The weather has been in the 80s so instead of the mountains we went to the beach. It was actually much cooler today with a marine layer cover that stuck around all day. Impossible to avoid were hoards of kelp flies. As you can see in the pictures below, they were all over everything and made it pretty uncomfortable for a while until we just got used to them.
We found this beautiful smooth brown turban snail. You can see it's lime green colored umbilicus and operculum showing here.
Here's a video from Dec 2013 of this same snail. You can see it's beautiful orange and black flesh.
Here is a mussel extending its foot. It's interesting to see how it reacts to the periwinkle.
Lucky for us, Cindy brought this $20 field microscope with her. We were able to observe bryozoa on the kelp that we would not have been able to see with the naked eye. While it isn't anything like a good home microscope, and it view area is small, it is still a good option for use in the field.
Here's a video of the bryozoa under our home microscope. It's unbelievable that we swim into and walk all over these creatures at the beach without a thought for their magnificence.
And here is a beautiful image of bryozoa by German biologist Ernst Haeckel from Kunstformen der Natur depicting symmetry and order.
