Why Choose Our Guides?

After exploring the Mendocino Coast’s treasure-laden tide pools for many years, we felt strongly that existing tide pool identification guides on the market had blind spots when it came to local use:

— a tendency to include a too-large geographic footprint means guides lack adequate specificity (California has 840 total miles of coastline; the Mendocino Coast covers only 90 miles, but is home to over 300 intertidal species)

— illustrations are typically chosen over real photographs, lending increased difficulty in accurate field identifications due to creative liberties and look-alike species

— these guides are often part of a larger collection, and/or are published elsewhere, suggesting a lack of “real world” experience on our coast and a questionable conceptualization of our actual intertidal environment

Our “Tide Pools of the Mendocino Coast” photographic identification guides solve all of these problems!

Our products feature real photographs (all taken locally by us—experienced naturalists and tide poolers!) and only include creatures found in the area, with an emphasis on the most common. In addition to the organisms included on the guides, each product also includes a typewritten link to our actively expanding online catalog that features up to over 105 additional organisms!

We are so proud of our guides, which represent the final two designs of several different prototypes we created and tested in an attempt to deliver the best identification resources possible to our community!