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Beach art. Looking straight down as I walk, there are random, colorful offerings like this pink lichen (even brighter in person) among a few remnants of surf grass, stones and mussel shells. Spread joy like a fungus with algae! Dude!<\/p>\n
![](\"http:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/blogpix\/fullanemonesm.jpg\"\/)
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Click on the blue music icon above to hear a movement from “At the Abyss” titled “Act.”<\/font><\/i><\/p>\n This sea anemone is not a plant. It’s an animal! And a predatory one, at that. They eat fish, mussels and even some crustaceans. Usually small ones like tiny shrimp, but not always. Hands down, the most amazing Wild Kingdom moment I’ve had at this particular beach was a couple of years ago, when a friend and I came upon an anemone about this size\u00e2\u20ac\u201c maybe 5 or 6 inches in diameter\u00e2\u20ac\u201c eating a small lobster. All that was sticking out were the last few inches of the lobster’s head and antennae. Oh, how I wish I had had a camera with me that day! I haven’t seen anything like that since.<\/p>\n On the sides of the anemone’s stalk-like body you can see all sorts of shell detritus that adheres to form a protective covering for this squishy fella. There’s no skeleton; it looks like this when extended, and then collapses on itself into a donut shaped blob as it waits for whatever the tides bring it for lunch that day.<\/p>\n Because this particular anemone is in a tidepool under water, it was challenging for me to capture the bright green-blue of it’s tentacles; I think the angle of the sun has to be just right, and it was… just left, perhaps. Nonetheless, I wanted to share the photo with you, because this animal is so beautiful and exposed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Beach art. Looking straight down as I walk, there are random, colorful offerings like this pink lichen (even brighter in person) among a few remnants of surf grass, stones and mussel shells. Spread joy like a fungus with algae! Dude!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"http:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/blogpix\/mscblue.jpg\"\"alt=\"listen)
…listen<\/font><\/a>
\n![](\"http:\/\/www.alexshapiro.org\/blog\/blogpix\/moregn.jpg\"\/)
…info about the music<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n