Oyster Blog

Deep, deep down, the Canal is a creepy place. Check out these tentacles! This octopus carcass washed up in our tumble farm a week ago... it was only half intact and had been chewed on by crabs and other critters....

Looking closely:

The other day we ran across a cast of hermit crabs living in periwinkle shells. (According to this page, "cast" is the correct term for a gathering of crabs. Now we know.) This appeared to be a pretty big cast,...

Here are some photos from a nighttime beach walk we took a couple of weeks ago. Ever wonder what diving ducks do underwater? In the photo below you can see a duck excavation, created by foraging a surf scoter, white wing, or...

Here we have the inspiration for the movie tremors.  Teredo clams are worm-shaped clams that use shell-shaped jaws to chew through wood.  Because these clams do  look an awful lot like worms, and perhaps because the idea of a wood eating clam is...

We were worried sick we wouldn't be able to get a good photograph of an inquisitive seal. And we didn't. But here's what the seal probably looked like:

Some of these are out of focus. Amateurs. A sunflower star. Clearly he wasn't dried on purpose, otherwise we would have done a better job. Big guy. Trust us on this one: it takes a long, long time to dry the stink...

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...

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...

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,...