At low tide, the beach recedes back revealing countless boulders, leaving an entire environment hidden for half of the day.
With the breaking waves leaving the area, tiny pools of water are left with thousands of small creatures ready to be discovered. When the wind is blowing and the sea is rough, low tide at my local beach is a great way to spend an afternoon with a small net and ice cream container.
Finding the small creatures is a little bit of an art as not all rocks are created equal, only the large rocks with an overhang and some water flow will hold the many species of triplefin. New Zealand’s iconic triplefins come in many different colours with the males often having electric blue and red fins. Common ones I run into are the variable triplefin, twister, estuarine triplefin and many more. By far my favourite species is the crested weedfish, which I have only ever run into once.
Often hanging on the bottom of rocks are the guitar shaped clingfish, who have a special suction disk in order to hold onto their favourite spot. The sucking disc can be amazingly strong, in some species it’s able to lift as much as 300 times the weight of the clingfish.
Small kina often scatters the outskirts of the rocks, slowly moving along to feed on kelp washed into the rocky shoreline. Kina is quite an amazing creature, as in between the large spines are tiny tubes, which they use to propel themselves across the seafloor.
Under the many deeper rockpool overhangs and nearing their second year of growth are juvenile red rock lobsters or crayfish as we all know them. Finding miniature crays is quite the rarity, as they like very specific cracks normally very hard to see or access. On occasion a big rock will have the odd one scatter as the light reaches in. Little crays grow very fast at this size and shed their shell frequently in order to make room for the next one. They will soon head offshore after they outgrow their little caves.
Kelpfish and marblefish juveniles can often be found around surgy rocks in the more exposed parts of the rocky shoreline and make a great effort to evade capture. With some effort they can be corralled into the net in order to view their stunning juvenile patterns. Young kelpfish are a ghostly silver with strange square dots reaching across the body while marblefish as the name suggests, have marble like green and black mottling across their flanks.
These tiny creatures are so delicate they are best handled carefully before being quickly returned.
The ocean is always a mystery and even in the smallest of habitats continues to surprise me with the diversity and interesting creatures.
