WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Tide Pools of Maine

Naturalist Bridget Butler and photographer Bob Davis and I went to the coast of Maine, to check out the Puffin Project, but while we were there, ...We really couldn't resist checking out the tide pools and we were in the perfect spot to do it. We were in the New Harbor area, and the Rachel Carson Salt Pond Preserve is just north of there. She gathered most of her material for her book "the Edge of the Sea" from that spot, ..The land was donated to the Nature Conservancy on 1966. It's the perfect place to poke around and see who lives in the tidal zone.

You have to time your visit to the tide zone for when the tides have receded, and then you can climb in and find all kinds of things from periwinkles, barnacles, and blue mussels, to hermit and green crabs. But if you look closely, ...You can see so much more. You have to be so careful where you step, because you don't want to smoosh anything. Snails are pretty resilient, but there is all of this soft stuff, like sponges, and anemones and crabs.

The tide pools are beautiful, with all kinds of colors, pinks and greens. You can find animals that look like plants, and plants that look like animals. The green stuff is an animal, a sponge. The pink, an algae, and the orange is another animal, a tunicate!

As Bridget tells us, you really have to look underneath the rockweed to find the best stuff!

"Its called rockweed, and there are a couple of different kinds. But where you really want to look, is underneath the rockweed! Because when the tide goes out, it gets really hot, and everybody goes underneath to hide and get some cover."

"We've got a couple of limpets here, these are relatives to snails, but they don't have a whirled shell, they just have a little hat. And they have a home base, where they feed from. They scrape algae off of the rocks, so you can see that this guy, has been scraping this area because this is all clean, where the white is?"

When you get out of the rockweed zone, you start to get down into the kelp zone. That's where you can find things that need some deeper, cooler water, like urchins.

"this one is still alive, it's got spines on it. The spines are for protection, and they also have little tube feet that come out of the top here when they are underwater? They are really tiny and they'll pull algae in on top of the urchin to kind of cover them up and protect them. Now the cool part is on the bottom. That's where their mouth is. It's a grazing mouth that eats the kelp that's down here in the kelp zone."

Next time you are by the ocean and it's low tide, go look around. You'll be amazed at everything you can find. Oh...and one other thing? Never turn your back on the ocean! And just in case you get a wet behind anyway, it's a good idea to have another pair of pants in the car!