Shore Buddies webblog
Wisdom Wednesday | Crabs
With tastebuds on their feet, crabs eat both meat and plants making them what we call omnivores. The average life of a crab may be short, lasting up to 3 to 4 years, but don’t worry because there are over 4,500 species of them!
Wisdom Wednesday | How old are Sea Turtles?
The actual documentation of the age of any species of sea turtle is difficult. What we do know is that sea turtles live a long time based on their species. Of the seven species of sea turtles on the globe, the hawksbill has the shortest lifespan at 30 to 50 years, and the green turtle has the longest at 80 years or more. The largest and smallest sea turtles–the leatherback and the kemp's ridley, respectively–both have an average lifespan of 45 to 50 years. The oldest sea turtle documented survived to be 150 years young! Most marine turtles take decades to mature—between 20 and 30 years—and remain actively reproductive for another 10 years.
Wisdom Wednesday | What's in a Whale's Mouth
Whales have HUGE mouths, extending to their belly buttons! This allows them to swallow a volume of water larger than themselves. Their throat stretches down to their navel. Tongue is the size of an elephant. You and 400 of your friends could fit in its mouth! Whales can be divided into two groups: the toothed whale and baleen whale.
Wisdom Wednesday | The Dwarf Zebra Lionfish
The Dwarf Zebra Lionfish is easy to distinguish from the other lionfish species because of the enlarged pectoral fins. The fins are full and fan shaped and the fin membranes extend almost all the way to the end of the rays. They are usually found on sandy areas of reef flats ranging from between 3 meters to 25 meters in Tanzania but can be found down to 80 meters. Dwarf Lionfish feed at night and prey on small fishes and crustaceans and pretty much anything that fits in their mouth. They are ambush predators and move into positions where small fishes are likely to congregate. They use their proportionally large mouths to create a vacuum and suck in and swallow the prey. Being smaller than other Lionfish they go after smaller prey. They will sometimes use their pectoral fins to herd prey into a position where they can trap them. Little is known about their reproduction.
Wisdom Wednesday 5/06/20
Tasmanian Blenny fish are odd looking fish that bring joy to the reefs with a large head, a blunt snout with a steep profile, and a large frilled tentacle over each eye. Tasmanian Blennies are pale brownish to dark brown or bluish-grey with a pattern of irregular bars and blotches on the sides, and two dark bars radiating from below the eye.
Wisdom Wednesday 4/29/20
It’s not a jellyfish! The Portuguese Man o’ War may look like a bloated jellyfish, but it’s actually a siphonophore—a bizarre group of animals that consist of colonies made up of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of genetically-identical individual creatures.
Wisdom Wednesday 4/22/20
Not much is known about the Spiny Devilfish, but what is known mostly revolves around it’s spines. It has poisonous spines on the dorsal, anal and ventral fins. This fish is predominantly well camouflaged (and so easy to miss) and lies buried up to the eyes and mouth, waiting for prey to swim by to ambush by lunging forward and inhaling their prey with their large mouths.
Wisdom Wednesday 4/15/20
Probably the most remarkable fact about the Jewel Fish, however, is the relationship of the mated couple, which comes as close to a “married life” in the full sense of the word as can be found among fish.
Wisdom Wednesday 4/8/20
This venom is more toxic than of any land animal. It is said that the venom of this octopus could kill 26 adults in just a few minutes. There is no antivenom for treatment.
Wisdom Wednesday 3/25/20
Puffer fish vary in size from one inch long pygmy puffer, to a two feet long freshwater giant puffer. The main feature, common for all puffer fish, is ability to ingest huge amounts of water, which increases their body size and turns them into odd-looking ball-like creatures. The most elastic part of their body is skin on the stomach area. When puffer fish ingests water, skin on the stomach expands several times of the normal size of the fish. The quick transformation scares predators.
Wisdom Wednesday 1/29/2020
Fossils place the earliest penguin relative at some 60 million years ago, meaning an ancestor of the birds we see today survived the mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Because they aren't used to danger from animals on solid ground, wild penguins exhibit no particular fear of human tourists.
Wisdom Wednesday 1/15/2020
This Sea Slug, called the Costasiella usagi, or Strawberry Slug, is very rare to see. Because of that, not much information about their behavior is known. This tiny and superbly camouflaged slug is often found on solitary fan greens seaweed, which they also feed on. At low tide, many slugs are often seen on one sea fan, usually clustered near the base of this seaweed
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