Extreme tide, star fish, octopus, and garibaldi

Some kind of flu has brought our entire household to a standstill this past week. Each of us have had about three days of fever and chills with a deep seated bronchial cough keeping us awake through the night. It has been the worst we've had in years.

Last Thursday we went to Treasure Island for the -1.8 extreme low tide. It was a cold and cloudy day.

You can see a small berm pushed up by the waves, and an opportunistic boy :)

Take a look at this large rock on the beach:

Now in this next picture of our kids sledding down a berm on January 18th (a week and five days earlier), you can see the very same rock in the upper right side of the picture and the bottom 1/3rd of it is buried in sand. Quite a bit of sand moved off the beach during that time.

Cindy found this dead sea star, upside down, laying in a crevice, which seemed significant in light of the sea star wasting syndrome being talked about in the news.

Here's a closer look where two arms are missing

While there is a lot of fear that it is being caused by radiation from the Fukushima plant across the Pacific, this post set my mind at ease about that. It made a couple great points:
1. ONLY sea stars are affected. Wouldn't radiation affect all living creatures?
2. There are incidents of sea star wasting disease being reported on the east coast as well.

With all the extremes in weather we've seen recently it wouldn't be too far fetched to imagine some other factor is affecting the sea stars.

Here's a pretty little shaded cove I found filled with anemone, sea urchin, and coraline algae.

Here's a beautiful watercolor of the landscape by one of the girls.

And here is an octopus. Can you find it? Click on the picture for a larger view.

You can watch it move in this video:

Here's a video on Octopus by Dr. Bill Bushing who dives off Catalina Island. After watching it, I grew convinced that the octopus above is a two-spot octopus. What do you think?

And here's a video of a garibaldi. It's a terrible video, you can hardly see it, but can you guess why it has blue on it? Garibaldi are typically orange, named after an Italian soldier who went into battle wearing an orange cape, it is the state fish of California.