More critter trails

I'm still sorting photos. These are also from our vacation on Vancouver Island this summer.

We went to Stories Beach, to the south of Campbell River, several times, always at low tide. The beach is flat and mostly covered with seaweeds.

Stories Beach, looking south.

Those rocks are some sort of sandstone; they look like sand, but are too hard to make a mark on. (More on them, later.) They are laid out in odd patterns, with large "avenues" curving through them, areas where there are no rocks, just hard, flat soil. Again, this looks like clayey sand, but feels like stone. It is generally covered with an inch-thick carpet of small seaweed.

In one of these avenues, we came across this trail of holes:

Something had punched holes in the rock. Something tougher than Laurie and his hiking stick; he had left no mark.

Looking closely, we saw that each hole had a small anemone attached to the bottom, all of them closed against the sunlight. They have obviously burrowed down through the rock; it makes a safe place where no-one can step on them at low tide, and a neat little trap for small things dropping out of the current. I wonder if the line follows an underwater current, where the food would be plentiful.

We didn't identify the anemones; they were all closed down. Next time (there will be a next time, definitely), we'll do better.