UnIdentified Marine Invertebrate

I found this interesting blob on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida. It was attached to the outside surface of a broken sea shell, so my guess is that it did not at one time live inside the shell. The ridges on the shell make it look sort of like a scallop, although it doesn't have the "wings" on the hinged side of the shell that you normally associate with a scallop.

The thought did cross my mind that the blob was one time the adductor muscle of a scallop (the part we eat). If you sliced it up, each section would be a disk that looked like a scallop on your dinner plate. But if someone or something opened up the scallop shell and pulled out the adductor muscle, how would it then re-attach itself to the outside of its old shell?

I'm thinking that this blob is some type of creature independent from the shell, which attached itself to the shell when they were both living in deeper waters. When the shell washed up on shore, its hitchhiker came with it. The hole in the shell at the bottom of the photo is also odd - I'm wondering if that is how the inhabitant of this shell met his end.

Here is a better view of the "foot" of this creature, with its "toes" securely attached to the shell. Or maybe it is the "mouth", and it was busy eating microorganisms off the shell?


Here is the other side.


And here is the end.


This whole animal was about 3 inches long and 2 inches in diameter, although it was longer and skinnier when I first approached it. As it "sensed" I was taking its picture, it got shorter and fatter, as if it were tensing up from stress. About the only other thing I can tell you is that I found this in salt water (i.e. on the ocean side, not the bay side).

If anyone has any ideas as to what this might be, please leave them in the comments!

UPDATE 8/31/10: Thank you to Anonymous, who identified this creature for me in the Comments below. I have to agree, it does appear to be an anemone with its tentacles withdrawn. I had never seen anything like this before, but after seeing many anemones in Washington state recently, I saw quite a few with their tentacles retracted. The ones I saw had more of a "puckered up" look to them, but I definitely see the resemblance. The mystery is solved!

Tour of the Matanzas River

Here is something you don't see every day - a bunch of Roseate Spoonbills roosting together in a tree. It was almost comical to see. Usually you see big birds like this gracefully wading around in the water looking for fish. They are too big to gracefully perch in trees.

There are 7 spoonbills here - the pink blob at the right end is actually two spoonbills. The bird in the water toward the left is a Tri-Colored Heron (aka Louisiana Heron). You can see his main color of gray and his white belly in this photo, but he is too far away to see the third color, which is a reddish patch at the top of his throat.

We saw this very cool sight in St. Augustine, Florida, on a pontoon boat tour on the Matanzas River. Along with these and many other birds, we also saw lots of dolphins. The boat had a hydrophone, so we could hear the clicks of the dolphins along with those of "snapping shrimp".

Snapping shrimp (aka pistol shrimp) have the amazing ability to snap their claws so quickly that they produce a bubble that makes a loud snap when it pops. This snap is loud enough to stun small fish that swim by, which the shrimp then grabs and eats. It is as if the shrimp is shooting the fish, hence the name pistol shrimp.

Other highlights of the trip were the mullet fish jumping out of the water all around us, and the beds of "spitting" oysters. No one seems to know for sure why mullet jump so much. A couple of theories are to increase their oxygen intake, or to escape from larger fish who are trying to catch them.

As for the oysters, they spit as part of their feeding process. They take in a "mouth" full of water, filter out the nutrients, and loudly spit out the water high into the air. Besides putting on a fun show, they are also serving an important purpose by cleaning the water.

Real Life Cabinet of Curiosity

Earlier this month, our family took a vacation to Florida. One of the places we visited was the Lightner Museum in St. Augustine. Otto Lightner was a "collector of collections", especially collections of items from America's Gilded Age in the late 1800's.

The scene above is what greets you when you walk into the Science & Industry room. This is enough to surprise anyone, but especially me, since it was as if my blog had come to life! A while back I wrote a post on "cabinets of curiosities", and I included an old engraving of one these proto-museums:

You can't help but notice the similarity between these two pictures (hint: it is the alligator hanging from the ceiling).

I knew this could not be a coincidence. Since Mr. Lightner had passed away in 1950, I guessed he had not gotten the alligator idea from reading my blog. Maybe the present curators of the museum had read my blog and thought, "What a great idea - let's get that old stuffed alligator out of the basement and hang him on the ceiling". I knew I should have copyrighted my blog!

The truth was finally revealed when I found a copy of the above engraving on the wall of the Science & Industry room. Apparently Mr. Lightner had seen this engraving before I had, and decided to recreate it in his museum. Many of the items in this room, and even the beautiful woodworking of the display cases, was typical of cabinets of curiosities.

This got me wondering - how many other museums around the world also have stuffed alligators hanging from the ceiling? If you know of any, please tell me.

If you are ever in St. Augustine, be sure to visit the Lightner Museum. You will not be disappointed.

Here is my favorite item from Mr. Lightner's collection. What American home in the Gilded Age would be complete without a colorful ceramic mandrill?

The Armored Catfish of Wekiwa Springs

I was at a professional development class in Florida last week, and as I usually like to do, I ran off into the nearest woods as soon as the class was over. This time it was to Wekiwa Springs State Park, which is a beautiful little park about an hour north of Orlando. I saw some pretty cool things there, including an armadillo, which we don't get in Jersey (sorry, I only got a blurry photo of his butt as he was running away).

The photo above is of the river filling with armored catfish (aka Orinoko sailfin catfish, plecostomus, pleco). These are an invasive species that has been spreading throughout Florida since about 1971. It is believed that they escaped and/or were released from aquariums and aquarium fish farms. They are originally from the Orinoco River basin in Venezuela and Colombia.

Here is a closeup from the Army Corp of Engineers, who is interested in these invasives because they like to destroy what the Corp has built.



During the day these catfish burrow into the river banks, causing erosion. At night they come out by the thousands to feed. All of the fish in the top photo are facing to the left, so the water flowing from the spring washes algae and small critters right into their mouths. Every once in a while, they come to the surface and take a gulp of air. All of this gulping sounded like someone was dropping stones into the water. These fish were very close to the spring, which apparently has low oxygen content as it comes out of the ground. Armored catfish can breath air fairly well, and can survive out of the water up to 30 hours!

Three types of heron - a green, a little blue and a great blue (named Henry according to the ranger) - stood to the side, patiently trying to find something to eat besides an armored catfish. Because of their tough, armored skin and sharp spines, these have been known to choke birds who tried to eat them. But the bears love them. The ranger told me that last year a group of volunteers "gigged" (speared) 5000 of them and left them out in the woods for the bears.

Here is some more info about these invasives and the damage they can cause.