Tag: Mussel

Shore Crab

Mussel

The shell of this common mussel is encrusted with the calcareous tubes of keelworms, which have a prominent ridge, so that they’re triangular in cross section.

shore crab

The carapace of this shore crab is encrusted with barnacles, these are the barnacle Semibalanus balanoides, which have a diamond-shaped aperture. Between the barnacles at the front of the crab’s shell there’s a flat, pockmarked whitish crust, which looks like sea mat, a marine bryozoan, a colonial animal, filter-feeding from tiny individual cells, like coral.

bladderwrack

Like this small frond of bladderwrack seaweed, I picked these up on the beach near the harbour at Bridlington when we spent the day there last month.

Trace and Paint

drawing a mussel shell

Two useful pieces of advice from Agathe Haevermans’ Drawing and Painting the Seashore:

  • If you’re drawing a bivalve shell life size, start by drawing the outline around the shell
  • Position yourself so that the light is coming from the top left, throwing a shadow to the right and below the shell
  • The shape of the shadow helps explain the shape of the shell – whether it’s convex or concave
mussel with keel worm

This mussel shell is encrusted with keel worm tubes. This is the left shell valve. The beak of the shell (top) is the anterior or front end from which the mussel’s foot emerges the its siphon emerges from the posterior end, at the bottom of my drawing.

Mussel and Barnacles

sketch

We did a bit of beachcombing along the strandline at Bridlington yesterday, between award-winning North Beach Fish & Chips and a champion roast latte at the local Costa.

mussel shell

Most of the mussel shells were small single valves, broken off at the wider end, but a few remained complete and still connected, including this one, partly encrusted by barnacles.

It’s a good time of year to go back to Agathe Haevermans Drawing and Painting The Seashore. It’s rare for me not to start a drawing in pen and ink, but, going back to Havermans’ examples, which are so evocative of summer strolls along the strandline, I thought that I’d try out her techniques.

Mussel-eaters

coot familyNewmillerdam, edge of lake near the boathouse, early June:

A PARENT COOT is introducing its brood to a new food; fresh shellfish. It dives and comes up with a small nutlike object which I soon realise is a freshwater mussel.

The young chicks are ‘tween-age’, no longer fluffy little infants with bright markings on their head and not yet in the sober black and grey ‘school uniform’ of older chicks. They’ve still got a sparse punkish ginger top knot while their bills, once bright red, have now faded to a fleshy pink, like lean bacon.

The parent turns the small shell in its beak before presenting the morsel to a youngster then dives again and in seconds pops back up with another bite-sized mussel.

After turning it around in in its beak it presents this reluctant to open mollusc to one of the chicks. The chick fumbles with it and soon drops it and another chick picks it up but also struggles with it.

The parent takes it back and gives it a few more turns in its beak, returning it to the youngster which makes an extra effort and, with some difficulty, swallows it whole.

It reminds me of the sort of scene you might get in a restaurant where a parent is trying to show their children the way to tackle some unfamiliar food. I still remember the steaming tureen of mussels, some of them still flapping their valves that was brought to the table when we were on a family holiday in an old-fashioned seaside resort in France. We were equally clueless about how we should tackle them.