As our Blue Recovery Project moves into its six month, our Plymouth rock poolers found some truly phenomenal marine creatures.
Unhindered by the very un-British weather, our fifth Blue Recovery Beach Day was another great success. Those undeterred by the heat, headed out to Mount Batten beach and the Mount Batten Watersports & Activities Centre.
At the beach
On the beach it was beadlets galore as our Rock Pool Families set out on an anemone hunt. With five varieties to find, all eyes were fixed firmly to each and every rock.
Slightly further along the beach, our Adult Citizen Scientists conducted true crab surveys. True crabs include: shore crabs, edible or pasty crabs, and velvet swimming crabs.
Although, we set out to find anemones of all shapes and colour, and true crabs, some very bizarre and rare marine wildlife turned up on Sunday. The St Piran’s hermit crab, with its unmistakeable bright red and electric blue colouration, made an appearance not once, but four times! Take a look at our St Piran’s species in focus blog to find out more about these amazing creatures and why it is so great to find them.
Perhaps an even rarer a find than our friends the St Piran’s, was a group of sea squirts known as Salps. These clear jelly-like animals were a spectular find by one of our Rock Pool Families as they are more commonly found further offshore.
See Our Shore
As our penultimate See Our Shore Beach Day for this year, Sunday was possible our best yet in Plymouth. The weather had packed out the beach for us with plenty of people walking over to have a look in our Mobile Rock Pool (MRP). It was great to see so many people engaging with wildlife they had not realised was so close by. Even greater still was seeing our Blue Recovery members showing off all they had found and learned.
Once again a massive thank you to everyone who came along and braved the sun, we hope you enjoyed the day as much as we did!
A special thank you to Fotonow and Ryan for coming along and taking some amazing photos and film.
