This brown seaweed lives high up on rocky shores, just below the high water mark. Its blades are usually twisted, giving it the name Spiral Wrack.

The bottlenose dolphins in our waters are the biggest of their kind – they need to be able to cope with our chilly waters!

Although they might not look it, sea cucumbers like this one belong to the Echinoderm group and are therefore closely related to starfish and sea urchins

The river lamprey is a primitive, jawless fish, with a round, sucker-mouth which it uses to attach to other fish to feed from them. Adults live in the sea and return to freshwater to spawn.

The herring gull is the typical 'seagull' of our seaside resorts, though our coastal populations have declined in recent decades.

The yew is a well-known tree of churchyards, but also grows wild on chalky soils. Yew trees can live for hundreds of years, turning into a maze of hollow wood and fallen trunks beneath dense…

Sand eels are a hugely important part of our marine ecosystem. In fact, the fledgling success of our breeding seabirds entirely depends on them.