A Small Tide Pool

Last Saturday at the beach at Chambers Creek Properties, we saw a very small tide pool in a rock and took some time to look into it.  There were barnacles opening and closing, reaching their modified legs into the water to get food, and snails and limpets moving around.  My younger son said he saw a little crab in there. It was a small world full of tiny creatures in a shallow little pool of water.

 "Tide pools are rocky pools by oceans that are filled with seawater. Many of these pools exist as separate entities only at low tide." ~ wikipedia

I really wanted to get a picture of a barnacle with it's legs sticking out into the water, so I took a bunch of pictures in a row.  Here are two of them.  They look very much alike, except if you look closely (you can click on them to see a bigger picture), you can see that the snails have moved a little and the barnacles are opening and closing.

The next picture is an animation made by putting a cropped section of the above two pictures together.  They aren't exactly the same size and they don't fit exactly together, but they are close enough that you can see the barnacles opening and that the snails have moved!  I'm not sure how far apart in time the pictures were taken, but I'm guessing maybe about 6-10 seconds (with three other pictures taken in between).

Here's a link to a bigger picture.

Outdoor Wednesday
Watery Wednesday