Oyster Blog — Tideflat Critters

Not quite as scary as the cougar, unless you happen to be an oyster.

Yesterday while filming the shuckers we discovered a gunnel hiding in the oyster pile. The little fish was making the most of his situation, and had his mouth stuffed with oyster meat: We decided to put the plucky gunnel into the aquarium. The aquarium is quite a bit warmer than the canal this time of year, so it takes a while for the creatures to acclimate. Unfortunately, this gunnel never got the chance. One of the bigger spider crabs sensed his disorientation and snatched him away and up into the spider crab liar, aka the top of the pump mechanism,...

Another mystery from the deep. This one came in on a tub that had been soaking for several weeks at a negative tide level. It was purple and wide eyed, and it could suction itself to the bottom of a bucket like it wanted to stay there. We took pictures of its head. It had horns: We had absolutely no idea what kind of fish it was, and Oyster Fan made the now-infamous and very whimsical suggestion that it might be a baby seal. But really I just said it looked like a baby seal, as in "of course this is...

We started out feeding the aquarium monsters cooked bay shrimp, then we discovered that they go absolutely nutso over raw oysters. So now we feed them oysters every couple of days or so. But the other day as a very special treat we fed them some live shrimp. Actually we didn't mean to feed the animals the shrimp... it just worked out that way.  We were hoping that everybody could just coexist peacefully in our tank. The shrimp were really cute and diminutive and hopped and skipped through the water. Unfortunately, they lasted about 5 seconds. The sculpins attacked first,...

A shore crab was tumbling along the aquarium wall the other day and we noticed that he had funny little hairy patches on the inside of his claws. Then we started paying attention, and we discovered that many of the shore crab in our tank have the same fuzzy claw patches. We did some sleuthing, and found this helpful description of the Purple shore crab, aka Hemigrapsus nudus: Does not live in burrows, as Hemigrapsus oregonensis often does. The chela of males, as of H. oregonensis and P. crassipes, have a prominent tuft of hairlike setae on the palm. So......