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I thought we might make history today, @catchang @sea_kangaroo and myself: 3 Endangered butterflies all seen on the same day. We saw this beauty halfway through the walk. Tough cuz W. Brown Elfin out here as well. Didn’t hit our historic goal but 16 species is Amazing in the month of March in the Bay Area...

Rare colours like yellow have been promoted in repositories, but red still remains the commonest colour form. Shell generally rounder and a little larger than the common Fanshell, Talochlamys zelandiae.

The common epithet for this varies depending on your location.
In Nelson eg. this is a silver Paua and queen paua is reserved for our tiniest sp H. virginea.

Easily recognised by coarse ripples across the shell and its silvery coloured nacre which quickly deteriorates to limey white if exposed on the beach for a tiime. Does not have the strong irridescent greens, blues and reds evident in H iris, they are considerably subdued in this sp.

Outer shell often hosts barnacles.

This shell was collected by BJ Stacey (@finatic) while he was on a one-night two-day trip away from his one-week Sanibel visit. During the rest of that week he and his wife stayed at the same hotel as myself and my husband.

BJ brought back a group of shells from Bark Park Dog Beach in Boca Raton, and I examined them. I photographed the rarest ones and the most fragile ones so I could attempt to nail down the IDs when I was examining the material in person, rather than trying to do it weeks later from photographs and maybe from broken pieces of some of the shells!

A small live Porpita porpita was found near Packery Channel, Padre Island. The diameter of the round float was about 12 mm, about half of the maximum diameter.

Porpita porpita is a condrophore, a colony of organisms in the phylum Cnidaria. It drifts on the surface of the sea. A close relative is Velella velella, which also has a disc with a sail. Physalia physalis is also colonial, but belongs to a different order, Siphonophorae.

The specimen was placed in a container for photos. The second photo shows the underside of the disc. All photos were taken with a cell phone (Samsung Galaxy S7 with a macro lens).

Several beached and mostly dried specimens of Blue Button were also observed. Also observed were some purple snails, Janthina globosa:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/15218146