Here’s more from my personal collection of seashells. This is a 5 x 7 painting in tones of rust, brown grey and white. All seashells have shells that consist of calcium carbonate, which is very strong and hard. A shell is like a mobile home–you carry it with you! For more information about this painting, click here.
Here’s a fine collection of sea snails: The Cerith, The Moon snails, the Lewis Moon Snail and the Colorful Atlantic Moon snail. There is also a common periwinkle in this 5 x 7 painting. For more information about this painting, click here.
Dog whelks are found in the inter tidal zone, the area of the shore covered and exposed by tides. They live all around the coasts wherever there are barnacles, oysters, or mussels. The banded tulip is also a sea snail. In England, whelks are considered tasty and very popular. An average whelk has 137 calories, 24g of protein,, .34g of fat and 8g of carbohydrates. (Not for me–I’ll stick with peanut butter and crackers!) For more information about this painting, click here.
The Admiral, Geography and Orbigny’s Cone Snails are all beautiful–but deadly! Their venom, the conotoxin is heavily researched by biochemists seeking medicines to treat a variety of human neurological disorders like Parkinsons, alzheimers, and epilepsy. Cone snails are taken and sold in vast numbers to research labs around the world. There are more than 800 species of poisonous cone snails. They are lovely and colorful, but do not pick them up. Their sting can be fatal. For more information about this painting, click here.
This is an 8 x 10 painting. The Queen Conch shell is one I have owned for years! Conchs were used by the Haitians to summon voodoo spirits. The Florida Keys were a major source of Queen Conchs until the 1970s, but harvesting them is now prohibited. The cone snails are not friendly fellows. They have over 100 toxins in their body and the venom is similar to curare, used by natives to make poisonous arrows. There have been over 30 recorded cases of death by cone snail. For more information about this painting click here.
This is another 8 x 8 canvas panel that would go quite well with the painting shown last week! The animals that inhabited these shells are commonly known as sea snails and part of the phylum Molluska in the animal kingdom. These creatures evolved about 500 million years ago and there are more than 100,000 known species. There is no definitive catalogue of all of them yet. For more information about this painting, click here.
More seashells! I love the brown, rust, white and tans of these different shells. This is an 8 x 8 canvas panel. Cowrie shells have an interesting history. For hundreds of years they were used as money in parts of Africa. Slave traders used cowrie shells to trade for human slaves. In the 1680’s, a slave cost 10,000 shells. In 1770 the cost for an adult male slave was 150,000 cowrie shells. For more information about this painting, click here.
This is another version of the Atlantic Ribbed Mussels. For more information, click here.
The Atlantic Ribbed Mussell (Geukensia Demissa) is featured in this painting. Mussels have been killed by an alien species, zebra mussels, which were brought to the United States from Eastern Europe. The zebra mussels killed our native mussels by holding their shells closed to stop them from taking in oxygen and food. Mussel murder??? For more information about this painting, click here.
This is a small 5 x 7 inch painting of the soft shell clam that is native to both coasts of the United States. It is a bivalve. Fossils of bivalves have been found in rocks from the early Cambrian period–about 500 million years ago. That was 300 million years before dinosaurs! For more information on this painting, click here.
