Oregon Tidepooling

I've been so busy since we returned from our Oregon vacation in July that all of my photos have remained on my photo card, languishing without my attention. It seems so long ago now that we were on the coast. I miss it, and I miss laughing my a** off with Paul, Denise and Jim, and poking around in the tidepools with them. Here are a few of the interesting things we saw...

A giant green anemone at low tide remains open in the little bit of water that is left in its pool. In the lower right hand corner of the photo you can see a shiny dark green thing - that's the edge of another giant green anemone that has retracted in on itself for low tide.

A bit of kelp makes a beautiful pattern against the beach pebbles.

Gooseneck barnacles and mussels on an exposed rock at low tide.

This crab had shuffled off this mortal coil (did I mention I'm a Monty Python fan?) by the time we saw it. A gull was trying to get the last bits of tasty meat out of the nooks and crannies of its shell when we happened upon it. The coloring and patterns on its shell were just fantastic.

These pink sea anemones, called aggregating anemones were much smaller than the more common giant green ones we saw. These were clustered in a sandy-bottomed tidepool at Hug Point.

There's a really cool website with great pictures all about the critters you can find in the Oregon tidepools at http://www.oregontidepooling.com/
Their focus is on southern Oregon tidepools but many of the things we saw in the north are included on their website.

Hope you enjoyed the trip down Memory Lane with me.