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.

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.

There used to be only a few of these little critters on the beach, now there are thousands. They’re very, very sociable, and like to congregate on muddy sections of beach. We didn’t know what to call them, but someone came up with the term algae eaters, and it stuck. Unicorn horn shell was in the running but deemed too fanciful. Their real name is Battlearia attramentaria, or Asian mud snail. They are originally from Asia (surprise!) and are normally associated with oyster farms… probably because they piggybacked in on the Pacific oyster when farmers first began importing seed from Japan.

To be really specific, they eat diatoms. And although ‘diatom eaters’ sounds really cool, it’s a bit of a tongue twister.