Shells Galore

Will: The shells here came from Uncle Larry's house. Some of them have dirt in them. Some he collected from western Australia. He has Pearl shells (lower left corner of photo) and some Tiger Cowries (in front of my hands) and some Cone shells (on the right corner of the rug) and some clams and some Scallops and others. At the top of the rug you can see some Cowries that I lined up by size.

I sorted the shells by type. I know a lot about shells and their names.

Michele: Thanks Uncle Larry for letting us learn so much from your shells. Robin and Will have been having a blast sorting the shells and learning the names of the critters.

This second photo shows some Cone shells. The patterns on the shells is amazing. Beautiful geometry designs. However, like nearly everything in Queensland they will kill you. The critter attacks out the narrow end so we are careful to pick them up at the wide end. Gavin found two live cone shells while tide pooling a few days ago.

Tide pooling is different here. In California and Maine we always tide pool by going to stranded pools of water at low tide. We might poke around the seaweed but generally we just look around for stuff. Here folks turn over rocks to see the good stuff. Good stuff indeed! The Cowries, Cone shells, sea cucumbers and even eels live under the rocks. Now that Uncle Larry has given us the scoop on proper tide pooling technique we are enjoying building our own shell collection. Lorna and my mom went home with boxes of shells that they found. However, our collections will never be as amazing as Larry's. These shells here are just a small fraction of his enormous and impressive collection.