This time with tentacles
We managed a single trip this summer—camping at a beach roughly fifty kilometres from our house. We set-up in a forest campsite a short walk to a rocky beach, close enough I could listen to the waves crashing as I lay in my tent. And bonus, because the area is technically a rainforest, it didn’t rain. But the best part, by far, was exploring the tide pools.
Tide pools are little biomes abandoned by the retreating water. Fish, crabs, sea stars, shrimp, and other ocean dwellers are stuck until the tide returns. The purple-tipped tentacles of aggregating anenome always draw my eye.
Tentacles are fascinating—and I’m not the only one to think so. There’s great tentacle artwork like this warehouse. Tentacles of all sorts regularly show up an aliens in science fiction like the Heptapods in the movie Arrival, or the any of the movies on this list. There’s even a whole sub-genera of erotica that features tentacles, which I won’t be providing any links to.
I spent a signifiant portion of my beach time as a child looking for aggregating anenome just so I could touch them. They’re delightfully sticky, like touching a wet candy cane. And yep, they’re venomous. Fortunately, as a human, I’m too thick skinned for the nematocyte (a dart on the end of an explosive cell evolved to deliver a venomous payload) to get through. These darts are why the tentacles feel sticky. Even if the dart got through my skin, it wouldn’t provide enough venom to harm me, unlike a box jellyfish which also uses the same tactic (and don’t live anywhere near me).
Along the same vein of the relationship between a clownfish and some tropical anemone (with a young child in the house I’ve seen Finding Nemo ten billion times, meaning this is a fact on the tip of my fingers), aggregating anemone play host to an assortment of symbiotic algae. The algae living inside them make their bodies appear green.
Note - Sea anemones are named after the anemone flower. Instead of luring in bees and giving them pollen, sea anemones wait at the bottom of the ocean and in tide pools waiting for unsuspecting fish and marine invertebrates to get close enough to snack on.