A shaggy, ten-legged figure advances through a Monterey tidepool. Her four-inch-long, oval outline is fuzzy—but not because of the murk of the spring low tides. Every part of her body is enveloped in overlapping sponges, sea squirts, and bryozoans. It is difficult to tell where creature ends and tidepool begins.
Nearing some algae, the animal tears off a piece with her pincers. Bringing it to her mouth, she chews it. Then, as if clipping a barrette to her hair, she reaches up and fastens the roughed-up algae to the small, Velcro-like hooks near her pointy snout. Thus adorned, she continues scuttling across the surf grass, adding to the living garden on her back as she goes.
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