As it’s summertime here in England, we went for a picnic on the beach today. As it’s summertime here in England, it was also cold, cloudy, spitting with rain and there was a very strong and persistent wind blowing onshore. The throngs of wind and kite surfers probably thought it was a nice day anyway.
The waves whipped up by the strong winds have brought ashore a great deal of interesting debris; lots of cuttlebones, seaweed, shells of all shapes and sizes. Plus a number of objects I’ve never seen before.
here is a picture of the largest one of them (apologies for the poor quality of the image - it was taken on a camera phone).
They are flattened ovoid capsules with a very densely resilient tough, rubbery texture, mottled sandy-beige to peach-orange in colour; variable in size from about three inches up to eight inches long (the one in the photo).
Some of them had short longitudinal slits and the last one we examined had what appeared to be a sphinctered opening midway along one side.
The all seemed to have a stone (or similar) embedded in one end.
Dunno; the other specimens we found were more regular in shape; just flat oval rubbery things - shaped like an elongated bar of soap.
I think I may have to go back there tomorrow at low tide and retrieve one for dissection.
I’m wondering if it might be the body of a bivalve mollusc that has been removed from its shell; there are always some very large(up to fist size) and heavy bivalve shells on this beach, often broken into pieces (and I mean heavy - the shell is about a centimetre thick)
Aha! I think I’ve got a match; at the bottom of this page is something called an encrusting sponge - the location, description (including the fact that there were embedded stones) and the picture all seem to match.
Just from the picture it is impossible for me to come up with a qualified guess, it could be anything from a sponge to dead-mans-fingers to a sea squirt to …
But, take a look in here to see if you find something looks like what you saw. I guess that would be the best way to start trying to identify what you saw.
Thanks, but I’m pretty confident that it’s the encrusting sponge on the page I linked above; the specimen on that page was found on more or less the same beach as mine.
Even better, do the above up to the “then”, but use the full Reply window rather than the “quick reply.” Click on the globe-and-paperclip icon (beneath the “color” drop box at the top, then paste the URL in there with Ctrl-V, and select text. That turns the result into a clickable link that is a word or phrase rather than an ugly URL embedded in the text.
