Hi everyone! This is the starting of my series of writings about uncommon sea creatures. Every day I will introduce and write about the uncommon sea creatures that we haven't seen in our life especially for the people who don't live near the coastal areas or hardly visited sea beaches in their entire life.
I have visited the longest sea beach in the world the Cox's Bazar in the year 2017. That was the first and last visit though. I hope that I will go there again.
Anyway, today let's talk about the "Sand Dollars". Hearing the word sounds like it will look like dollars! But it is not exactly that but it's round in shape as we see in the cover picture of this post.
I haven't ever seen this creature in my entire life. Today I was scrolling Quora and suddenly appeared in front of me. So, what are the sand dollars? These are one type of echinoderms that belongs to the phylum of marine invertebrates. So, it lives in seawater and the order is Clypeasteroida.
The sand dollars are unusual has look which is a flat and bottom-hugging appearance. They are closely related to the starfish. Another name of them is sea cookies and pansy shells.
Interestingly you can tell their ages just by looking at them. The way we count the branches of trees like that there are rigs on the sand dollars. Counting these rings can determine the lifetime. each rig resembles almost 1 year. On average a single sand dollar can live from 7 to 10 years.
The sand dollars eat sands and stick together like a colony. The shells of sand dollars are used for creating souvenirs. You should also know that collecting living sand dollars is illegal.
Thanks for reading my post. Hope that you have learned something new. If you have ever seen this sea creature then comment below and let me know about it.😀
Best regards
@shahriar33