Whelks, Anemones, and Sea Urchins I am back to continue with my posting after an unexpected absence due to bodily self-decomposition.  A word to the wise, don’t get old.  Or if you do, don’t let your body know.  It might just not like the process.   Anyway, on with my  tales from the slimy lagoon… In an earlier discussion, I mentioned that aeons ago I saw large female whelks depositing egg capsule masses on one of my research sorties to “my” intertidal study site near Homer, Alaska.  I found this to be very interesting, at the time I was casting around for some research to do, and here a potential easily-done project dropped into my lap. Normally I don’t trust to luck, but I wasn’t about to overtly examine the buccal anatomy of this presentation equine.  I was able to identify the animals, but, at that time, there was no record of them depositing egg capsules in a mass or otherwise.  In point of fact, virtually nothing was known about the natural history of these beautiful whelks, an artifact of being found in an out-of-the-way place where the accumulated knowledge of such critters was minimal.  In fact the only reason I knew the whelks were at this area was that I had taken some students down to the site the previous autumn on a class field trip. Neptunea pribiloffensis whelks on the study beach. The substrate is sandstone, and the “fuzzy” clumps are masses of a feather duster worm which is one of the common prey of the whelks. Figuring that the presence of essentially unknown animals that I was interested in learning about would lead to an easy publication, the following spring I decided to do a little bit of basic research on the snails, and went down to the site to make some field observations as well as to collect a few animals for gut analyses.  Having examined some other Neptunea, including some specimens for this species, I knew I had to look at the gut contents to determine what MORE: A Snail’s Babysitter