Category Archives: outdoors

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Anomiidae

Walking the beach with a friend a couple of mornings ago, I keep finding shells with a dark marking in the center of the interior and nice shiny interior. Then I find a shell with the other half attached. The other half has a hole in it.

I look it up. This site comes up: http://www.bily.com/pnwsc/web-content/Northwest%20Shells.html. Wow. We filter through it and the shell is in the family Anomiidae. Specifically Pododesmus macrochisma, aka Green False Jingle. It attaches to rocks or other jingles or whatever through the hole. Then it disguises itself. The outside of the shells I found was diverse, some with barnacles. I found a young one, pink, and the radial ridges are visible on the shell.

Cool! Next I tried to identify the two different kinds of chitons. Uh-oh. There are LOTS of chitons. I run out of air very quickly. I will save the chitons for another day. I also returned two sea cucumbers to the sea. The second one scrunches up when I pick her up with a piece of seaweed. When I put the second one in the water, she relaxes. The first one was probably already dead.

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home

We walked the beach on Marrowstone Island yesterday. It’s amazing how different the rocks and shellfish are there compared to North Beach. We are looking for agates, but I got interested in some of the shellfish. My zoology is pretty out of date, but you can find so much on the internet. Then it becomes overwhelming. I look up one creature and find that there are twenty species and can I figure out which one? Sometimes I think so and sometimes I don’t!

I like this shell. The original owner is gone and then barnacles lived there and a seaweed is attached. I am sure there are all sorts of microscopic critters too. I have my microscope and will start looking at the tiny creatures too. Wonderful.

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I don’t think I realized what I had gotten myself into, but it seemed like the potential for fun and insanity were there in equal parts

sometimes you know things
without knowing

sometimes you no things
without noing

sometimes you know things
without noing

sometimes you no things
without knowing

sometimes you koanow things
without knowing

sometimes you no things
without koanowing

sometimes you koanow
without koanowing

sometimes you koanow

snow

also published on another site today.