The tide is out. Emerald green sea anemones retract shopping arms to look like jelly candies stuck to rocks. Purple sea urchins mope. Sea stars rest. A single cap coral is a splotch of orange.
Mussels hang like bunches of bananas from rocks.
Sculpins swim lazily, these spiny-headed fishes with wide mouths, drab and ugly in this colorful marine garden. Visitors are intrigued by a red blob about the size of a building brick clinging to rocks. Lambert gently plucks the mollusk from the shore. A relative of clams and snails, the common name for this chiton is a gum boot, he said. Turned over, the chiton reveals its dorsal shell with eight articulating plates and ventral foot.