Sand Dollars

Greetings,



Last week Clairissa returned from a California vacation with a special surprise for everyone. She had spent an afternoon collecting sand dollars and brought one home for each student in the class. This led to some interesting discoveries for us as we later researched these mysterious sea creatures.

Here are some facts we found interesting.
Did you know that sand dollars use their spines to move along the sand?
On the upper half of the sand dollar’s body, spines also serve as gills.
In quiet waters, they stand on end, partially buried in the sand as you can see in the octopus video below.
When the water is rough, sand dollars hold their ground by lying flat—or burrowing under. Young sand dollars swallow heavy sand grains to weigh themselves down.

Here are some cool you tube videos that we really liked.





Lise Fellbaum