🐚 Coral reefs and shores

Yes, look near the beach or in a basket at home, seashells come in lots of shapes and sizes.

Coral reefs are built by tiny animals called coral polyps, which live together in enormous colonies and slowly build hard, stony skeletons around their soft little bodies over many years. As countless generations of coral polyps grow, build, and eventually die, their leftover hard skeletons pile up and connect together, gradually forming the enormous, colourful reef structures you might picture. Coral reefs provide shelter and food for an incredible number of other ocean creatures, which is part of why reefs are sometimes called the rainforests of the sea, packed with more variety of life than almost anywhere else in the ocean.

Coral can be pink, orange, purple, or yellow, coral reefs are full of bright colors underwater.

A seashell is actually the hard, protective outer skeleton that a soft-bodied sea creature, like a snail or a clam, builds slowly around its own body as it grows throughout its life. Each type of sea creature builds its shell in its own particular shape and pattern, since that exact shape helps it in its own environment, whether that means fitting into a tight crevice, spiralling for extra strength, or blending into the seafloor. As the creature grows bigger over time, it adds new material to the edge of its shell, which is often why you can see faint rings or spiral patterns showing its shell's growth over the years.

Yes, stretch your arms and legs out wide like the five points of a starfish.

A crab's legs are built to bend at joints that mostly move sideways rather than forward and back, which naturally makes sideways scuttling the fastest, most efficient way for a crab to move across the sand or seafloor. Because a crab's legs are positioned out to the sides of its body rather than underneath it, walking sideways lets it use its full leg length efficiently with each stride, rather than awkwardly bumping its legs into each other. Not every crab only walks sideways, some species can actually walk forward or even climb, but sideways scuttling remains the quickest option for most crabs when they need to move fast.

Soft little sea animals, like snails and clams, live inside their hard shells to stay safe.

Female sea turtles are believed to remember the unique magnetic signature of the very beach where they themselves hatched many years earlier, using Earth's magnetic field almost like an internal compass to navigate back across enormous distances of open ocean. After spending most of their long lives swimming freely across the sea, adult female turtles eventually return to that same remembered beach specifically to dig a nest in the sand and lay their own eggs there. Once the baby turtles hatch, they instinctively scramble toward the ocean and swim off to spend years growing up at sea, until they too are eventually ready to return to that very same beach one day.