Under the sea...
Summertime... when the living is easy and it’s hard to resist a trip to the seaside. Lincolnshire’s wide sandy beaches are perfect for building sandcastles and soaking up the sun. But have you ever paused to think about the wildlife that lives on our coast? The seas off our shores are home to many creatures.
These marine animals are difficult to spot but signs of them wash up onto the beach. The strandline is a great place to start to look. This is where the tide reaches its highest point and drops off what it's carrying. All you need to do is keep your eyes open and see what you can spot laying in or on the sand.
Here are our top five seashore treasures to look for:
1. Hornwrack
Often mistaken for seaweed, hornwrack is actually a colonial animal called a bryozoan. Look for the little holes all over it - each hole is the home of one individual animal and they all work together to be able to live.
2. Common whelk egg cases
Whelks are a type of sea snail and they can lay hundreds of eggs. When the young whelks are ready they will all hatch at the same time. The sheer number of young overwhelms predators, ensuring that sure some survive to adulthood. Common whelks feed on worms and bivalves. They find their food by smell.
3. Mermaid’s purse
Mermaid’s purses are the egg cases of dogfish, catsharks and rays: species of shark that live off our coast. Although you are unlikely to see the fish themselves, you can find their egg cases. The egg cases are sometimes mistaken for seaweed. They have a roughly rectangular shape with either twiddly bits or points at the ends. These are used to attach to seaweeds and keep the shark or ray safe as they grow inside.
4. Scallop
Scallops are a bivalve; this means an animal with two separate shells. The animal lives in the middle of the two shells, holding them together with strong muscles. Unlike mussels and many other bivalves which attach themselves to a hard surface such as rocks, scallops can swim. They clap their shells together, making a jet of water that shoot out of the bottom part of their shell. This pushes them forward through the water.
5. Sea urchin tests
When they are alive, sea urchins are covered in spines. If another animal tries to eat them they get a mouth full of spines and spit them out. What you find on the beach is the skeleton known as the test. They are very fragile so be careful with them.