More on rolled up leaves...

My Dad googled 'insect burrito leaf roll' and he found what they were. :) They're Leaf Rolling Weevils! Interesting little critters..

Rolled up leaves?

This is very bizarre. I was outside in the yard, and I found all these little rolled up leaves about a centimeter long. I'm assuming some sort of insect made them. I haven't found out what they are, though.

Chocolate Jimmies? I think not.

Don't they look yum? If you're a tourist and you've ever walked on a Hilton Head beach, you may have seen these little holes with the jimmie-shaped pellets on top, you may have wondered what they were. The holes belong to Mud or Ghost shrimp, and the pellets are shrimp poo!

That, mud, and other feces from sea-life gets mushed together into this:
(You don't know how hard it was to take this picture...)

More on Cannonballs...

I'm pretty sure that this Cannonball jelly was still alive at the time this photo was taken. It was pulsating very slightly. In addition to that, it looks like a sphere, while the dead one below has deflated. :(


These jellies are strong swimmers, but I guess they have to wash up some time. :S

My sister found one jelly that had a rock crab stuck in it! The crab's normally hard shell was all soft and gushy.. O_o... I think that the crab tried to eat the jellyfish, but got trapped inside and died. I don't think the jellyfish tried to eat the crab because I've read several places that these jellies only eat zooplankton.

Lotta Jellyfish...

Hwhooh! We've been getting a lot of jellyfish lately. :) And I got some nice photos which I'll post.

Most of the time, for my 'research' on the local wildlife, I usually use my indispensable book, the Tideland Treasure, but this time the book didn't help me out much. The jellyfish pictured above is a Cannonball jellyfish, or Cabbagehead, but Mr. Ballantine, (the author) captioned it as 'Jellyball'. Is this a nickname for it maybe? I googled Jellyball but got no results... >_<

But all that aside, more about the jellyfish! This Jellyfish washes up in droves in the spring, and this kind doesn't sting! I've probably astounded a couple tourists by picking them up. :D (The jellyfish, not the tourists.)

I also found out an interesting thing about them. I'm not sure whether they just do this when they're dead, but when you touch the red stuff, it comes off! (See picture at right.)

Phlegm Attack!

Is this a melted jellyfish? Shark guts? Egg sac mucus? Heaven knows what it is..

My sister found this scentless sludge on the beach, and we have yet to discover what it was. :)'

Erm

I haven't been on in a while... This was mainly due to the death of my beloved camera, so I haven't been able to put up pictures. :( But my Mom has generously lent me hers, (:D),and I'm gonna start putting up artwork too.


Just how many "re-openings" can we survive?

A pretty little Mole Crab.

It looks like a wierd cross between a sandy cockroach and a purple lobster, but nothing like a crab. Go figure.

Mole crabs, (AKA Sand Fleas) burrow into the sand from predators like fish and seabirds. Most of the time I think they're varying shades of brown and white, but this one is dead and bleached. Plus, I've also found one that looked sort of opally. I don't know what that was about. This one's sort of got a camo pattern now.

Mole crabs are found from Massachusetts all the way down the coast.

I think the correct word would be... yuk?

Eww. What a creepy little fetus thingy. You know those little black egg cases you find on the beach? Mermaid's Purses? I found one and cut it open. At first it just had sand in it, but I hosed it out and viola... I am not sure what this is. I've researched and I think it's a skate, (like a stingray), because of the little flaps on the sides, but I also see mermaid's purses defined as the egg cases of Dogfish. Hmm. It was interesting, anyway.

Good gravy I hope that tail fin was larger when it was alive...

Here is the dead pufferfish I was telling you about! It's actually called a spiny boxfish. It's about 6 inches long. It was quite stinky, and I nicked myself with a spine. :(

Fish backbone piece

Here is a tiny fish vertebrae. It was about a centimeter long. Fish bones are not that common on South Beach, where I went, but are quite plentiful on the beach near Harbor Town. There are many large bones there, and I'm assuming that's because people go and fish, then come back and clean their fish on the docks, and throw the carcasses over the railing. The carcasses are eaten by crabs, and the skeletons wash up on the beach. At least that's how I see it. :)

Limpet.

Here is a limpet shell. Have you ever heard the phrase, "cling like a limpet"? That's what limpets do. They cling onto other shells for transportation and shelter. Notice how this one is curved. It probably lived in some whelk or moon snail shell as a very small limpet, and grew larger and larger, and curved as the shell was curved, to accommodate its tight lodging. And yes, my fingernails need trimming.

Misc. II

Here are some miscellaneous shells and a fuzzy caterpillar. The only one I could recognize is the one second to the bottom. That one is a broken Olive shell, (South Carolina's state shell), with a little star coral attached.

Some broken shell

I had a hard time identifying this. It's either a Knobbed Whelk or some kind of conch. Probably a knobbed whelk. By the way, there is a way to help identify these things. There are two main kinds of whelks around here, knobbed whelks, and lightning whelks. If you turn some unknown whelk on its "back", then you will see the opening is on a particular side. Knobbed Whelks have the opening on the right side, while Lighting Whelks have it on the left. See how that eliminates Lightning Whelks as a candidate for this shells' identification? Hope that makes that clear. As I've said, I'm bad at condensing. Just type in knobbed or lightning whelk in the google image search engine, and you'll see what I mean. :)

P.s. I pronounce it conch, like a Northerner. Not conk. (It can be pronounced either way.)

Misc.

Here's some miscellanous feather from some seabird I found.

Star Coral

This is, (in case the title didn't give you a hint), star coral. It is also known as Astrangia, and personally, it's one of my favorite things to find on the beach. It's Hilton Head's only stony coral, (stony as in not brittle or soft, and rocklike instead.) There are very often chunks of it scattered along the beach, and I've never found any alive with polyps. (Polyps are the little creatures that live in those pretty cavities.) If you decorate your house with shells and other ocean things, star coral looks very attractive in a small bowl or other piece of glassware.

Spider crabs

And here we have Spider Crabs! They're about 1-2 inches long, but some can grow up to 3 inches, mabye a bit longer. These crabs are unique because they grow gardens on their backs! On all these photos, you see stringy brown stuff, a little goop, and sand. (The sand wasn't supposed to be there.) These crabs collect ooze, bacteria, and plankton on their rough, spiny shells. The gooey mess attracts other plants and animals. Some of these are seaweed, sponge, tube worms, hydroids, and bryzoans. Interesting! The crabs will even snip off plants from the ocean floor, put them to their mouth, coating the organism with gluey mucus, and sticks it to their backs! 8) Wierd...