s Harte Research Institute (HRI). Before that, he was director of the Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve. In that role, he helped legendary marine biologist Tony Amos conduct twice-a-week surveys of turtles, birds, and debris, and took the project over after Amos died in 2017.
During one of those forays, Tunnell found the head of a doll that had done some hard time at sea. Let’s just say it: It was a sex doll, its open mouth filled with marine encrustations and one of its eyes pierced open.
Tunnell posted a shot of it on Facebook with the open-ended question “Who left this on the beach?” The photo was so popular that it eventually led to a comedic segment on HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver.
That was a turning point for Tunnell. “As scientists, we’re always preaching to the choir. But how do we reach a new group of people to get them interested in what we’re doing? Because ultimately, if they know about it, they begin to care about it, and it leads to conservation. And so it clicked with me. Let’s not just post seashells and birds. If we find something weird, that’s even better.” It turns out that we like to see ourselves in what washes ashore.
As we climbed in a white Chevy Silverado and headed south, Tunnell explained the basics of successful beachcombing. “First, you need to be able to tell what’s different.” That’s a skill he’s been honing since childhood. His father, Wes Tunnell, had a four-decade career as a marine biologist at Texas A&M–Corpus Christi and was a beloved teacher to thousands of students, including his three children.
“As a kid, we’d come down here,” Tunnell said. “It wasn’t ‘Go play in the water.’ It was ‘We’re counting endangered species of birds.’ ‘We’re counting how much tar per mile.’ We’d sieve coquina [white coffee bean–size clams] on the shoreline. We were always, always collecting data.”
When Tunnell enrolled at the Corpus Christi university, he thought he’d be a journalist. But he took one biology class and realized he’d absorbed so much from his childhood that he switched his major to marine biology. With his own recent appointment to the Harte Research Institute, Tunnell continues his dad’s legacy.
Parking the truck, he shared a second requirement for good beachcombing: “getting out and looking around.” That might sound obvious, but the ability to pay close attention and notice things others miss—especially at a time when we’re all distracted by our phones—pays off in his line of work.
Pretty quickly, Tunnell tossed me a piece of gray pumice stone. As I felt its lightness, he said, “There’s a mountain range in Mexico just south of Veracruz, and it all comes from there.” His talent lies not just in his ability to get people excited about what he finds on the beach but also in being able to read these objects and quickly know so much about them.
In addition to the Friday Facebook posts, Tunnell creates weekly videos focusing on beach topics like comb jellies and sea roaches. He also reports for NPR’s KEDT, which serves Victoria down to the Rio Grande Valley. That material then runs in a print column in five South Texas newspapers. His most recent story was about this very pumice.
Strolling the line of debris, I mentioned that my goal was to find a hamburger sea bean, a nut from a tropical Mucuna vine. Other names are horse-eye beans or ojos de vaca (cow’s eyes), but the nuts look strikingly like a bottle cap–size single patty in a toasted bun.
As I spoke, Tunnell pointed to a white lentil-size object in the sand that my eye had missed. It was a nurdle, a kind of microplastic used to manufacture plastic products. Formosa Plastics near Lavaca Bay has been repeatedly disciplined for releasing nurdles in violation of the Clean Water Act. Numerous studies have shown that because nurdles look like fish eggs, they threaten the health of marine animals and the humans who eat them.
Another project Tunnell helms is Nurdle Patrol, which engages volunteers to take ten minutes to scan the ground for nurdles and help document their distribution. So far, Nurdle Patrollers have reported 2.6 million sightings from around the globe. Within three steps, we saw a dozen more plastic bits.
Before we moved on, Tunnell found a pair of plastic water bottles stuffed with Styrofoam cubes and posed them in the soft morning sunlight. With the Coast Guard and Texas Parks and Wildlife, Tunnell was producing a video about illegal fishing, which includes taking fish from Texas waters without permits or in the wrong season, or using illegal gear. Often from Mexico, these kinds of water bottle floats hold up one end of a long line from which many hooked lines hang, illegally trolling for sharks or snapper. Because regulators struggle to know how much fish is caught illegally and then resold into U.S. markets, they can’t effectively support local fisheries. “It impacts the economy. It impacts how many fish people can keep. It impacts everybody,” Tunnell said.
He crouched down to frame the shot with the agility of the lifelong surfer he is. “Sometimes you get the lighting . . .” he snapped a photo and then captioned it, “Cheap floats at sunrise.” One of the hallmarks of Tunnell’s work is plain language that’s more tongue-in-cheek than preachy environmentalism.
We walked past clover-topped moon jellies, sunburst-topped sea nettles, fountain-shaped pen shells, parchment-textured worm tubes, and rosy barnacles. I picked up a detached Barbie doll’s leg. Tunnell wasn’t impressed; it didn’t count as a creepy doll. I photographed a suntan lotion tube with two triangular bite marks left by sea turtles.
“Here you go,” Tunnell said, handing me something small and round.
I felt its smoothness. “A hamburger sea bean!” Inside its woody exterior was a little pocket of air that allowed it to float across the seas to reach this beach at this moment. It felt like a gift.
Tunnell was already picking up something else. “Here’s a starnut sea bean. From the starnut palm.” This treasure was tear-shaped with small ridges across its surface.
Over the next dozen miles, we discovered sea hearts, flat as a skipping stone, which come from the Caribbean, South America, or as far away as Africa. They have the largest carpel (female reproductive parts) of any plant. We also found a Longhorn-shaped acacia tree thorn and another variety of hamburger bean—this one looked like a double patty. Then there was a walnut-size bean with an intricate braided surface from a foxtail palm. Originally native to Queensland, Australia, it’s now a popular garden tree.
That we found so many varieties of beans and other debris was more than just luck. A collision of currents and geography makes the Texas coast prime picking for beachcombers.
The Loop Current, the prevailing current in the Gulf of Mexico, winds around the Yucatán and then travels north toward Texas. It makes a clockwise loop and then heads back out to the Atlantic south of Florida. Eddies tens of kilometers in diameter spin off from the current, concentrate debris, and dump it on the shore.
In 2016 and 2017 Tunnell participated in a NOAA ocean debris study. Each month, researchers in every Gulf-adjacent state walked one hundred meters along the beach, collecting everything bigger than a bottle cap, sorting and recording what they found. “We have ten times the amount of trash washing up here than anywhere else in the Gulf,” Tunnell said.
At around the 21-mile mark, we stopped in front of what looked like a hay bale turned rancid and dusted in sand. Tunnell said it was rubber, originally from a World War II German supply ship called the SS Rio Grande. The rubber might have been turned into tires, boots, or gas masks for Nazi troops had the USS Omaha and USS Jouett not attacked the vessel off the coast of Brazil, where it sank on January 4, 1944.
Then in 1996 an English deepwater shipwreck recovery company discovered a ship three and a half miles deep off the coast of Brazil. When they sent a remotely operated vehicle down to investigate, they found the SS Rio Grande broken in two. It set the Guinness World record for the deepest visited shipwreck.
Now it’s thought that the sea has corroded the ship’s hull, freeing the rubber bales from their eighty years of confinement. They surf the Gulf Stream and the Loop Current, washing up on U.S. beaches. “There are probably five or six bales on this sixty-mile stretch,” Tunnell said.
I touched the black surface. It felt wiggly on top but solid below. It was made of many layers several inches thick, laminated with time. “They used to make rubber from trees. It’s a white sap, and they formed the rubber in thick sheets,” Tunnell explained. “Now they make rubber in synthetic pellets . . .”
Together we finished the sentence, “. . . like nurdles.”
I recognized that my expectation for this day of beachcombing—finding a hamburger sea bean—was a vast underestimation of what I’d discover.
At around 28 miles in, Tunnell parked the truck again. But unlike at our other stops, he didn’t leap from the vehicle. Instead he said, “I always look and see what’s inside a backpack. Sometimes it’s fishing gear. Sometimes it’s clothes. Sometimes it’s trash. But it could be cocaine. If it’s cocaine, we call the authorities.”
My pattern recognition lacking, I hadn’t yet picked out a blue backpack resting in the debris near the dunes. Tunnell headed toward it.
“Okay,” I said, slowly following.
When Tunnell reached the bag, he threw his arms in the air in victory. “Find of the day!” he shouted. Together, we looked through a rip in the cloth. The unmistakable form of a baby doll’s leg appeared through the fissure. “No way!”
Left: A creepy doll in a backpack on the beach. Juli Berwald
Top: Creepy dolls adorn a signpost along the beach. Juli Berwald
Tunnell cut open the backpack with a knife. The creepy doll had its head on backward and plastic boy parts that comically dripped a stream of seawater from the right location when Tunnell held it up. He also fished out a toy helicopter with half a rotor, a bedraggled My Little Pony, a small stuffed bear, and two Barbies with sand-inundated hair, limbs askew.
In a wave of sadness, I found it impossible not to wonder about the child who had lost this backpack and how it had gotten there. My mind skittered across various scenarios: a kid who’d simply forgotten it at the beach or a migrant unable to carry it any farther. Of course, there’s no way to know.
But what I did know was that beachcombing is a more complicated activity than we usually think. The beach is a place of exchange, of dynamism, of confrontation. It is the stage for all the drama that happens at the edge of our terrestrial world and our watery one. And creepy dolls are as much about what is lost as what is found.
We continued to the thirty-mile marker, where, as promised, creepy dolls hung like ornaments on the signpost. We added the contents of the backpack, as well as the detached Barbie leg, as tributes to the shrine.
On the way back north, Tunnell drove more quickly past the debris. Even though we’d seen so much, there had to be so much more we’d missed. He said what I was thinking: “There’s enough content in the Gulf of Mexico to go on in perpetuity. It’s never-ending. There’s always something new.”
Tunnell’s Tips for Beachcombers
- Focus your attention on the wrack lines—places where debris accumulates during the most recent high tide or storm—and keep an eye out for anything that looks unusual.
- Bring water, food, a hat, sunscreen, and a full tank of gas. If you’re headed to beaches that require four-wheel drive, be sure you have it—but search on foot, not from your vehicle, for the best view of small objects on the sand.
- Go out during low tides, as early in the morning as you can. More of the beach is exposed and less has been picked over. After a storm is also a great time to go beachcombing.
- The lowest tides of the year are in late January and early February. That’s when the crowds are thinnest too.
- Be very careful when opening objects that are closed. Use common sense and always assume something that’s not easily identifiable may be sharp or could sting.
- Using iNaturalist to identify what you find is a good place to start, but be mindful that soaking and sunning can change how things look.
- You can identify 90 percent of everything on Texas beaches with two books: Texas Seashells and the Living Beaches of the Gulf Coast.
- Follow beachcombers on social media to learn more about your finds and become amazed at what’s out there.
