The fact that it was 81 degrees in our living room even before sunrise this morning does not warm the cockles of my heart. And if you've ever wondered where that saying comes from, it appears that a "cockle" is the chamber of a kiln. Our hearts have four chambers--four cockles--to be warmed.
I believe this is the shell of a Nuttall's Cockle (Clinocardium nuttallii), found on the sand near the mouth of Drake's Estero. It's surprisingly more colorful up close than it appeared at first glance, and I can only wonder what gave the shell its light blue coloration.
In the book The Nature of Nature which I mentioned in a recent post, Enric Sala writes about testing the water for bacterial pollutants in a string of islands, some of which people lived on, while others were uninhabited. On the uninhabited islands, giant clams which, like cockles, are filter-feeders, lived in peace, while on the populated islands they were eaten, and their numbers were greatly reduced. The predictable result was that the water around the clammy islands was pristine, while the water around the people-y islands was filthy with bacteria.
And if you thought, as I did, that cockles just sit there waiting to be eaten, check out this short video of a cockle escaping predation by a sunstar.
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