TOMALES PADDLE

Dad was in town this weekend, and we went kayaking on Tomales Bay with Point Reyes Outdoors. It was a very small group, an excellent guide, and a very cool day paddling around calm waters, checking out harbor seals, pelicans, sea stars, &c.

Our guide had been informed of my peculiar predilection for naked-gilled marine mollusks, and while attempting to sift some out of the eel grass beds as we passed over, she pulled out a fantastic beast!

Encountering this little monster was one of those fantastic natural history moments when you simply cannot place what you’re seeing into your understanding of the world. Clearly an arthropod, of course, probably a crustacean, but from there? I was thrown. Luckily there was a guide book on hand that identified the thing as a skeleton shrimp (Caprella sp.), an exceedingly common amphipod, and not really a shrimp at all. They are sit-and-wait predators, if that isn’t clear from their body plan. After finding this one, we realized they were all over the eel grass. Here’s another shot for scale:

One of the best parts of Tomales Bay was the silence. On the Pt Reyes side, you couldn’t hear Highway 1, and it was amazing. It’s so easy to forget how permeated with noise my life has become (or perhaps always has been). As our guide pointed out, you could here the flap of pelican wings.