Coast Walk 2: from the Town Beach to Cromwell Harbor; January 6-10, 2015
Remember Coast Walk 2 – wandering along the Shore Path? This is the still life of objects I found along the way. It went a lot faster than the one for the first walk because I didn’t have any gross bones to clean. My favorite bit of this one is the hot pink coralline in the second row. That color! Usually when I find coralline it has bleached white. I’ve no idea why the color lasted so well in this one. Coralline is a marine alga, a seaweed, but it uses calcium carbonate in its structure, so it feels hard and brittle. If you look closely at it, you can see it has articulations every few millimeters that allow it to flex. Also very cool? All the itty-bitty baby mussel shells! None of those are even as big as my pinkie nail. They were so hard to work with, as the least breeze would move them around, but then they would develop some kind of static-electricity bond with the plexiglass of my light box and just stick to it. As my mother used to say, “It’s a good thing you’re cute.”
From left to right, top to bottom:
Hovering above: plastic ring, sea glass
Row 1: young Blue Mussels (Mytilus edulis), Northern Rock Barnacle (Semibalanus balanoides), more mussels
Row 2: granite beach stone, Corallina officinalis, plastic marker cap, driftwood, Dog Whelks (Nucella lapillus)
Row 3: sea glass, fish eggs (dried out now but there’s a photo of them fresh in the CW2 blog post), sea glass, more mussels (not sure if they’re Blue or Horse Mussels), acorn (probably Quercus rubra), beach stone, mussels
Row4: Dog whelk, more mussels, Common Periwinkles (Littorina littorea)
Row 5: Seaweed attached to barnacle, Smooth Periwinkles (Littorina obtusata), sea glass, plastic thingy (I think it’s from a glow stick), beach stone
Row 6: Common Periwinkles, granite beach stone, sea glass, mussels
Row 7: Dog whelks, Horse Mussel (Modiolus modiolus)
