Are you ready to get a little wet? At our Rockpool you can examine and touch our beautiful and colourful starfish and Horseshoe crabs, which are among the world’s oldest and most fascinating creatures. They are estimated to be at least 300 million years old. The earliest Horseshoe Crab species were crawling around the Earth’s shallow coastal seas for about 100 million years before dinosaurs arrived.
Everything in our Rockpool is safe to handle... and our rockpool experts are on hand to show you how!
Discover on your visit
- How to touch a crab – without getting nipped
- What a Sea Anemone is
- All of our different shelled creatures
- Live starfish
Starfish
Starfish are found in every ocean in the world! There are over 2000 known species, each one is full of surprises!
Did you know that a starfish can drop an arm at will if it needs to? If one is grabbed by a hungry predator they will drop it off and make their escape, eventually growing a new arm to replace it.
Starfish have no brain, heart or blood! What they do have is a specialized stomach. They can eject part of it out of their body to digest food much bigger than their mouth, and then suck it all back in to finish digesting it... Gross!
