And Even More Tide Pooling

This is prime tide pooling season for our family. Armed with our trusty Tide Table (indicating negative tides this week), our buckets (for temporarily holding interesting things), our shovels (for scooping and poking...gently), and our camara, we've spent quite a bit of time at the beach lately.

The coast is different every time we go. In early June, there are By-The-Wind-Sailors,
(Velella velella) with sails tipped to the right, as well as Sea Gooseberries (which I didn't get a good picture of but you can see here). Many thanks to MacBeth at the 4RealLearning Boards for helping me to identify these creatures. The By-The-Wind-Sailors are a type of jellyfish, they eat plankton and are pushed by the wind (there are two varieties, those with sail tipped to the right and those with sail tipped to the left). Sea Gooseberries are ctenophores, jelly-type creatures that don't have any stingers of their own. We saw one eating a sand shrimp. Because the Sea Gooseberries are transparent we could see the sand shrimp being digested inside it.

On Monday we saw mostly starfish and sea anemones (below). We also saw a lot of tide pool sculpin (a smallish fish, the ones we saw were about two inches long). I didn't get a picture because they are quick and skittery. We played Musical Seaweed with them. They like to hide out in patches of seaweed. When we pass an arm over the tide pool they all rush out in a panic and switch hiding places. It's quite entertaining.

We saw these interesting creatures:

Thanks to Jennifer at the 4RealLearning Boards who suggested the Sea Searchers Handbook (an excellent resource from the Monteray Bay Aquarium) we were able to identify these as sea slugs. We were tempted to touch these soft, furry-looking creatures, but I was afraid they might sting (which they DO). So I still don't know if the horns are stiff or squishy. The one on the left had a mucusy rope of sand, about 1 foot long, trailing behind it. We are still speculating as to whether this was just mucus or maybe a string of eggs?

Edison found a dry starfish in the sand. It is unusual to find a starfish that is not holding tightly to a rock. Todd and I were pretty sure it was dead, but Edison (who is perpetually saving the life of some thing or other) put it into our holding bucket filled with sea water. Within a few minutes, six or seven of its legs had re-hydrated enough to stick up and wave around. We left it in the bucket until the tide came in and then Edison put the starfish in a tide pool and let it go.

We found a three-armed starfish:
Is this a mutant or an amputee? I wonder how we would find out? All the photographs of starfish so far are of "Ochre Seastars" Pisaster ochraceus Phylum Echinodermata/Class Asteroidea, pictures taken on Arch Cape in Oregon, 2006.


We found loads of crabs yesterday. A funny porcelain crab, many extremely LARGE hermit crabs and a whole tide pool full of teeny tiny hermit crabs.


And then we found this:


What is this? The "skin" on the tubes was tough, but the contents seemed mushy. Todd thinks it is an egg sac of some kind. The ocean is so full of fascinating and unusual life!