What was this small animal in the ocean?

Question

Okay, I was at the beach in Santa Barbara, California, and I was walking in the shallow water in the sand. Whenever the tide would wash back into the ocean it would carry these little critters back with it. I was able to catch a few and they had what looked like to be shells, and on the under belly it had hermit crab like legs and it was a little orange. It would burrow itself down into the sand the second it was placed down, and it also had eyes that looked similar to a snails. Any idea of what this animal was???

Answer 1

My first guess is a little animal I like to call a sand flea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerita_(ge... .Does that look like what you saw? It might also be a ghost crab.