A near miss and spot on.

Well there weren’t many guesses to this past week’s What is it Wednesday?
Linda G tried her frequent Bush Lawyer’s approach with “black splotch”. Well unusually I can’t award even part marks for that effort. Splotch is a stretch and it certainly isn’t black.

Kitty was half right, it is a hole, but not in a tree.

Kristen M, earns full marks for one of the two possible answers. It is a hole in an iridescent shell. Also Kristen obviously noticed the swirl pattern in the hole and guessed “wooden table” for the other half.

The background is actually one of my fingers.

Not a great piccie really because I was holding this half grown abalone shell in one hand and my camera awkwardly in one hand. With my usual lens it weighs just over 1.5 kilograms (3lb 5oz). It balances nicely in two hands, but not one!

I have seen literally 1,000s of abalone shell in my life, but they are just so nice I can never resist a look.
Oddly, I love seafood but I have never tasted abalone. It can only be collected by diving and is a very tightly controlled fishery. There are huge fines for unlicensed collecting (repeat offenders can face fines of up to $88,000 and corporations $440,000 per offence). With prices for Oz abalone fetching about $50 per kilo it almost all goes straight into export to Singapore and Hong Kong. 

As a post script I would like to say thank you for the kind words people said over Patrick.