More 'Fan'-tastic East Coast finds!

Another day solo and I nipped by the East Coast again to catch the zero tide at 6am before going for the Labrador relocation exercise scheduled at 8am this morning.

And the first lagoon I went to was very much alive!

Again, with sea fans! Much larger ones, this time embedded in the sand.

In all colours of the rainbow!

They were mostly still submerged, and water quality much better. You can see the tiny white polyps still expanded out of their colourful skeletons.

These sea fans also had small animals living on them. But I'm really bad at spotting tiny things in the field. I didn't see them until I enlarged the photos when I got home.

In this very badly taken photo, there were THREE ovulid snails!

Can you see them? I've circled them in yellow.

There were fewer of those tiny brittle stars clinging to the sea fan branches.
But there were some large brittle stars happily roaming on the sand.

The sand flats in this shallow lagoon were very much ALIVE!

When you see trails like this, be warned! Something is up to no good. Evil is afoot (which is quite accurate, as it is moving on one very LARGE foot).

The big blob on the lower left which left a wide trail is a hunting moon snail. This burrowing predatory snail has a very large foot. It bulldozes beneath the sand seeking buried prey. The luckless prey is then enveloped in its huge foot and eaten alive!

This particular moon snail is hunting tiny button snails, that also lie buried in the sand. Needless to say, button snails don't particularly want to be eaten. So they frantically leap out of the way, leaving the smaller trails in the sand.

There were several of these plain moon snails, ferociously ploughing about for a titbit. And the tiny button snails were just as plentiful. No two of these snails have shells that are exactly alike!

Also seen prowling the sand was this Tiger moon snail with a spotted shell. It is considered less common. Indeed, I don't see this kind very often.

Another wonderful surprise were sand dollars! The sand was teeming with them.

I didn't have much time at this lagoon, so I'm sure there's more out there that I totally missed. Next time, hopefully will be accompanied by our highly accomplished Hunter Seekers with Bionic Eyes to spot all the good stuff.

Alas, like the other parts of the East Coast, this lagoon too had a fair amount of litter.

There were plastic bags aplenty. And hopefully, the poor snorkeller saw something of the marine life in the lagoon before this mask was lost.