Corndogs + Avocados

Yesterday was my last day at Starquest Expeditions, but I will still be teaching weekday mornings until June 9th. To celebrate, I took myself to Carkeek Park (2-3 miles from our house) for some tide pooling. Yippee! It was a perfect Seattle day at the beach, rainy and no one in sight.

There are railway tracks running along the beach and pretty pink and yellow flowers hugging the embankment leading from them down to the water.

It was an excellent load tide, exposing loads of creatures just lying about trying to look unappetizing so I wouldn?t eat them.

This is a shore crab. They are very small, less than 2 inches across, and range in color from purple to green. They hide under rocks at low tide, scavenge, and feed on bits of algae.

These are acorn barnacles. They attach their ?heads? to rocks along the beach and when they are completely submerged they extend their six limbs fringed with cirri to comb the surrounding ocean currents for small particles. These limbs are swept down through the water toward the mouth where specialized appendages wipe off and sort the particles. Organisms up to 1mm. long are caught in the net of the cirri and eaten. Also eaten are very small particles (1/500mm long) such as single-celled plants and bacteria that are swept into the barnacle by the feeding currents.

This is an aggregating anemone. In order to protect themselves from predators and from drying out when the water recedes, they retract in such a way that the outside of body column closes around the oral disc in the center, like a draw-string purse. To me they look like greenish blobs attached to rocks. Under water they extend their purple and green stinging tentacles to feed on small crustaceans, invertebrates and plankton. They ?swallow? their prey whole and spit out what is not digested through the same oral disc. I?m glad we don?t do that.

This is me in the rain. I?m a bit goofy, I know.