Born to gaze into night skies..

Throughout my time in college taking marine biology classes and going on plenty of field trips, I've been to many rocky intertidal areas along the coast of California. I studied up at Bodega Bay in northern California (where Hitchcock's "The Birds" was filmed, by the way) for a while, and went on trips to a few camping spots all the way up by San Luis Obispo for our fish and invertebrates classes. And of course at Leo Carillo beach which is by Malibu. And seriously, there's so much treasure to find in these places. I've picked a few of the weirder animals we've found to upload that are just freakin' cool.




This is just a common green anemone that is pretty much all over the tidepools, but I picked it to show just how squishy these things are. When the tide goes out, these things curl up into little rubber balls and you can barely see them. And when the tide comes back in, they wave their tentacles in the water. When you step on them they squirt out streams of water that they have stored inside them. I don't think it hurts them, but it's really fun lol. These things don't hurt either, you can touch em and their tentacles stick to your finger, but won't sting you.

A green eel?! Yeah, bet you've never seen one of those.

This thing is so awesome. It's a chiton, and usually they're these boring brown-shelled things that just suck onto rocks and don't budge. But if you take a closer look (probably have to click on it), you can see that this one has all these intricate blue designs carved into its shells. Isn't that amazing? How does a simple chiton grow to have these designs on it? I'm sure someone could get into the scientific evolutionary explanation of it, but to a normal human being, it blows my mind away.

Ever see one of these? Look at its bright green flourescent markings and wavy back hair. Pretty alien, huh? Well, this thing's a nudibranch, basically a sea slug. They're one of my favorite invertebrate animals, and they come in all kinds of psychedelic colors. There's one called the spanish shawl that is bright purple with tufts of bright orange hair growing out of it.

And of course we can't forget the baby sea star. Normal big ones are all over the place and not so fascinating, so I kick it up a notch by trying to find baby ones.