Feature Creature July 09

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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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PERIWINKLES

Most visitors to Central Coast rockpools will encounter tiny blue-grey shells quite far away from the edge of the sea. These tiny molluscs are commonly known as ‘periwinkles’ or ‘australwinks’. The can be found in their thousands in some areas.

Blue Periwinkle - Nodilittorina unifasciata

These little marine snails are grazing animals and spend their life rasping off the micro-algae from the rocks. They are very inactive most of the time, but do have a period of frantic activity once in every moon-tidal cycle. At this time they do most of their breeding and feeding.

Tubercled Periwinkles - Nodilittorina pyramidalis

Although they breathe through gills like most sea snails, they are small enough to obtain oxygen from merely the spray of the waves and therefore do not need to be inundated by tides each day. This means that they can live higher up on the rockplatform. They still, however, need water in which to release their eggs, and so will wait until high tides to do this.

Written by Jeannie Lawson

Photographs by Ivon Sebastian & Chris Roberts