The whole family went out to beach comb yesterday’s morning tide, a minus 4.5. We looked for starfish for the garden, but didn’t see any large enough to collect yet. The seaweed is growing amazingly fast, though. I picked some for drying, and even had some with lunch. Mostly, though, we just looked around to see what we could see. As usual, a lot of it was strange, wondrous, and mysterious.
For instance, on certain mussel encrusted rocks, we found bare places that showed strange markings. We don’t know quite what to make of them.
Beautiful but mysterious markings on the lowtide rocks (Photo: Mark Zeiger).
We speculated that they might be places where mussels attached their thready hold-fasts, but we also noticed similar markings on the shells of some nearby mussels on the rocks. They cluster thickly, but we don’t usually see them attached to the upper parts of each other’s shells.
I don’t recall seeing anything like this before, either in person or in reference books. We’ll have to keep an eye out for an explanation. In the meantime, it’s just another strange thing to see in this wonderful old world of ours.
