Thinking about anemones, which to me back in the day, were always the funny little things that you find in rock pools at the beach. These strange oddities have a ring of tentacles and if you feed them, as we used to do, with a morsel extracted from a ‘cats eye’ rock snail, the tentacles would swiftly close in around the treat!
Click on any photo to enlarge.
Here’s a rock pool from a beach near Brighton, Dunedin. This is just a pretty (anemone-less) pic for my lead photo; anemones are found in the smaller rock pools. The rock pool photos were taken on 25 October 2020.

In this photo of a much smaller rock pool, the anemones are clearly seen.

Larger context …

In contrast, here’s autumn anemone flowers taken at Maple Glen garden on 04 April 2021. The so-called Japanese anemone flowers. Cropped from a photo I’d already shared in White In Autumn.

You may well ask … what prompted my thoughts about anemones to begin with?
This wonderful post by Linda Leinen (Link 1). Fascinating photos of anemones found in Texas USA.
Link 1: Anemones Again. ~the comments are also an interesting read!
Link 2: Anemone berlandieri ~another post of Linda’s.
[later update] Link 3: All About Anemones ~web page link Linda gave me.
You’ll find fantastic photos of anemones like the one I showed above at Ann Mackay’s fabulous blog (UK).
This post on Japanese anemones ~and I love this recent one on Anemone blanda (which isn’t at all bland but blue!)
NB: both of these blogs have search boxes if you look for them. Just put the word ‘anemone’ in and you may find more posts to look at.
Text and photos by Liz; Exploring Colour (2021)
Thanks for the links Linda! Your description of feeding the sea-anemones amused me…wonder if they waited for more… π It reminded me of many happy childhood times at our local beach. It was mostly tiny crabs that we hoped to find in the rock pools there. Happy days!
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Yes, very happy! I always most wanted to see the shrimps darting around in the rock pools. If you approached carefully you could usually spot them! I was a bit wary of the rock crabs (which up north were quite large things with big nippers in front). They’d sit around under the rocks with nippers at the ready in front of them .. scary!
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Luckily our crabs were just tiny things – not so sure I’d have been likely to go looking for the big ones! Too nippy – hehe!
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I had no idea you could ‘feed’ sea anemones. Of course they have to eat, but I think I assumed they filtered food from the water, like oysters. Wrong. I’ve never seen one in the wild, but I just learned that we have at least three species here. Apparently they’re most easily found around rock jetties, but I don’t hang out around the jetties, so that may explain why I’ve not seen one. I’ll have to look more carefully.
Thanks for the mention, and for expanding my understanding of anemones!
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My pleasure Linda. I learned a lot too from all this interesting coverage and discussion about different kinds of anemones!
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I always enjoy finding rock pools by the ocean, here they are called tidal pools. Anemones…for some reason Mary Beth cannot help calling them anenomies. π
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Haha! .. I rather suspect I may do that myself Steve π
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The English language can be so confusing. π
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Haha (huge grin!). Yes .. confusing and funny too sometimes π
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Agree! π
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