Tide pool
[2] Tide pool habitats are home to especially adaptable animals, like snails, barnacles, mussels, anemones, urchins, sea stars, crustaceans, seaweed, and small fish.
The same waves and currents that make life in the high tide zone difficult bring food to filter feeders and other intertidal organisms.
More plants and animals live here, compared to the high tide zone, because they are not exposed to drying conditions for so long.
Low tide zone organisms include abalone, anemones, brown seaweed, chitons, crabs, green algae, hydroids, isopods, limpets, mussels, and sometimes even small vertebrates such as fish.
Inhabitants deal with a frequently changing environment: fluctuations in water temperature, salinity, and oxygen content.
[6] The sea anemone Anthopleura elegantissima reproduces clones of itself through a process of longitudinal fission, in which the animal splits into two parts along its length.
With spines, some filled with poison like with "Toxopnesutes pileolus", that protect them from predators they feed almost undisturbed in tide pools.
[10] The presence of the California mussel increases the supply of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus in coastal marine tide pools which allows the ecosystem the nutrients to be more productive.
[12] Climate change and ocean acidification has led to a decrease in these amounts important compounds in California Mussel shells over many years.
[2] Different barnacle species live at very tightly constrained elevations, with tidal conditions precisely determining the exact height of an assemblage relative to sea level.
Tidepool fishes are those inhabiting the intertidal zone during part or the entirety of their life cycle, including residents displaying morphological, physiological and behavioral adaptations to withstand the fluctuating environment and non-residents that use the intertidal as juvenile habitat, feeding or refuge ground, or as transient space between nearshore areas.
Secondary residents are species that spend only a portion of their life history in tidepools, typically during their juvenile stage, before moving on to adult subtidal habitats.
Unlike residents, transients lack specialized adaptations for intertidal life and typically occupy large tidepools for a relatively short period, ranging from a single tidal cycle to a few months.
These small crustaceans provide an important food source for predator species as well as limiting the growth of algae attached to vegetation.
High wave action may increase nutrient availability and moves the blades of the thallus, allowing more sunlight to reach the organism so that it can photosynthesize.
Recent studies have shown that Postelsia grows in greater numbers when such competition exists; a control group with no competition produced fewer offspring than an experimental group with mussels; from this it is thought that the mussels provide protection for the developing gametophytes.
Calcium carbonate (CaCO3) takes the form of calcite in their cell walls providing them with a hard outer shell.
These predators play an important role in the tide pool food web and create competition for resources.
