Too Wet To Explode
It’s July Fourth! Independence Day! Time for fireworks! Colors so bright they hurt your eyes!
Except what if it was too wet to light a match. What then, smart guy?
Well, the answer is down on the Oregon coast, at Cannon Beach. Because, there you can go visiting the tide pools at the minus tides, even lower than regular low tides.
The huge offshore rocks, as big as office buildings, are normally surrounded by water. You can see in the first photo below where the water normally sits, defined by the lighter line above the heads of the people on the beach.
But for a brief couple of hours at the lowest tides of the season, you can walk almost to these rocks, and see all of the animals which are normally hidden.
A huge part of the biomass is dull colored, like this giant mass of mussels, barnacles, and seaweed.
Some of the things you see will have little patches of color, like these mergansers taking a break on this rock while it’s temporarily exposed to the air.
But then, you see the otherworldly colors of thing like these green sea anomenes.
And then there are all of the starfish, brightly colored for evolutionary reasons I can’t begin to understand.
Happy Fourth, Deadsplinteristas!
These pics are so vivid that I can almost smell the ocean.
I don’t know if it was the cold water temperature or something else, but there wasn’t any low tide smell. Kind of surprising considering how much shellfish was sitting out in the sun.
Love how that last one is flipping us off.
Same energy I feel most days, lil starfish, same.
😂
https://gifdb.com/images/high/patrick-star-angry-zbhn4gpqobu6f2c7.webp
🤣
Maybe “he” is just excited to see us?
The heat and humidity is killing me @manchucandidate how are you fairing?
Hiding in my house under cover of AC.
Awesome shots, @bluedogcollar.
Sea stars were very endangered around Cannon Beach a few years back but starting to come back. I haven’t been in a few years but that is a very special place for our family and we use to camp there every year when my kids were little. Probably a major reason my daughter is an environmental scientist.