Seaside

Merganser

Harbor seal

Green anemone

The ages of Western Gull
From back to front: juvenile, second year, adult

Crab shell

Lined shore crab 

An osprey having brunch:

Caudina

I saw these pink blobs on San Diego beaches last autumn and winter.

After asking around online turned up no answers (though it did lead to getting my work on Wikipedia), I sent my photos to researchers at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who were able to identify them.

These are juveniles of the "sweet potato sea cucumber," scientifically known as Caudina arenicola or Molpadia arenicola. Normally found in deep water, they sometimes wash up during storms.

Gulls, not caring about taxonomic distinctions, happily eat them:

These would be at home in the weird "superfood" ads that were all over the web a few years back. 

"A year at the shore"

Lovely illustrations of tidepool creatures from a book by 19th-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse:

He also created some gorgeous illustrations of sea anemones.

Ctenoimbricata

Believe it or not, this odd prickly creature, which lived during the Cambrian era, is a primitive echinoderm:

Echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, crinoids, etc.) are well-known for their pentamerous (5-fold) radial symmetry. ...Many living echinoderms pass through a bilateral larval stage, evidence for the well-worn adage "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" (also known as the Biogenic Law, which as a general hypothesis is now largely unaccepted). However, no fossil evidence - that is, an actual bilateral echinoderm - has ever been found (although a few asymmetric fossil echinoderms are known). Until now. Samuel Zamora, of The Natural History Museum in London, and colleagues have just described Ctenoimbricata spinosa, a new genus and species from the Murero Formation (earliest middle Cambrian Period) in northeastern Spain.

Via This View of Life.

Aquarium creatures

 Feather stars (aka crinoids)

Underside of a starfish

(More below the fold)

Starfish soup

This article from the New York Times Diner's Journal discusses one of many eccentric epicurean clubs that sprang up in the 19th century:

From 1880 to 1887, when mussels were considered vulgar and skate too ugly to cook, a group of socially prominent men met once a year to glut on unpopular seafood. Calling themselves the Ichthyophagous Club, they would “endeavor to overcome prejudice directed towards many kinds of fish, which are rarely eaten, because their excellence is unknown.”

The club boasted of feasting on such things as "aspic of jellyfish, octopus stew" and "garfish older than trilobite"-- but one dish they actually did serve was surprising to me: starfish bisque. This dish was recommended not only for its taste ("the king of all shell fish, so far as flavor is concerned"), but as a way to deal with the plague of starfish attacking oyster beds:

Man is, of course, the oyster's greatest destroyer, but the star-fish comes next and while the poor bivalve is attacked and done away with by both, there is nothing but accident to reduce the numbers of star-fish. We take up hundreds of the five-horned devils-- thousands, I should say-- when dredging for oysters, and kill them as well as we can by smashing them and trampling on them...
If people can only be made to know how good the star-fish is and taught how to cook him, the demand for him will soon become so great that modes of catching him in quantity will be devised, and the problem of abating his depredations on the oyster beds will speedily be settled.

I had previously thought that starfish were inedible, but further Googling revealed that starfish are occasionally used in Asian cuisine, sometimes fried whole or, again, as part of a soup.

Frozen starfish

A clip from the BBC showing a bizarre phenomenon called a "brinicle" (brine-icicle) and the destruction it wreaks on local life-forms:

Via TYWKIWDBI.

Starfish larva

Image from The Echinoblog. This transparent creature grows into a many-armed sun star.

Even stranger is the starfish Luidia-- its larva splits into a juvenile starfish and a gelatinous planktonic creature, which go on to live independent lives.

Sea apple

This is a type of sea cucumber popular in the aquarium trade; I spotted it in a tropical fish/aquarium supply store.

A miscellany

Spicules

Illustrations of spicules, spines found in the skin of sea cucumbers. 

Micro-photos of these pretty objects can be seen here and here; they also appear in the border of this sea-cucumber drawing by Ernst Haeckel.

Crinoids

These creatures, also known as sea lilies, are related to starfish. Most living species are small and dwell on the sea floor, but in prehistoric times they grew to truly impressive proportions and drifted in the ocean currents:

Also, fragments of their fossil exoskeletons have been used as rosary beads.

Young brittle star

A larva of the brittle star Ophiura albida