Well I said I'd share some of the other things I found at the beach, so I'd better do it! On this particular day there was quite a lot of seaweed washed up on the beach, so not surprisingly a lot of the things I found have to do with seaweeds.
The blue bottle, also known as Portugese man O'war is a blue coloured jelly fish with a nasty sting. Fortunately the ones I found looked pretty dead and only one showed any sign of still having tentacles. Interestingly is not a true jelly fish, but the 'jelly fish' is made up of many individuals of a colonial hydrozooid. In this photo the blue bottle has become entangled with a piece of Neptune's necklace.
Here are some goose barnacles that were living on the end of a piece of kelp that I found washed ashore. They are filter feeders that feed on plankton in the water column.
Sandhoppers are group of amphipods (little crustaceans) that feed on rotting seaweed that gets washed ashore. With their laterally flattened bodies and hopping movement they resemble large fleas, and are also known as sand fleas, but they are not true fleas.
Mussel's beard looks a bit like golden hair. It is a colonial hydroid, forming chains of tiny polyps (similar to corals) on mussel shells (front of photo).
Neptune's necklace (left of photo) is a seaweed endemic to New Zealand and parts of Australia. The little 'beads' are hollow and filled with water and gas, which causes the seaweed to float. They are also fun to pop and squirt each other with!
Sea lettuce is a bright green seaweed that when alive and healthy looks a bit like a leafy lettuce. The pieces I found though had washed ashore and didn't look very appetising (green bit in the middle of the photo).
Bladder kelp (right of photo) is New Zealand's largest seaweed and grow to 50m in length. It has air filled 'bladders' that help to keep the leaves upright in the water.
So there are plenty of things to find at the beach, or where ever you are, if you just stop and take the time to look :)
