Backyard Zoology · 18 February 2020
2020-02-18T16:22:12+11:00
https://www.facebook.com/backyardzoology/videos/877369926048762/

I took myself down to the rock pools this morning. It has been forever but I needed to breathe that salty air, to hear those waves crashing and of course to find some interesting critters. But my head was most definitely not in the game today and I took myself, my uncoordinated self down there, onto the slippery, wet, sharp, uneven rocks wearing slippery when wet thongs! I have no idea what I was thinking but I soon realised it was a very, very bad idea as soon as my little feet hit the first lot of wet rocks and one of my thongs flipped over. As in, that toe strap bit stayed between my toes, but the entire thong flipped around and I was suddenly wearing my thong upside down, on top of my foot. Which is fine, I'm not into fashion really anyway but it did mean my soft little foot went sliding across the jagged rock and out from under me, so the people watching from above, of which there were many, would have seen me doing what looked like a very enthusiastic high kick. I'm here to confirm that it was most certainly NOT an enthusiastic high kick. Happy to report that despite many slips and slides, I remained off my bum for the entire trip!

The last couple of times I have been down to the rock pools recently, I've noticed the absence of my most favourite critters; no sign of the brightly coloured Carpet Sea Stars and the nobbly little Sea Slugs. Gone. I searched today, staring down into various pools but couldn't locate them. There is still loads of other life though, little transparent shrimps, heaps of little crabs, their pincers poking out from under rock shelves and out from weed grabbing at bits and pieces, lots of species of marine snails and tiny fish darting about. But I really wanted to see Sea Stars and luckily for me the Dwarf Cushion Sea Stars were there in decent numbers. So I plunged the camera down into a couple of different pools. Some full of other animals moving about slowly to the eye but totally active, others pretty sparsely occupied. 

But there's something about watching these time lapse videos that I love, looking at different areas and seeing new movements and watching as the stars puff themselves up and off the rock face, sliding along to find a new patch of microscopic algae before settling down and feeding. And that's what I needed today. To see the stars, all of them, going about their quiet, but busy, little lives.

Dwarf Cushion Sea Star
Sandon Point