Posted: Apr 16 2024
I made this first-time trip to Salt Run in hopes of finding a Busycon carica forma eliceans, a shell I've never seen live in Florida. Salt Run attracted my interest due to an observation reported on iNaturalist.
Salt Run is a lagoon running south along Anastasia State Park from St. Augustine Inlet.
My search area was at the southern tip of Salt Run. The habitat is one of soft, muddy sand with oyster-lined shorelines. I timed my visit for a -0.71 tide.
I spent about two hours trudging through the soft sand over exposed flats and shoreline. Few mollusks were observed.
Here are the sppecies I encountered in addition to thousands of oysters:
Only one adult Busycon Carica was observed. To me this specimen has enough "swelling running around the center girth of the body whorl (Abbott 1974)" to be called a forma eliceans. Others have opined that it "whispers eliceans," "this shell shows the bulge," and "I regard eliceans as an ecophenotype (a phenotype modified by specific adaptive response to environmental factors) of carica, so I’d say carica."
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