Abstract Thursday

Once again I am stuck indoors because of the weather: rain, wind and hailstones. Sitting there wondering what to blip I spotted some items I collected while in Barbados some years back. I had intended to keep you guessing as to what the blips were but heyho. The top one is a close up of the inside of an Abalone shell showing the Nacre and the bottom is Brain Coral. 

Abalone is a common name for any of a group of small to very large sea snails, marine gastropod molluscs in the family Haliotidae. Other common names are ear shells, sea ears, and muttonfish or muttonshells in Australia, ormer in the UK, perlemoen in South Africa, and paua in New Zealand. Abalone are marine snails.

Brain coral is a common name given to various corals in the families Mussidae and Merulinidae, so called due to their generally spheroid shape and grooved surface which resembles a brain. ... Brain corals are found in shallow warm-water coral reefs in all the world's oceans.