Hello All.

   Watching cars wipe out left and right of us on the Interstate south of
Indianapolis you'd wonder why we made a spring break run to Florida, but
we did nevertheless.

     We went to the T.H. Stone Memorial St. Joseph Peninsula State Park in
NW Florida.  The weather brought up lots of starfish, sea pansies, tube
worms, but only a few interesting mollusks, notably a few live Anatina
anatina which I left alone and one very dead Phalium granulatum (lots of
broken ones though).  An odd finding though were several Mussels; I'm
pretty sure they are Perna viridis, at first pretty large ones (5-7 cm)
with a dark green color on the valve.  When I first found a few pairs I
was inclined to believe that this was someone's lunch or possibly idea of
seeding shells as noted by others here at Conch-L.  However it was a
pretty good hike from the campsite and then I started to find several
small ones too, on the order of 1-2 cm, really too small to be the ones
I've seen generally for sale for food.  They were washing in with the worm
tubes.

    It all seems so unlikely because I would associate Mussels with heavy
wave action, not what one would expect on a mostly sandy beach in Florida.
But the finding of the immature ones really set me to think that however
unlikely that this might be, that it could be the result of colonization;
is it at all possible?  I picked up only a couple of the larger ones
(foolishly) but if anyone feels they would like an image I can generate
one for them.

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