Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

Barnacles with a sense of humor took it upon themselves to decorate someone’s lost pair of pliers to look like a sea monster:

And while on a beach walk today we discovered a particularly disgusting, previously unknown (to us), and brilliantly red worm:

Fortunately, biologist Dan Cheney with the Pacific Shellfish Institute just so happened to be on our beach conducting a vibrio study. He saved us a huge google headache by identifying the red worm as an intertidal nemertean, aka an orange or primitive ribbon worm, aka Tubulanus polymorphus. According to Western Washington University’s Field Guide to the Salish Sea, these worms can grow to 3 meters long, lay their eggs in the summer, and are found at low tide hunting for small crustaceans and annelid worms.

As it turns out, there are a lot of worms in the world.

See mystery worms #1, #2, and #3.

Erin found this little guy last month while hunting geoduck.  He’s green, fuzzy with hair, and very crabby.  We did a little sleuthing and decided that he’s likely a helmet crab.

According to this site, helmet crab live in the north Pacific and are rarely found south of Puget Sound. They live out deep (low intertidal to 110 m)  in eelgrass beds and rocky areas covered with algae.

No idea what this is, but couldn’t resist picking it up.

Earlier this month we came across one of these worms for the first time ever out on the flats, and we tried to save it to photograph, but it crawled into a mass of mussel byssel threads and escaped.

Apologies for the dishpan hands. They come with the territory.

The chiton is continuing his cleaning ways:

And both the gunnel and the sculpin have found hiding places where they can get a little R&R without worrying about a spider crab attack:

The gunnel prefers a floating piece of drift wood.

And the sculpin is partial to the magnetized tank cleaner.

Shrimp are much faster in reverse, but we didn’t get it on camera.

We haven’t been able to find live crab for the past couple of weeks, so we saved a few of the spot prawns in our crab aquarium, just to see how they’d do. Now we have two species of local shrimp on display: the spot prawns and coonstripe shrimp, which are much smaller but just as tasty.

Here’s a closeup of a coonstripe (and a fuzzy picture of Preston, the guy who sold us the shrimp):

Here’s a spot prawn and a coonstripe becoming acquainted in the livetank:

Coonstripe are also called dock shrimp. They’re common in Nothern Puget Sound, the San Juans, and the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Our shrimp came from the Straights.

And here’s a picture of a coonstripe looking very colorful:

The above photo came from the divebums photo of the week page.

This little guy came in with the spot prawns last week. He lost his right paw somewhere along the way.

After a little sleuthing we determined that he’s a squat lobster:

According to Emerald Diving, squat lobsters are actually just funny looking shrimp, and they’re common in Hood Canal. Wikipedia says that referring to squat lobsters as lobster “highly upsets the Maine lobster industry.”

So from now on we’ll refer to them as squat “lobster.”

And it turns out that there are actually several kinds of shrimp that live in Puget Sound. For obvious reasons we’re partial to the spot prawns, but the candy stripe shrimp gets the prize for coolest looking:

Go here for an illustrated list of Puget Sound shrimp.

Our shark tank is full of meat eaters, and they make for good viewing but bad algae control. So we decided to introduce a chiton into the mix. The problem is that it takes animals a while to acclimate to the warmer temperatures in the aquarium, and the chitons would always get ambushed and eaten by the spider crab while they were incapacitated. We made an extra effort to protect this one while he adjusted to the tank, and now he’s happily licking his way around.

Meet our newest aquarium addition!

Anemones eat small fish and shrimp. Be glad you’re not a little fish stuck in an aquarium with a hungry anemone: each tentacle contains a harpoon-like structure that injects a toxin into the anemone’s prey.

But then again: be glad you’re not an anemone stuck inside a salt-water aquarium devoid of any small fish or shrimp.

Our anemone looks like a tube dwelling anemone, found here, but don’t quote us on that.

A couple of weeks ago the water we added to the tank contained jellyfish larvae, which proceeded to grow into baby jellyfish. They got about a centimeter big and then disappeared. Maybe anemones eat jellyfish?

Here are some of our baby jellies, stuck to the wall of the aquarium:

Tube feet in action! Today the sea star was doing laps around the aquarium. Maybe he ate too much over the weekend?

We sped it up to double time, and it’s still pretty slow.