Hama Hama® Oyster Blog

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.

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:

We can’t get over this ridiculous spider crab. The barnacles aren’t actually over his eyeballs, so he can still see, but still. It’s too silly.

Read more about spider crab, and see a video of one without barnacle goggles, in our earlier post.

Mystery creature identified! Sort of. According to Jeff at the Seattle Aquarium, it looks like the body of a sea whip, but it may also be the body of a sea pen. But because the thing reminded us of a bull whip, and we have little more to go on, we’re going to call it a sea whip.

We got the picture below of sea whips in their native habitat from this site. The whips like to live at least 100 feet deep and in a nice sandy bottom.

It turns out that this isn’t the first time that shrimp traps have interfered with sea whips, which is too bad.

We found one site that referred to sea whips as “deepwater corals,” but other than that we know very little about this creature. Most sites categorize it as a “miscellaneous” animal. We’ll let you know if we discover anything.

Sandworms (genus Nephtys) live in the mid-intertidal to deep-sea area. We found this worm while digging for littleneck clams at the edge of the Hama Hama delta. They are nocturnal predators, and use the proboscis to capture their prey: small worms, molluscs and crustaceans. They also evert the proboscis to create tunnels through the sand. Probably that’s what this worm was attempting to do… he wasn’t trying to eat a human hand; he just wanted to get out of the spotlight.

For a more detailed description of nephtys anatomy, go here.

Some marine worms have venomous glands at the base of their jaws that secrete a neurotoxin. Fortunately for the camera woman, this worm isn’t one of them.

Mystery solved!

To everyone except native Lilliwaupians the blood oyster is known as a rock oyster, or jingle shell. Officially, the animal is called Pododesmus cepio.

Other names include Pacific jingle, blister shell, false jingle shell, green false jingle shell, and money shell.

Another official name is Pododesmus macrochisma.

The bivalve lives in the low intertidal zone to 300 feet. It’s not a scallop (but thank-you to the  people wrote in suggesting that the red meat was actually scallop roe). And it’s not a clam. But it isn’t really an oyster, either.  Here’s a photo of a live one:

‘Jingle shell’ is used to describe various species of bivalve that extend byssal threads through their bottom shells to attach themselves to rocks (or pilings, or other shells, etc). The delicate, translucent shells make a jingling sound when strung together in wind chimes or necklaces.

We don’t know what this is. And neither did these three graybeards, who between them have nearly a century and a half of experience in the Hood Canal oyster industry:

Nathan is the only one who wasn’t shocked at the bright red bivalve. He said that they grow way out deep and called them “blood oysters.”

We love that delightfully dramatic name, and will continue to use it,  but the general consensus is that it’s some sort of scallop. Are there any scuba divers out there who know what this is?

Below is a series of photos showing Jim shucking the red… thing.

First he pries it off of a Pacific oyster shell:

…and it comes all the way off. If it had been a real oyster, he would have only been able to pry off the top shell.

The thing used a muscle to attach itself to the empty shell:

Here’s the hole for the muscle:

And here it is fully open:

We’ve called every expert we could think of to try to get an ID on this creature, but for now we’ll have to end this post with a cliff hanger.

Stay tuned!