A Tide Pool in Kansas?

Ocean life has always held a fascination for me, something I suspect is not uncommon among those of us who end up as biologists. My mother gave me some of Rachel Carson's books, the The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea and several trips to Cape Cod imprinted the smells, sites and creatures of the sea. So of course as part exploring Blender and mesh had to make something with tentacles. I didn't think I was ready to tackle squid or octopuses so decided on sea anemones. Easy enough right...well it took 2 days to get something that looked sort of like a sea anemone.

Here are three of my attempts. My first attempt is on the left and my latest attempt is on the right.

 The first attempt was not meant to be realistic and I had all sorts of trouble with painting the seams out. Both the second and third attempts are more realistic, which ironically was easier than what I tried to do in my first attempt.  The tentacles were done using extrude, scale and translate tools in the mesh editor. There are I think other ways to do tentacles but I decided to stick with the the tools I best understood. The last one is still has some seam issues but pretty minor.

Of course I had to make my own little tide pool. Which resides some where in the cloud or mirrored to my home machine, alas in-silico.