Taryn The Shell

30/08/2026

🃏 Week 35 of 2026 from the Broome Shells deck is...
Purple Banded Dolphin shell in the Gastropods suit ♦

I use common names because they make sense on the beach and are easier to remember. A few of them require some imagination... can you see the dolphin? The curved, stubby-spine silhoettes around the outside of the shell look like a dolphin's curved back and dorsal fin coming out of the water while it swims along (this behaviour is called sharking). This particular species has dark purple bands growing around the spiral. It's a very thick, heavy, strong shell with a round aperture and operculum. The seasnail needs this protection while they graze algae off rocks and reef, helping to maintain balance in the ecosystem. After the mollusc dies, the empty shell makes a great home for hermit crabs, both in the water (aquatic) and in the sand dunes (terrestrial).

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28/08/2026

22/08/2026

🃏 Week 34 of 2026 from the Broome Shells deck is...
Bonnet shell in the Gastropods suit ♣

Bonnets, like their cousins the helmet shells, are named because they resemble that type of headwear. A thick and sturdy seasnail, they cruise around the sandy ocean floor hunting echinoderms like sea urchins and sand dollars. Using their radula, like a modified toothy tongue, they drill through the urchin's test, inject an acidic saliva, then suck the food up like a straw. In the photo, the apex (pointy part of the spiral) is at the top. The tiny tip is the protoconch (first-shell) and the oldest part of the shell, formed when the mollusc was a few weeks old. As the animal grew, it added calcium carbonate to enlarge the shell around it. When the bonnet approaches reproductive maturity age, the animal adds more calcium carbonate to the base and outer lip of the shell so it becomes more stable for mating, and in the females, for laying eggs. In the photo at the bottom of the shell is the opening called siphonal canal. It's a channel in the hard shell that protects the soft siphon part of the animal to protrude safely for sniffering, or up into the water while submerged under the sand. While this specimen has been bleached white by the sun, the living shell has brown markings on it, sometimes in a soft square checkerboard pattern.

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21/08/2026

The Shell 🐚 Books 📚

📖 Pearls and Pearling Life
✒️ Edwin W. Streeter
🏷 Non-Fiction 1886
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As you'd expect with a book written 150 years ago, the language (some of the words) are ye olde style. There's also passages of foreign language without translation. Some of the phrases and characterisations of pearl shelling are fun. Interesting from a local perspective, when the pearling industry was run out of Cossack, Broome was not yet on the map (literally). This account is world-wide and very comprehensive for its time. Did you know some individual pearl specimens have names? There's a list of these famous pearls traced through history (ie. who owned them) and I wonder where they are now. The colour plates of pearls in different types of shells are attractive and good examples of that era's style.

3 / 5 shells in my rating 🤓

16/08/2026

project with augers, Duplicaria duplicate, can you see the 2 rows spiralling around 🔄🔄
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16/08/2026

🃏 Week 33 of 2026 from the Broome Shells deck is...
Heart Urchin in the miscellaneous suit ♥

The Heart Urchin, also called the Potato Urchin, is not a mollusc, it's an echinoderm. It sort of looks like a potato, and feels about the weight of a potato if you pick up a live specimen. Be careful, they're covered in delicate spines! The spines are how the urchin moves through the sand, they can be completely submerged and sometimes on top of the wet sand during low tide. They also look like a heart shape, and again, feels a bit like holding a heavy heart in your hand. When dead and empty the test or shell (skeleton) is hollow, fragile, lightweight, and you can see a hole in each end. This is the mouth and the a**s, food in and food out. As with other urchins, they have a symmetry. It's almost 5-sided like the sea star but due to the elongation of the oval shape it's called bilateral or 2-sided symmetry, like there's a mirror through the middle. Whenever someone finds a heart urchin washed up, it feels special and I think it may reflect the delicate nature of the human heart. Their hidden life under the sand could represent inner strength, patience, and the beauty found beneath surface appearances. Here's a Heart Urchin for you today.

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09/08/2026

🃏 Week 32 of 2026 from the Broome Shells deck is...
Worm shell in the Gastropods suit ♥

There are some weird gastropods, that don't look anything like snails, and this is one of them. The worm shell is not a worm, it's a gastropod in the mollusc class. The shell that this animal makes starts in a "regular" coil then opens up into an "irregular" coil which can look like a wavy or twisting tube. The tube has a slit running along it which is a series of holes used for water circulation, breathing in and excreting waste out. The mollusc lives with its shell attached to the reef, coral or sponge and therefore needs to protrude out to catch food via filter feeding or suspension feeding. The large, round open aperture is where the animal can release a string of mucus to catch microscopic algae and plankton, a bit like a sticky spider web. It then draws the mucus back into the shell and eats the catch. These shells are commonly found on Cable Beach. When only a part of the worm shell is found, say just the straight part, or the tightly coiled part by itself, they can be intriguing and mysterious to identify, if you don't know about the worm shell. They're usually white, light brown as in the photo, and if the protoconch is present, the very first regular tiny coil can be purplish.

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