Tide Pools

1. Tide Pools By: Cianna Palomino & Alex Atkins 

2. What is a Tide Pool? • Tide pools are areas on rocks by the ocean that are filled with seawater • Can either be small and shallow or large and deep

3. Tide Pools • Gravitational pull of moon and sun causes tides on earth • The moon is responsible for a little more than half of earth’s tidal energy • During the tidal cycle (about 25 hours) various places on earth’s surface experience one or two high tides and two low tides

4. Tide Cycle

5. Tide Pools • Provide a home for hardy organisms • Inhabitants must cope with constantly changing environment- fluctuations in water temp., salinity, oxygen content, and other difficulties

6. What lives in Tide Pools? • Tide pools are inhabited by sea stars, crabs, sea urchins, anemones, barnacles, sea cucumber (lower level), sculpins, killifish, blenny, yellow spongefish, sand shrimp, lobster, octopus, nudibranch, chiton, mussles, scallops, abalone, snails, limpets, and some other creatures

7. Spray/Splash Zone • This zone receives wave action during high tides and storms • At other times the rocks experience other extreme conditions, baking in the sun or exposed to cold winds. Few organisms survive harsh conditions

8. Species Interaction • In addition to being shaped by aspects of climate, intertidal habitats—especially intertidal zonation patterns—are strongly influenced by species interactions, such as predation, competition, facilitation, and indirect interactions. • Intertidal habitats have been a model system for many classic ecological studies because the resident communities are particularly amenable to experimentation

9. Competition Interaction • Competition, especially for space, is another dominant interaction structuring intertidal communities. Space competition is especially fierce in rocky intertidal habitats, where habitable space is limited compared to soft-sediment habitats in which three-dimensional space is available

10. Facilitation • Facilitation refers to one organism helping another without harming itself. • Mussels, although they are tough competitors with certain species, are also good facilitators as mussel beds provide a three-dimensional habitat to species of snails, worms, and crustaceans 

11. Predation • Organisms compete in tide pools to hunt for prey • Some tide pools are smaller so hunting prey may be more of a challenge

12. Human Impact • Humans harvest animals and plants for food, bait, and more recently, for home aquariums • Oil spills, whether intentional or not, happen quite often and have a great impact on sea life • Chemicals used to clean oil spills also devastate shore life

13. Human Impact • Sewage, sewage related debris, and litter contaminate sea shore ecosystem and puts wildlife in danger • Toxic chemicals and radioactive waste affects not only marine life, but human life as well. Deadly waste from radioactive plants and nuclear power plants are gotten rid of in the sea and beaches are also contaminated by leaks from these power stations

14. Human Impact • Bait collection, trampling, and recreational disturbance also impact tide pools because rocky shores are easily accessible. People are careless when walking around on them and do much harm to this marine ecosystem 

15. Sources • www.npca.org/marine_and_coastal/beaches/tide_pools.html • www.juandefucamarinetrail.com • www.homepages.ed.ac.uk. • http://www.glaucus.org.uk/Snakelok.htm • http://en.allexperts.com/q/Biology-664/Regeneration.htm