Archive for Lucine
Dear Fragile Seashells, Please Don’t Break On The Way Home
Posted by: | Comments
How many times have you found a perfect SAND DOLLAR, a cute little crab shell or a SUNRAY VENUS still with both side attached… only to find them broken to pieces by the time you get home to show off your gems? Geez, I don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the times I’ve done it. Fortunatley, in the last few years I miraculously grew more brain cells (thank goodness) so now I throw tubs and tubes in my tote to protect those fragile shells.
You remember all of the SAND DOLLARS I found snorkeling over the weekend? As soon as I got back to our boat, I put them in plastic tubs I’ve saved (the packaging for our butter, cottage cheese and lunch meat) to keep them from getting crushed in my bag. Recycling at its best! My favorite container is the tube from the Crystal Light packaging. I save this one for long fragile shells… like WORMIES but unfortunately I didn’t find any WORM SHELLS on our boat trip this time so I used this container keep my biggest ANGEL WING safe and sound…
Okay, so I have to show you my newest shell bag that is helping me keep my fragile shells safe until I can even get the to my containers for travel. This called a “shower tote” I found at Bed Bath and Beyond that is a rubberized mesh with tons of outside pockets. I’m loving this thing! All the non-fragiles go in the center like a regular shell bucket or bag then the fragiles get stashed in the outside pockets. The SAND DOLLARS are a perfect fit for the wider pockets and the other pockets keep small or thin shells from getting broken by the OLIVE and WHELKS being thrown on top of them. Watch out MacGyver!
In one of the smaller pockets, I threw a couple of bivalves that I found on Cayo Costa that I don’t often find on Sanibel…
This PURPLISH SEMELE is not a rare shell, but this one seemed particularly deep purple on the interior. Okay, I should have put some mineral oil on it to keep the color bright… but I didn’t. ;( I hope you can still see the deep color!
Here’s the exterior…
I also found her sister shell… the WHITE ATLANTIC SEMELE…
I’m sure both of these would be great craft shells…
I also found several CHALKY BUTTERCUP LUCINES on Cayo Costa. I never find these on Sanibel! These are the big sisters of the BUTTERCUP LUCINES (on top row of the next photo) which we do find on Sanibel frequently … and one of Clark’s faves.
After shelling all day, we stored all of our treasures safely in our containers then Captain Clark got behind the wheel as I was going to pull up the anchor… and looky who was giving us a great send off! A MANATEE!
Darn! I wished I still had my snorkel gear on with my camera to film this underwater but any way we get to see them is a really treat.
We always get excited when we see a MANATEE so not only did we see this one, we saw a whole group of them on the way home. It was thrilling! This time I got a very shaky video. Yes, shaky because I was so excited and because I had to react really quickly when I saw them surface. Clark always does a great job of watching out for them and idling the engine when they get close but we’ve never had them follow the boat like this before. It was crazy! And I cant help but squeal or ohhh and ahhh when they surface so … I’m apologizing now. I had to edit some of it out because my voice gets so weird and high and sqeaky… it’s embarrassing. LOL Enjoy! 
PS- If you’d like to take a boat ride out to Cayo Costa for some shelling and sight seeing.. CLICK HERE
Sorting Seashells For The Holidays
Posted by: | Comments
I first met Susan (NY) on this gigantic shell pile a couple of weeks ago about a mile east of Bowman’s Beach. If you have ever read some of the comments here, you might recognize the commenter “Susan H”. That’s her! She loves everything about seashells. She loves to collect, study, research, admire and talk about shells. IMHO (in my humble opinion) she’s a Seashell Brainiac. She even donates her time to share her knowledge of gastropods and bivalves to make Wikipedia what it is now. She’s a Wikipedian with over 60,000 edits! The amazing thing was, is that she offered to sort and organize my bivalves. I thought to myself “Oh, Honey, you have no idea what you just got yourself into!”
You might know that I’ve only recently acquired the taste for collecting bivalves other than ANGEL WINGS and a select few. So just this past year when I saw a bivalve that I never noticed before, I’d pick it up and throw it in the “bivalve jar” and lump them all together. Before I knew it, I had lots of those jars but no time to sort them or to find out what I had. Susan persuaded me to bring those jars over to her cottage at Blue Dolphin to sort and identify anything I had questions about.
She told me to bring paper, scissors, ziplock bags and a pencil to organize and ID. She cut the paper in little squares then got to work quickly sorting. She also had told me to bring my new bivalve book (her fave too) Seashells of Southern Florida by Paula Mikkelsen & Rudiger Bieler that I showed you in yesterday’s post - the gift from MurexKen and MurexAlice!.
Now this is where the story gets really COOL…. Susan told me that she has been a volunteer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York since 2000. During the time when Paula Mikkelsen (one of the authors of my new bivalve book) was still at the Museum, she worked directly for her for about 9 months, and sorted shells for her. She met Rudiger (the other author) on his visits to the Museum working with Paula. Susan is actually listed (with her last name misspelled as “Hewett” instead of “Hewitt”) in the acknowledgements section of that book on page 410. To me, that’s so cool- I was having a ball!!!
Most of the bivalves I had in the jars were ROUGH SCALLOPS, CALICO SCALLOPS, BUTTERCUP LUCINES, COMMON JINGLES and the other shells you saw in the second photo. I was so happy when I heard her voice get a little excited when she found something other than the common shells. “Oh look, here’s a BEAUTIFUL CRASSATELLA!”
Beautiful Crassatella Eucrassatella speciosa
beautiful crassatella interior
She didn’t mind at all this BROAD PAPER COCKLE had a chip in it. She was still excited to see it.
Broad Paper Cockle
Broad Paper Cockle interior
I don’t pick up many broken shells any more but when I find shells that I don’t normally see on the beaches of Sanibel, I’m so glad that now I pick them up. This is a CANCELLATE SEMELE…
Cancellate Semele
cancellate semele interior
This one isn’t very attractive but now I know it’s an ATLANTIC SEMELE…
Atlantic semele exterior interior
Clark always laughs at me when I pick up a shell like this CHALKY BUTTERCUP LUCINE. It’s just big and white and not very pretty but I thought it looked like a gigantic BUTTERCUP that lost its yellow inside. I was sort of right…it’s the same family! Susan said the same thing “Oh look! A CHALKY BUTTERCUP! I found one of these the other day too!”. LOL Really? Someone else who gets excited about a CHALKY BUTTERCUP?
Chalky Buttercup Lucine
I have more identifications to show you but I have to wait until after Christmas. I couldn’t wait to share some it and to introduce you to Susan. It was like another fabulous Christmas present to have a “pro” like her help sort and identify my jumbled shells while we laughed and giggled. Thank you so much Susan!!
Happy, Happy Holidays to all of you!!
Chalky Buttercup Lucine interior
PS- I can’t tell you how many times I have linked a post to WIKIPEDIA to provide more information about a certain subject. I looked back on several of them, and sure enough, Susan had done some editing on the information (her user name is Invertzoo). After learning how many volunteers it takes to make that sight possible, I made a donation. If you ever find Wikipedia useful and want to make a donation or add content that you know about, you can click on this logo…
Road Trip To Honeymoon Island Florida- Part 3 Finale
Posted by: | Comments
In my first 2 posts about our weekend trip to Honeymoon Island State Park, I showed you some cool treasures we found like TURBANS, MERMAID MONEY, AGATIZED CORAL GEODES, rock art and a variety of shells… but wait! I still have a few more things I want to show you. Like the biggest KING’S CROWN we’ve ever seen! Clark found this live mollusk on the bay side of the northern tip of the island.
Of course we put him back where Clark found him after peaking at this awesome creature…
We saw a MANATEE! It’s always a bonus to see them so close to the shore and this guy wasn’t shy at all so came up to say “hi”…
On our walk back we found 2 SAND DOLLARS along with some of the other shells…and remember, it’s a 5 mile round trip- whew! I even wish we had taken more than the 100 fluid oz. we packed for the “hike”.
On Sunday, we decided to take the scenic drive back through Clearwater Beach down to Pass-A-Grille since we heard the shelling was good against the jetty rocks. Nuttin, Honey. All I found was my butt busting on a rock after I slipped on an unsteady chunk of the jetty. Ouch!
Pass-A-Grille jetty rocks
I met a nice couple a few years ago in my shop Kirby Rambo Collections (Clark sold it for me in 2004… 4 weeks before Hurricane Charley. Talk about timing!) who showed me a bag of WORM SHELLS they collected on Fort De Soto beach. I’ve been wanting to check it out ever since so we stopped there too while passing through St Pete. We didn’t find much there either but that’s okay. It was fun to just walk the beach and see the lay of the land. Just like I tell people that visit our beaches….. the shelling changes every day on each beach. There could have been hundreds of WORM SHELLS there the day after or before we walked it. It’s the hunt that makes it fun!
Fort De Soto beach
When I was sorting through our shells when we got home, I found a few bivalves that we had collected on Honeymoon Island that were a little unusual. It might not be so pretty but this ATLANTIC FAT TELLIN which should be called the bent tellin because it has an obvious bend in the middle of it.
I think you can see the bend a little better at this angle…
Shelling Sistah Moira showed me a facebook photo last week of this same LUCINE shell in the next photo. The closest thing I found at Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum is the THICK LUCINE….. but it looks more like a worn PENNSYLVANIA LUCINE to me. I found the same shell on Honeymoon too….
Here’s the inside… some people wouldn’t think this is too pretty but for identification purposes, I have found that the interior of the shell is just as important to identify it correctly as the exterior.
I also found a very worn WHITE CRESTED TELLIN. It’s the first one I’ve ever found.
So now that I’ve shown you all of our treasures from our weekend getaway, I thought I’d throw in a few places we enjoyed other than the beaches. Unfortunately, I don’t have many pictures but we both loved the little town of Dunedin (pronounced dun-E-din). It’s one of those quant little village-y areas with funky art studios, sweet gift shops and really good restaurants and bars- most with live entertainment so you can just wander around before and after dinner to enjoy the town. Our fave restaurant was a place called Kelly’s Chicaboom- awesome! We also loved this tiny restaurant/fish market called Olde Bay Cafe at the marina.
We had a wonderful time exploring another gulf coast town of Florida that offers some beautiful and different gifts of the sea but it was time to head back over the Sunshine Skyway…
…to get home to our little island paradise of Sanibel. Home Sweet Home!
Sanibel Shelling is Getting A Little Hairy
Posted by: | Comments
Hairy Triton
I was on the beach near Gulf Side City Park at 7 a.m. to catch the negative .7 low tide. The first person I saw was my friend Julie. She is an avid sheller but I’ve never run into her on the beach before since she always shells in the early mornings. Now that I’ve put on my big girl panties and get out to see the sunrise over the seashells (at times), I see different people. I’m so glad I ran into her because I was very excited to see a shell I’ve never seen before….. A HAIRY TRITON.
Hairy Triton aperture
It has so much hair, to me it looks like a werewolf ROCK SNAIL . Julie reassured me it was a HAIRY TRITON because her husband had found one a few years ago and entered it into the Sanibel Shell Fair and Show. Here’s Julie holding her rare treasure!…..
Julie (Sanibel)
Okay, I have to show you a close up of the “hair” on this shell.
Hairy Triton close up
That’s wild, huh?
Teresa and Alexandra (Indianapolis)
I met other avid shellers Teresa and Alexandra combing the beaches filling their bags with all sorts of goodies.
Alexandra with her shell collection
Today Alexandra was collecting BUTTERCUP LUCINES and EGG COCKLES. Shell crafters love those BUTTERCUPS for making shell flowers and I even saw a Christmas tree made with BUTTERCUPS this year.
Buttercup seashells
Maybe I don’t pay enough attention to the bivalves as I should so I didn’t know the name of the EGG COCKLE. I don’t see them often…. is it just me?
Velvet Egg Cockle
It was obviously an exciting morning to be at the beach. Enjoy the rest of the scenery…
Golden Sanibel Sunrise
True tulip (live and put back in the water)
Cockle shells at sunrise
It’s Rough at High Tide
Posted by: | CommentsThis morning the rough water is bringing in a very gritty darker batch of sand and just a few OLIVES, BUTTERCUPS, FIGHTING CONCHS and COCKLES. Most of the CONCHS are chipped and just a few of the OLIVES are making it in whole.
The morning is still high tide so I’ll check back around 2:30pm when the tide is low.
Waiting for Ida’s Wake
Posted by: | CommentsCatagory 1 Hurricane Ida is spinning in the gulf waters. My first thought is that I hope she fizzles out before she can do any damage to any coastal cities. Living on the coast is no laughing matter when any named storm is heading toward your home. After the coast looks clear, it’s time to be on the look out for signs for the best shelling locations. The gulf is being stirred up so the deep water beautiful shells will be dislodged and start being pushed toward the natural slope to the shallow waters of Southwest Florida then on to our beaches.
My friend Jane said that the East End isn’t bringing any big stuff in yet. She said BUTTERCUPS, CLAMS and only a few OLIVES were to be seen. The waters were very choppy on the bay side by the causeway but not in the gulf yet. She also said that West Gulf had about the same look as the East End but nothing from the storm yet.
I’m expecting to see a good turnout more on the West End of Sanibel more towards Captiva around Wednesday.
I’ll have my shelling shoes ready to save my feet from walking on all of those sharp, big shells on the beach later in the week……I hope I’ll need them.
