Knobbed Whelk Eggs on Hilton Head

While walking along Hilton Head beach, I found a few of these spine-shaped things, that you can see in the picture below. I thought that they were seaweeds, like the other bits of debris that are around it.

The “spine” in the next picture has thicker, flatter discs, and looks like it could have been a snake in a past life!

However, these aren’t seaweeds, or skeletons, they are the egg containers of a large sea snail – the Knobbed Whelk. Each of those discs is a capsule that can hold almost 100 eggs.

So far, I haven’t seen any Knobbed Whelk shells on the beach – they apparently look like a large conch shell. You can read about them in this Wikipedia article, and see a couple more pictures – The Knobbed Whelk.

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