Since we have been have lots of rain, the water is clear making it quite easy to find the source of the crackle. A blue crab was clinging to a barnacle encrusted board that was used to stabilize the small skiff. That raspy sound was the crab's claws on the barnacles. Oh, my! The blue crab was actually raking out the small critter inside the shell. The crab was dining on barnacles!
Barnacles, themselves, are arthropods and are actually kin to crabs and lobsters. I never knew that the crabs would eat the barnacles but, then again, crabs eat most anything. Apparently, this fellow was hungry enough to work for his snack. So, barnacles were on the menu.
The mystery was solved! I now have a new tidbit of useless information to pass along to visitors to the Bayou. That's what makes life interesting...useless information! It is the stuff you can twist and turn to make tall tales seem much taller!
I used to babysit a lot of my nieces and nephews. It was fun and a good way for me to look as though I was doing something productive when actually playing! I had taken one of my nephews who was around six years old for a walk down by the bay. We were "exploring" which meant "hanging over the side of the pier to see what was under it"! Fun stuff there! It must have been very fascinating to him as we stayed there for what seemed like hours..in reality, probably only minutes but with the blood rushing to my head, I lost all sense of time. Anyway, in the process of dangling upside-down, we discussed what we saw. Mud! There is no shortage of that here..that seemed to interest him to no end..I guess it is a "boy" thing. There was an occasional minnow and perhaps a crab, but then he spied them..."Baby volcanoes!". Huh? Baby volcanoes?? What in the world? He pointed exuberantly! "Baby volcanoes!" Then I realized what he was so excited about. There on the pier post were clusters of barnacles..his "volcanoes"! I explained to him that these were not volcanoes but rather a tiny creature that somewhere down the line was kin to crabs. He looked at me like I was slap nuts. I went on and told him how they made their shells to protect themselves. That they lived in them just like we do houses. Without missing a beat, he asked "Why do they live in volcanoes?" I explained it all again and I thought he fully understood it this time..then hours later, he told his mother.."Mom! We saw baby volcanoes!" Oh, geez! I thought I had done so well explaining some sea life.
