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| All seashore creatures
depend at first hand or second hand upon the seaweeds or the tiny plants washed in by
waves. But sandy shores and rocky shores have different communities of animals
inhabitating them. Sandy shores: Loose sand grains provide no foothold for the dwellers on a sandy or muddy shore. Here, the common habitats are the mollusks, crustaceans and other dig down to find safety from storm waves or drying up at low tide. At high tide, cockles, razor shells and tellins push up tubes to suck in scraps of food brought in by water. Lugworms stay buried, sieving food from muddy sand. Here too the masked crab lies concealed. It takes oxygen and live on their form water drawn in through two feelers that interlock and poke up through sand to form a breathing tube. Rocky shores: The pools and boulders of a rocky shore support a largely different set of creatures. Shore crabs occur on sandy shores,  but find more safety
in rock crevices. Limpets, acorn barnacles, mussels and sea anemones all anchor their
bodies to the rocks and there they survive the fury of the sea. Limpets graze upon the
algae growing on their rocks. The other three depend for food on what the tide brings
in. Even at low tide, deep rock pools hold water. They offer food and safety for small fishes, prawns, hermit crabs and sometimes lobsters. |
Icy shores:
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In the polar regions of the Arctic and the Antarctica most of the animals crowd along the icy shore lines. For it is the only source of food in the stretches of ice. The Artic is basically a frozen ocean. Thus water below the sheets of ice acts as a steady source of food. And in the summer when ice melts even the nature supplies a rich variety of items to be taken and stored for the harder winter days. Thus Arctic sees a richer variety of life than the Antarctica, the icy continent. But even the limited variety is found to be crowding around the shorelines in Antarctica. And the life form is totally missing even a few miles away inside the land.  The mammals inhabiting the shores and shallow
parts of the sea in the Arctic includes seals, sea otters, walruses or manities, and sea
lions. . |
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and
whales are also found in Antarctica other variety of mammals are grossly missing| back to marine index | sea world | fresh water variety |