Hi fellow Hiveians,
Today I wanted to share the cool tide pool touch tank we recently saw!
In our ever increasing exploration of the beautiful coastline of New England, we came across this beach that we really enjoy going to now. One of the funny things about the beach is that it's got a little indoor area that we had no idea existed!
Our son is always on the lookout for things that he can touch, pick up and take a close look at from the animal kingdom. Touch tanks have always been a favorite of his! This touch tank group was awesome because it contained all sorts of critters!
There were some of the craziest and biggest hermit crabs I've ever seen in this tank lol I guess you could expect to see that type of stuff when you're at the bottom of the ocean and I'm sure they catch them all the time in the lobster traps since they do bottom feed like other crustaceans but damn these things were giant! One of them was the size of a softball, it was wild.
This tank here was cool. In the tank were a whole bunch of mackerel! Mackerel are one of the best baitfish to use when you're trying to catch stripers or other big game fish. The mackerel are a schooling fish so it's very easy and common to see a whole school of them in the same area at the same time. The trick is to find the school! A lot of times you can catch a bunch at once and then that's prime bait to use for striper fishing. The fishing charter boats often try to get the mackerel so they can have a successful charter.
There were two tanks with hermit crabs all over them. There was also a lot of these other snail type things, I can't recall the name of them but they are a common find when you're hunting for crabs. The ones in the tank here were a lot bigger than the ones that we were used to seeing! You can also see a lobster or two in the tank. The lobsters were certainly one of the cooler finds because they were all unsecured. The claws were free to snap whatever they wanted to lol so that means watch out!
What was cool too, above the lobster tank was a little chart to show you the lifecycle of the lobster. When it comes to crab hunting, we see all kinds of what we thought were shrimp. They were actually a bunch of baby lobsters! There are thousands of them everywhere lol which makes sense because the rocks are the prime location for these things to grow. There is plenty of shelter from bigger predators and there is ample food all over the place. It's cool to think that what we've caught a bunch of times were the precursors to lobsters!
The day was rounded out in a cool fashion with these here. The dock had this group that was letting kids use a bag with a rock and a bit of dead fish chunks in it. You drop it down to the bottom of the sea floor and let it sit there to then pull the strings back up. Boom you had lots of crabs on the end there! That gave us at least 90 minutes of entertainment lol which is perfect for the little man. Not so much for my wife because we were on a dock that moved around and she ended up getting a little motion sickness. Oops!
In all though, it was a really fun day full of our usual adventures!
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