Just worms. Beautiful worms.

They hide their bright, flowery faces in the deep shadows underneath rocks. When the tide abandons them, they flee. When the water comes back, it pays to kneel in seaweed and peer into their hideaways, cautiously; the slightest disturbance will cause them to retreat into their tubes and slam the doors.

Red trumpet calcareous tubeworms, Serpula columbiana. Taken with flash: it's dark down there.

The worms live in white tubes attached to the rock, curved outward at the head to spread their feeding tentacles. The central circle is a funnel-shaped door, or operculum. It seals the tube when the tide goes out, hiding the brilliant head.

Zooming in. I like the rayed funnel on the one on the right.

The spaghetti worms cannot retract their tentacles, as most tentacled worms do. And they really do look like wet spaghetti dumped in the sand, with a sculpted carrot for a body.

Spaghetti worm, Terrebelid sp.

The white "spaghetti" are feeding tentacles. Just beneath them, some of the red gills are visible here. The worms build themselves a soft mud tube, but are not always protected by it. In this photo, only the tail of the worm remains in the tube.

The polychaete worm is not as spectacular as its cousins, but viewed closely, has lovely, shimmery colours, blue, green, pink, and sometimes red.

Zooming in to display the iridescence.

Spaghetti and cucumber, with ribbons. Under rocks.

What's purple and white and has an orange head? A worm, of course!

Purple ribbon worm, Micrura verrilli. The belly is all white.

Under rocks near the bottom of the intertidal zone, wherever the rock rests on mud or sand, there are worms. Many of them are these purple predators, hunting for other species of worms, which they catch like a frog catching flies, with a sticky proboscis. (Or a tongue, if it's a frog.)

The orange blob next to the worm is a sea cucumber, possibly a juvenile burrowing sea cucumber, Leptosynapta clarki. The dark lump at its head end is the mouth, with all its feeding tentacles retracted. These are detritus feeders, and grow up to about 6 inches long. This one was about 2 inches.

Another sea cucumber, under the next rock, and with a purple ribbon worm next to it. The worm is no danger to the cucumber, I think; it's 'way too big to swallow.

Spaghetti worm, with purple ribbon worm. And more worms; at the lower right, a polychaete lies in the mud; towards the centre right, there's a scale worm; below the spaghetti worm, there's a calcareous tubeworm. And in the clam shell, some sort of orange worm is encased in his sandy tube.

Next: the latest fashion in crab wear.