Beaches | Smithsonian Ocean

Beaches

Featured Content

Beaches Articles

A screenshot from the video showing trash on a rocky beach.

Video

Trash on the Beach and in the Ocean

A Caribbean hermit crab (Coenobita clypeatus) crawls on the forest floor.

Article

The Great Hermit Crab Migration

Horizontal bands of color represent different species of lichen that have adapted to the conditions at different heights above sea level.

Article

Seaside Lichens

Rough periwinkles sit on a bed of barnacles.

Article

Spirals in Time: A Walk at the Seashore

On Moorea, an island in French Polynesia, researchers are striving to complete a biocode—a DNA catalog of every life form big enough to pick up with tweezers.

Overview

Scientists Catalog Life on the Island of Moorea

Microscopic beach dweller in the sand.

Video

Organisms Beneath the Sand

A screenshot from the video showing a fiddler crab with a large claw.

Video

Claws Out: Fiddler Crabs Do Battle

The Peninsula Valdes in Argentina was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1999. The site is home to important breeding populations of the endangered southern right whale (Eubalaena australis), southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina), and southern sea

Slideshow

Marine World Heritage Photo Gallery

A juvenile Kemp's ridley sea turtle emerges from the nest

Article

Taking the Temperature of the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle

This male dancing fiddler crab (Uca terpsichores) has built a sand “hood” at the entrance to his burrow, which he hopes will attract females to his humble abode—as if that big beautiful claw of his weren't enough!

Article

The Design of a Beautiful Weapon

10 grains of star shaped sand collected from southern Japan

Article

The Sant Ocean Hall: Life in the Sand Exhibit