Sea fruits and veg

Natasha Sharma

Communities and Wildlife Officer

The Wildlife Rangers at Rye Harbour Nature reserve often go out and pick litter to help look after nature at the beach. This month for Marine Week they noticed some fun natural 'alternatives' to the supermarket throwaways that sometimes wash up on our shores and thought to share some of their finds:

Sea Kale - (main image - which also features Wild Carrot - mentioned below!) has large pale green leaves and white flowers or ball like seeds to help identify it. Just like supermarket kale, this is edible but also a very rare plant due to its habitat (vegetated shingle) being developed on in most coastal environments. It attracts Large White Butterflies, among many other insects.

Sea Pea - this beautiful plant produces seeds in pods nearly as big as the peas we eat (though these are not edible to us) and the flowers are loved by bees in June and July. It is also very rare as its habitat is vegetated shingle.

Sea Gooseberries are a small Comb Jelly that were found by us and lots of school groups this summer. Fun was had scooping them up in shells and sending them back out to sea to feed on the plankton blooms that occur in the summer months.

Sea Chervil can give you itchy skin so we were careful not to touch this underwater 'supermarket item'. This is not a herb or seaweed but an animal. Pieces of this sea floor based bryzoan are often ripped up by storms and get washed up on the shore.

Sea Grapes are Cuttlefish eggs, named because they look so much like juicy black grapes but when we found these we put them back in the sea to continue to hatch into new baby Cuttlefish.

Razor clams are commonly found around sandy areas of shore where they dig into the sand and come out to feed when covered by water. One of our Wildlife Rangers shows how they could be used just like a real razor!

Why not see how many 'supermarket finds' are near you at the sea shore during marine week?

Look out for the colourful red Strawberry Anemone stuck to rocks in rockpools with dots that look just like strawberry seeds.

Maybe you can see signs of Sea Lettuce growing in the shallow water when the tide has just gone out or washed up on the shore - flat and bright green with wavy edges, it is as edible as land grown lettuce but with a more salty flavour!

On a really low tide you may also find a Sea Potato an urchin that feeds on rocks in the middle to lower shore. The feet or spines of this animal look like hair as they are very fine. Sometimes like us you only find the test (a heart-shaped skeleton of this urchin) washed up on the shingle shore.

Wild Carrot: (main image) Wild Carrot does, indeed, smell of carrots, but the roots are not like our cultivated, dinnertime favourite. Look for this umbellifer on chalk grasslands and coasts.

These are real treasures of the sea and its so nice not to have to collect them up and throw them away responsibly as they're all natural parts of the ecosystem we love to explore.