Tide Pools

And we are back!  Tropical paradise from the eyes of an armature photographer, novice blogger, and explorer.  Lets get to it:

Although sitting by the pool getting your tan on might be fun for like an hour, I much prefer going out and exploring what we flew 13 hours to visit.  Tide pooling is something my mom actually got my into.  If you are not familiar with the process, it is basically going out during low tide and investigating the little pools of ocean life that are left in the lava by upturning rocks and breaking you back bending over.  It's actually a lot more fun than I am making it out to be, which is why we did it almost every day. 

This sea urchin was astounding just because of the greenish tips of its spikes.  Although, I am assuming mold or fungus was the cause of this. O_o

Black sea urchins are the poisonous ones, but it looked so pretty on the pink rock!

This is a brittle star, they were EVERYWHERE and when you pick them up they wiggle their arms around a lot and kind of squirm.  I always thought starfish were slow moving creatures, but apparently not.  And, in case you couldn't figure it out on your own, the name indicates that they are super fragile, so you have to be very careful picking them up so that you won't break off any of their arms.  We encountered many brittle stars with fewer or half limbs :(

The underside of a sea urchin!

This is a sea snail! Or so I was told by the boyfriend.  And what was so amazing about it was its size.  You can kind of scale it by the boyfriends hand, but to give you another reference, it was about as long as my iPhone. 

He really was super adorable though.

We also encountered lots of sea slugs or sea cucumbers.  When they feel threatened, they squirt their intestines on you!  My poor mother got slug intestines on her and they almost wouldn't come off -_-

The reason I took another shot of a sea urchin was really just because of the cool shadow it created on my mom's hand.

If you click on this pictures and zoom in, you can see all of the tons of sea urchins.  You had to be super careful where you stepped!  And I had to be UBER careful with my camera.  I was tiptoeing around like I was a prima donna. 

Unfortunately, this is the best shot I could get, but that's a moray eel.  He was huge - about four feet long.  Probably the coolest find of the entire trip.  My boyfriend wanted to pick him up, but knew that that would just lead to being bitten, and he couldn't remember if they were poisonous.  But he was really waffling with the idea.  :)

The boyfriend with some sea cucumbers!

Another sea slug!  He was holding on for dear life!! To get this shot, the boyfriend actually had to lift and rotate this rock, which was about half his side, to the sun.  That's the real reason I keep him around ;)

Just so you could see how sea slugs hold on with their little feetsies. 

The boyfriend and my mother.  I told you it was back breaking!

My mother has me take pictures of all of the cool birds so that she can identify them when we get home, and it just so happens I got this awesome pose out of one.  Mom still hasn't gotten around to identifying it, but I'll update this when she does.

That's about it for today! 

Live Long and Prosper, people of the interwebs.