SEA SHORE DIARIES: PART I

Greetings viewers! all of us will be having one or other hobbies to spend on free time. Our kind of hobbies may be influenced by our tastes and interests. Photography, arts, gardening, reading, writing, are the prominent hobbies which we opt. My hobby is to collect the shells of molluscs; Shells are the most attractive things present on the shores, and I hope all of us would have played with them during our childhood. I had a habit of buying jewels carved from shells when I was a teen slowly my fashion turned to passion and I started collecting shells as my hobby. 

Shells of Molluscs: 

Molluscs are a kind of invertebrates/non-chordates (not synonyms) which can be found on land, fresh water or marine water and other habitats. Their bodies are very soft and hence they are encapsulated by a hard calcareous shells. The shell of a molluscan may be external or internal (in some squids), univalve (single valved), bivalve or octavalve (Chiton). Every shell of a molluscs is different in colour, pattern, shape and size. The cells of the mantle of the organisms secretes the calcium carbonate which precipitates into hard shells; shell grows as the body of an organism grows. 

Collection of shells is called conchology and the person who studies sea shells is called a conchologist. I started collecting shells as a hobby ten years back when I accidentally found an

attractive snail shell lying on the road near my college campus. 

 I managed to keep it safe in my jewel box and on the same month I got a chance to dissect one of the fresh water mussels (Now the dissections are banned in most of the Indian Universities) and preserved its shell along with my first one. 

Unio (fresh water mussels)

Then this practice continued, and now I have made my collections, from the shores of Trivandrum and Thrissur, Kerala; Chennai and Kannyakumari (Nagercoil), Tamil nadu; 

 

 

Pattaya, Thailand  

Collected from Oman

Not just mollusc, once I got to purchase fossilized sea star from Kanyakumari, India

Collected from Besant Nagar beach, 

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

 Collected from Besant Nagar beach, 

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Collected from Besant Nagar beach, 

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Collected from one of the beaches in Dapoli 

Dapoli, Maharashtra, India

Collected from one of the beaches in Dapoli 

Dapoli, Maharashtra, India

Collected from Baga beach, Goa, India 

Collected from Marina beach, Chennai, India 

Collected from Karanji Lake, Mysore, India

So that's it from my sea shore dairies, and I am trying to find out the identifications of all these specimens; anybody who can identify these shells please drop your comments on the comment box. See you next week.. Bye bye..