Seeing a Lewis’s Moonsnail out of its shell, laying its egg casing or actually plowing through the sand is an unforgettable experience. These animals are large! They lay foot-wide egg casings that are reminiscent of beautiful grey pieces of pottery — a mix of egg, sand and mucous. I actually blame Lewis’s Moonsnail for my strange love of mollusks. Years ago, when a couple of young children asked me to photograph a large looming creature they had found in the intertidal zone, I was surprised by what they had found — but mostly I was surprised that I hadn’t seen them before — that I had kayaked over them for years.
The experience prompted me to ask: What else had I kayaked over? What else had I missed? I began to look more closely at what lay right in front of my eyes and the moonsnail never disappointed. These animals get to be nearly 18 inches long (more than 1/2 metre when stretched out of their shells). They are mostly water and when threatened they will squeeze back into their shells, shoot water everywhere and close shut their operculum. Sea gulls love them and will take the smaller ones and drop them from the sky in order to shatter their shells. Some humans will eat them as well — pounding their flesh as they would abalone. Their prey? Clams and cockles — essentially bivalves. They have powerful raspers that bore holes in their prey, leaving perfect little holes in empty shells. Look for those shells, as well as their egg casings for evidence of their existence beneath the mucky, sandy intertidal/subtidal zones they occupy.