Today I was supposed to be out SCUBA diving on a SeaSearch dive, but since I still have this f***ing cough, breathing in a bunch of dry air underwater is probably not the best idea so I decided to give it a miss. However, today was water change day for my seagrass and seaweed that I am keeping in the CT (constant temperature) room and on one of the lab benches was the remnants of a fan mussel (Atrina pectinata) that we found out at Salcombe when out there early last week. Since I had just emailed Nigel, the South Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty Estuaries Officer, about having it, I figured I had better document it before possibly having to hand it off to him. As you can see from its size, it is quite large, but nowhere near the size that fan mussel's can reach in the Mediterranean Sea, but HUGE compared to the mussels that most people in the UK and US eat (completely different species, but just to give you an idea...). The bottom photo illustrates that even after death life goes on as the inside of the shell was completely colonised by calcareous tube worms. Life in the intertidal never ceases to amaze...
More info about UK Fan Mussels:
http://www.marlin.ac.uk/speciesinformation.php?speciesID=2680#
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