Feature Creature March10

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Welcome to the feature creature page. Here you will find short articles on different marine creatures. A new article will be featured each month.

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BARNACLES

There are many beautiful places to visit on the Central Coast, and some of the best spots are by the sea. When visiting rock pools, take a minute to think about the life that lives there. How would you cope with living here for one day... Imagine that you are, say, a barnacle. How will your day unfold?

Twice a day you will be covered by the ocean, which is great because you need water to breath and to feed from. You will spend your underwater time grasping tiny particles from the plankton to eat and g dissolved oxygen from the water through your gills. But what happens when the tide goes out?

Barnacle Feeding

Then, you tightly close the top of your shell to prevent air from getting in and drying you out. You go into a state like hibernation - your system slows down so that you don’t use much energy or the small amount of oxygen that you have stored around your gills. You hope that one of the predator whelks will pass you by and not eat you. You hope the Sooty Oyster catcher, a bird that visits the rock platforms at low tide, doesn’t prise you off the rocks for its dinner. You hope the surf doesn’t become too strong and knock you off the rocks.

Predatory whelks feeding on barnacles

All the animals that live in the rock pools have to cope with these vastly changing conditions every day. They are AMAZING! Please respect them and don’t collect them.

Written by Jeannie Lawson

Photographs by Ivon Sebastian & Chris Roberts

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