Shoreside Textures

Sparse gravel dots the sand between the cobbles above and the bare sand below. In this middle ground, the pebbles are smaller than their cobble-mates and have rounded edges that allow them to roll easily in the swash. Here, they’ve settled just in time for the tail end of the backwash to erode the sand above and below them faintly. Darker, heavier minerals fall out in patterns that enhance the effect.

Yellowish-olive Fucus peeks through a mat of brown cylinders to texture the top of a high intertidal rock.

I love this near-monochrome closeup from a high sandstone outcrop. The scene features a couple of barnacles, some ribbed limpets (mostly up along the top), and a mysterious convoluted tarspot. Is it one of those seaside lichens?

Ever-lovely Pelvetiopsis lends texture to the tops of high intertidal rocks in surf-swept habitats. Fucus photobombs in the upper and lower left-hand portions of the scene.

I’m attracted to the contrast between the smooth, clean sand and the coarse seaweed-bearing boulders, especially at the break, which is uneven and incomplete. Amid the sand and boulders, there is a smattering of pebbles (the size suitable for throwing) and cobbles (potato to grapefruit size). As long as we’re talking sizes, boulders have to be bigger than a basketball to qualify. Those are the rules.

There is a range of textures here across the spatial scales. Taking the short path, I wonder what erosive forces created the unique exterior surface of the boulder in the foreground—then going a long way around, in the distance, maritime forest textures an iconic headland.

This closeup shows pores called oscula that connect the water inside a sponge to the world outside. Oscula are widely known as excurrent openings, so if that’s true here, they’re the openings through which water moves out of the sponge.

A textured sunset.

The red blades in the left-hand panel have the texture of grain leather. On the right, olive-brown blades lay like satin brush strokes.

Beneath each show in the left-hand panel rests a purple olive, a sand-dwelling snail. Then, on the right, coming to you from the rocky intertidal, the bryozoan, Flustrellidra corniculata. How about those branched spines texturing its blades?

The texture on this claw earned its crab the common name, granular claw crab.

The intertidal creatures framed on either side by bare rock draw me into this scene, and the textures keep me there. Gooseneck barnacles, limpets, and a cute little periwinkle dot the foreground, where a looming thatched barnacle dominates. Its eroded shell’s texture is a sensual force and a site of attachment for tiny barnacles. The tube-like structures that give thatched barnacles their thatched look are hollow, at least in places, and you can see that here. In the background, Anthopleura and some more goosenecks.