How many tiny sails?

I know I just wrote about tiny By-the-wind Sailors (Velella velella) a few days ago.  I have to post about them again because I don't think I've ever seen so many of this size, and it seems worth documenting.

Here's a picture showing a variety of sizes with a ruler for scale.  The Velella on the left is the more typical size that you "expect" to encounter on a beach.

 

Below is the same picture, but it's a close-up of the left side of the ruler:

 

Now you can see the smallest of the Velella, just a couple of millimeters long.  They looked like this for almost the entire length of the beach that we walked, about 3/4 mile.

I know they were probably variable along that stretch of beach.  But if we used this picture just to come up with some sort of estimate — then there were 25 tiny Velella/10 cm or 2.5/cm, and there are 160,934 cm in a mile, so there would have been ~400,000 tiny Velella washed up on a mile-long section of Salmon Creek Beach tonight.  No wonder I kept saying, "Wow" as we walked along next to the receding waves.