What the...

[surfnron]

Saw this guy stuck to a cliff about 1' above the water line in St. Maarten last week. Does anybody know what it is?



Thanx,

Ron

[geoffs]

It looks like a trilobyte, but it couldn't be because I think those are all extinct long, long ago.

Seriously, it is interesting but I haven't the faintest idea what that thing is!!!

[geoffs]

Guess what? I just did some internet searches and found a close match to what you found. This page shows some pictures. The creatures are called chitons.

And here is another very informative website...

And here is a page that describes the chiton in the picture posted by the original poster! Nailed it!!!

[Jedi]

beautifull pic. Nice colors at the edge of the "Thing"

[Normcar]

Excellent, this is really different...looks like Jewelry.

[surfnron]

Geoffs,
How do you search by photo. or did you have some idea what it was?

Jedi & Normcar,
Thanx for the comments. There were lots of these chitons on the cliff, but the one above is the only one I could get close to without taking a chance on getting the camera wet.
You guys might have liked photos taken 180 degrees opposite better. It was a clothing optional beach! And there was a lot of "optional" present.

Ron

[zoomn]

That is cool looking? How big is it?

I really like the colors.

[geoffs]

surfnron wrote:

How do you search by photo. or did you have some idea what it was?

I didn't search by photo.

Knowing that this was some sort of a creature occupying tide pools, I did a google search with ' "tide pool" community '. One of the hits on that search was this Oregon State University website. From that page I went tothis page that discussed the different zones of the intertidal areas. The zone of the intertidal area that chitons occupy is the High Tide Zone which the last mentioned page led me to here. Then I followed this link on that page to another page with pictures of some chitons.

Ok, so now I knew it was a chiton for sure. But which one? I did a google search on 'chitons' and found this site. I followed the link on this page for chitons occuring on the East Coast of the US and the Caribbean which went to this page. The pictures of individual chitons on that page led me to the one you found at this page.

Sounds like a complicated search? Not really. It took me all of about 5-10 minutes to zero in on your chiton. The secret is in the keywords you search on in google. The internet is a vast store of knowledge, lots of it true and some of it totally bonkers. It's up to you to filter the info. Our conversations here get catalogued by various internet web spiders and worms and will become part of this knowledge base.

You guys might have liked photos taken 180 degrees opposite better. It was a clothing optional beach! And there was a lot of "optional" present.

Hmmm... wildlife of a different sort...