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Dinner bell

A bit of food in a rockpool brings hungry creatures out of hiding.

There can be few greater pleasures in life than a day at the beach. Sun, sea and rockpools. This rockpool is calm, but a few discarded picnic scraps can change the mood in an instant. As the juices seep into the water the pool comes alive. A small hermit crab is too nervous to approach, but the prawns have no qualms. These opportunistic scavengers have antennae that tune into anything delicious. Prawns will devour anything they find cast away in a rock pool, using six feeding arms and four delicate pincers to slice and dice their catch. A mature hermit crab emerges. To grow this big requires several costume changes, so hermit crabs are always on the lookout for a new shell. As it feeds, the hermit is distracted by the tentacles of a snakelocks anemone. It grabs the lump of food from the hermit. Anemones come in a variety of shapes and colours but they all eat in the same way - their petal-like arms gather food and sweep it into their mouth. A crab tries to steal some of the anemone's food, but it is too late. The young hermit has spotted another lump of food, but it is too large and the hermit tips over when it picks it up. A crab steals the food from it. Another creature stranded by the tides is the shanny. It grabs anything it can find in its powerful jaws. With the tide racing back in, it's everyone for themselves, and fights break out. The young hermit finally gets something to eat.

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6 minutes

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