... big or small.

Not everyone likes mussels.
But I do.
Feels like a clean, detailed, well-balanced image and I love the textures on the shell on the right. I assume you had distracting elements that dictated your choice of crop. Otherwise I would prefer a more standard format with a bit more height.

Scott

After seeing what you did with the cattail, I guess I will need to check back. Right now this seems less than interesting and attractive.

No expert by any means of this type of image, so I will offer the conventional wisdom I have picked up over the years.

If I wanted one thing sharp and the rest blurred, I would have chosen the left mussel and perhaps the right one and included all of those two and worked to blur the rest of the stuff. I might get rid of the sticks, preferable before taking the shot, but later perhaps in PP. The foreground detail works ok for me, but the upper left corner does not. The top white shell leads you out of the frame.

I could see a tighter crop that removes the lightest part of the top mussel.

The twig, or whatever that stick-like thing in the middle, is the first thing I'm drawn to, and it's smack dab in the middle of the frame. In fact, both mussels are cropped, making them inconsequential.

I wish you had a really tight crop on the left one because it has so much character with all the green growth.

I'll have to go back and see what I've got @ the left one. That too caught my attention. I probably tried to do too much with it here, and diluted it in the process.