The Secret Lives of Baby Tidepool Creatures
Imagine if your offspring were unrecognizable as the same species, and lived in a completely different habitat. This is the case for most tidepool creatures: barnacles, sea stars, urchins and more lead secret early lives as zooplankton, microscopic animals drifting out in the open ocean.
“Take a trip down the intertidal at low tide, and most of the animals you see attached to the rocks—the barnacles, the mussels, the tube worms that are there, things crawling around like sea stars, and sea urchins, they all have a planktonic larval phase,” says Baldo Marinovic, a zooplankton ecologist at UC Santa Cruz.