Aquascope

Facts


Sand beach

They are wonderful

Certain organisms can exist as both plants and animals. This reflects the imperfections in the way different groups are classified (phyllums, families, etc). Because a more accurate classification would be so much more complicated and that there is much disagreement about how such a classification should be defined, we have to, at present, satisfy ourselves with a simplier, but inaccurate classification of plants and animals.

The animals

Many animal groups have representatives on sand beaches, but many of these are very small, less than 1 millimetre, and you tread on thousands of individuals with every step you take on the sand. All these multiple celled animals are remarkable and interesting. There is an abundance of specie and they can be of great ecological significance for the beach environment.
   These small animals deserve a better account, but wait, this site is updated constantly.
    Of the larger animals on the beach, the worm, shell, mussel, insect and crustacean groups dominate.

Different types of consumers

Depending on how an animal eats, they can be divided into grazers, suspension eaters, deposit feeders, carrion eaters, parasites and predators. Grazers eat parts of, or whole plants; suspension eaters consume particles suspended in the water (usually by filtering); deposit feeders consume sediment (certain specie eat all the sediment and the intestines absorb nutrients from the organic material, while others sort out and consume the organic particles); carrion eaters consume dead animal and plant matter; parasites are found both internally and externally on other (larger) organisms called hosts and eat them without directly killing them; predators kill and eat their prey.

 

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Waves, bottoms and construction

Sand movement and erosion

Sand bottoms as living environments

The art of digging

Sand beach organisms

Food web

Change and variation

Swedish beach life


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Bo Johannesson | Martin Larsvik | Lars-Ove Loo | Helena Samuelsson