Archive for Easter
Easter Colors Sanibel Style
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Everywhere I looked last night, I saw the colors of Easter… in seashells.
…..and in the sky
…..and around the palm trees.
As we “hopped” around to the lighthouse beach filling up our Easter shell basket, I ran into sisters Carol and Gail finding goodies for their basket (errr, shell bag 
).
It was their last night on Sanibel and Carol finally found her first WENTLETRAP at the lighthouse beach. Yippee! Congrats!
I found sweet little LACE MUREX.
And I found this cute little DUSKY CONE on a piece of SEA PORK. It looks like an Easter egg broke and the yoke spilled everywhere, doesn’t it?
Then we hopped on over to the beach off Middle Gulf Dr. and met Aimee (too shy to have her picture taken) where she found three of these FIGHTING CONCHS so I added the one furthest down in her palm. Look at how cool it is since it has a “freak” growth pattern.
Even the BANDED TULIPS had a hint of pink for Easter.
Happy Easter! Good wishes for you all to shellebrate the day.
Feeding Frenzy
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King's Crown ate a crab
This KING’S CROWN had a feast for lunch! Do you think he ate the claw too? I’m sure he did! He already ate the rest of the shell (?). These are the rest of the pictures from Easter but I was way too excited to blog about anything else but my big find of the 12″ WHELK. Sorry, you’ll probably get sick of me talking about that 12″ WHELK (heehee) so I’ll try to keep focused…..because these pictures are really cool!
Horse Conch seashell eats Lighning whelk
Isn’t this wild??? We saw many live shells that were eating other seashell species. They are so powerful that they just suck that other mullosk right out of their shell.
Horse Conch seashell lunches on whelk
This is how shallow the water was that he was found (and released) with his lunch.
Horse conch and king's crown
When you look into the shallow rippling water, some times you can’t really decipher what it is that you are about to pick up. Clark picked up this HORSE CONCH and this KING’S CROWN came with him. The HORSE CONCH had just sucked out the KING’S CROWN mullosk and spit the empty shell into Clark’s hand. Unbelievable.
Whelk egg casing in shallow water
I hope you can see what’s in this picture. It’s a very long and winding WHELK EGG CASING that looks like something from outer space. It looked like one end of this was dug into the sand. I’ve never seen a WHELK “birth” one of these casing so I’m not sure if they (she?) are under the sand when they do it or not. I wasn’t about to tug on it to find out. Remember, I’m far from a scientist and I don’t even play one on TV.
Bright orange Horse conch
We ended up bringing home 13 KING’S CROWNS, a bunch of WORM SHELLS, a bright orange HORSE CONCH and of course, A TWELVE INCH WHELK.
I Found A BIG ONE!!
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I Found A Big One
This was the best Easter shell hunt I’ve ever had!
OK, Clark and I found it together……but I picked it up first! heehee. Yeah, I’m still a little giddy from all of the excitement. It’s not every day that we find a WHELK that BIG!
We didn’t have a lot of time today for boating since we had to take our boat back to Salty Sam’s Marina in Ft Myers Beach where we keep it in dry storage. So we just did some island hopping (Easter bunnies!…….. sorry…..still giddy) off Captiva and found this mac daddy WHELK in some shallow waters on one of the out islands. He had some scum on him but it came right off with a little “sand exfoliation”.
12 inch whelk shell
Foot long whelk
We found some other cool stuff too but I’ve run out of time so I’ll show those pictures tomorrow. I’d just like to savor this for the night.
