I'm sleepy, he's hungry.

Working late again. Just finished, at 2 AM. No time for blogging. Sleepy. This guy's awake:

Always hungry, and squeezed up close to the pump, where the food is. Growing like a weed.

Tomorrow (later today, really), if the sun comes up, we're heading to the beach. 'bout time!

Goodnight, all!

Rainy day and muddy swans

In a field along the Ladner Trunk Road.

Muddy bellies and legs, some white backs.

It's been raining too long. This photo is from 10 days ago. It's still raining.

Last year's critters finally get ID'd.

I'm still following up on the orange* hermit crabs and their snail shells. I've gone over all my stored photos of that section of beach, looking for the logs, to see how long they've been there, but without luck. Without looking closely, they're just nondescript rotting wood; I must have deleted any photos of them.

I found more photos of the hermits, though.

Hermits, small and medium.

We found these just off Kwomais Point, between Crescent Beach and White Rock. The little ones raced around in my bowl at home, fast and faster, staying together, mostly circling and climbing all over the three or four big ones, looking like kids staying close to Mommy.

Because of the size, and the striped legs, I assumed they were hairy hermits, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, like the large ones. I thought the colour was just pale because they were juveniles. I should have looked a bit closer. One, who had panicked and ditched her shell, was obviously a mature female; she was carrying a batch of eggs.

Greenmark hermit, Pagurus caurinus, nude and in berry.

These went in the aquarium, but unfortunately did not survive the summer. It may be that they need the water to remain cooler, or saltier, than the other two species do. Both groups I found have been closer to open water than the hairy hermits' main hangouts. I'll keep a close watch on the new ones this year.

*I've been calling them "orange hermits", but the usual name is "Greenmark hermit". I wonder which green mark the name refers to. This one has green on the carapace, but the others don't.

"Smiley"

In a bowl of sand and sea water where I'm growing worms (more on that later) an unfortunate springtail landed, and was trapped by the surface tension.

Before I rescued him, I took a photo:

Globular springtail, barely visible to the naked eye.

Lifted out, and washed off with fresh water, he recovered the use of his spring mechanism. Boingggg! I managed to capture him before he landed in the computer, and deposited him instead on a plant, where I imagine he is still happily bouncing around.

My hermits are hairy, blue, and now orange.

Following up on yesterday's hermit mystery (where we find logs with hermit snails in mudsnail shells, but no mudsnails in the vicinity to provide shells.)

Olivia and Tim, in the comments on that post, came up with a few more scenarios. The logs could have been washed up from some other source; the hermits could have massacred the snails after all (they have been known to do that in a pinch); or it could be a seasonal thing.

I'll have to start paying closer attention to numbers, dates, proportions, demographic ratios.

And I have more data to add; here goes.

As usual, I examined my hermits in a bowl of water before I added them to the tank. Three were quite tiny, and one was in a different shell, not from a mudsnail. I took its photo, before I settled it down in its new home.

Orange hermit in a matching shell, possibly an  olive snail's shell.

It wasn't until I examined the photos that I realized that this was not one of the two common species on these beaches (and the only two in my tank). I had thought it was a small hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, because of the white stripes on the legs, but all the colours were wrong. The antennae are orange, the tips of the legs and pincers are orange, the rest is lighter than the hairy's legs.

Hairy hermits crabs have green and white banded antennae, dark, hairy legs with variable white and/or blue markings.

Small hairy hermit in pretty moonsnail shell.

Two of the orange hermits. The larger one is in a mudsnail shell.

Zooming in.

I think this is a greenmark hermit, Pagurus caurinus. The encyclopedia says they have "White leg banding, orange pincer tips, and unbanded orange antennae." They are smaller than the hairies, too; they grow to half the size, 1 cm. versus 1.9 cm. Walla Walla U. adds, among other details, orange-tipped spines on the upper part of the pincers. I can almost be sure I see these in some of my photos.

By the time I'd discovered this, the 5 new hermits had mingled with the old-timers. I looked for them in the tank, and discovered one of the tinies in an awkward position:

Caught on the back leg of a big shore crab.

"Oops! Sorry, youngster!" After a few steps, the crab noticed and shook off the struggling hermit.

None the worse for wear.

And sure enough, this one has the orange-tipped pincers and antennae, too.

The other common species, the grainyhand hermit, has orange antennae, but otherwise is quite different:

Bluish-green to brown legs and pincers, all covered with blue warts. These are larger hermits, up to 2 cm. They prefer big shells, like this whelk.

This adds to the questions I have. Were all those hermits on the logs greenmarks? Why have I not seen any before? Do they, tiny as they are, kill snails?

We must go back and examine those logs properly.

Snail and hermit mystery

I can never keep enough small snails in the aquarium. The crabs eat them; so do the big trophon snails. I'm always bringing home a few more, and always finding only one or two actually doing their work of keeping the walls and floor clean. The rest are reduced to empty shells lying on the sand, or new outfits for the hermits.

So when we went to Boundary Bay a few days ago, I planned to pick up a good handful of snails. The mud flats around Centennial Beach are loaded with them, starting a few steps below the high tide line. They're mostly the mud-flat snail, Batillaria attramentaria, spread so thickly that at every step I can hear the "crunch!" of a few more.

But this time, for variety, we went to the south end of Beach Grove and walked down to the US border. The tide was coming in, but there was still some flat sand. But no snails. Not one. There were clams in abundance, lying in groups on the sand at the edge of rocky patches. There were worm casts and worm tubes sticking up out of the sand. No crabs, no hermits, no snails.

Just a few metres north of the border, we passed two rotting logs buried deep in the sand. Here there were barnacles and crevasses packed with mussels and mudsnail shells.

Hollowed logs make great hideouts.

Deep in a crack.

I started collecting snails. Each one I picked up, I inspected; I didn't want any more hermit crabs. The aquarium held 11 at that point, more than enough for a small tank.

And each snail, as I turned it over to look for the glossy operculum, waved hermit pincers at me. I put them back on the log, and checked another. And another, and another ... They were all hermits. All around the first log, all around the second one, down the in the innards; hermits, hermits, hermits. Finally, I found 3 very small ones that seemed to have the right dark brown glossy lid on the opening; snails, at last. I dumped them in my bottle, with a few barnacles and mussels for the trophons to nibble on, and brought them home.

And once I'd left them a few minutes in a bowl, out crawled the hermits. Out of 3 "snails", I got 5 hermits. The last two were really tiny, and must have been hitchikers on the barnacle clumps.

The more I think about this, the stranger it seems. There were no snails to be seen in the vicinity of these stumps. And all the snail shells there housed hermits. Where did they get the shells? Why did I find no surviving snails?

Did the hermits invade a colony of snails and wipe out every single one for their shells? But hermits don't usually do that; they use empty shells, or take them away from other hermits. They ignore live snails.

So did something else, crabs maybe, kill the snails and leave them piled into the logs for the hermits? Where are the crabs, then? Why only on the logs?

Or did the hermits immigrate, shells and all, from far down the beach? Why? Why were there none scuttling across the sand, or under the nearby rocks?

Hermit, one of the 11. See how his shell is broken? That's how a crab gets at the tasty snail meat.

I wish hermits could talk. We'll have to take another walk down that way next time the tide is a bit lower, to look for the missing snail population.

And now I have 16 hermits in my tank. At least the newest residents are tiny.

(More about these snails - before the hermits get them - om Dave Ingram's Island Nature blog.)

Clean desk, with bird.

At least, this one ...

I gave my Dad this miniature roll-top in Mexico, some 40-odd years ago. He kept it on his working desk until his death. Now it's beside mine. The bird is from Metepec.

My real desk isn't quite so empty. But at least the stack of papers is gone.

Tomorrow; beach critters.

Spring break

It's spring! *Does a happy happy springy spring dance. Woo-hoo!* *Comes back down to earth.*

Well, maybe it's not quite spring, but my patch of lily of the valley is full of brand-new, spiky flower stalks. Good enough for me. And the hellebore is budding up; I'll have flowers soon. Spring!

Lily of the valley from last year's crop.

 I have two hellebore plants. One is in a big planter just outside the back door, and I noticed the first new sprouts last week. But of three stalks, two were broken off and lying on the dirt. I blamed cutworms or something similar. (So early in the year?)  Then I caught a squirrel in the act; staring me insolently in the face, he jumped into the planter, bit the last sprout off at the top, and ate the bud.

I dashed out to check the other plant; it was fine, so far. But I upended a pot rack over it and piled rocks on top. Just try to nibble those, Mr. Bud Eater! I wired a holey ice cream bucket over the injured one. Looks awful, but no squirrel is going to have my hellebores.

I don't think they eat Lily of the Valley. They'd better not.

And now, I'm watching for the first green shoots of the rest; daffs and crocuses any day now. And at least a few hellebores.

Dutchman's Breeches, March 2010

Bleeding heart, March 2010

Now, back to the grindstone. Almost done with this batch. (I'm editing documents for my son's business.)

The sky goes on forever

A quiet afternoon on Boundary Bay.

That's Point Roberts on the right.

And now, back to work. When this job is done, I'll have some interesting photos to show you.

Waiting for the sun

I'm tied up with work and a deadline for a couple of days.

Here's a fine morning a week ago.

Dawn, with pigeon and wires.

Now, back to the grindstone ...

A Skywatch post

Not quite wordless

Daddy Sandhill crane, just checking ...

"Well? Did you bring the food?"

We did.

Shrimp feathers, crumpled moth, eye of hermit...

I've been experimenting with settings and lens configurations on the baby Sony. I'm still impressed with what a tiny point-and-shoot can do. These are a few samples from tonight's work.

Through the glass of the aquarium:

Eye of hermit. Big Blue, IIRC.

Carapace of smallest shrimp, with one fuzzy eye. The carapace is transparent. I think the pinkish blob is a stomach. But what are those feathery shapes behind it?*

*Gills. Hugh explains in the comments.

Looking down a hermit's throat.

With this arrangement - camera lens zoomed to its maximum, homemade lens attached in front - I have very little leeway. The field is shallow, and the subject has to be less than 1 1/2 inches away. At least, in this camera, the flash works even nose to nose. That helps.

And I keep a couple of long-dead, dry-land critters to practice on:

Crumpled 1/2 inch long moth.

And a faded, dusty carpet beetle. 1 mm. long. I don't seem to find any live ones these days.

The whole moth, taken with all automatic settings and no extra lens.

Next, I'll take apart my lens, clean it, and rebuild it for a tighter fit. And hope I don't ruin it in the process.

Tiny, but fat. Globular, even.

These cuties were in a dish of moss flanked by two rusty birds.

Bird with globular springtail (Dicyrtomina ornata?) on his beak.

Heading down to the moss. They don't like my light.

Two springtails in the moss.

Another view. The moss is under an inch tall, the springtail around 1 mm. long.

Zooming in.

I notice little spikes coming out of the tail end, on this one and another couple. Hairs, or tubes?  Frans Janssens mentions wax excretions, with a similar photo. I must e-mail him to ask about them.

And, in reply to Anon. in recent comments, these last three photos were taken with the little Sony and that old homemade lens. It gives me about an extra 2x magnification. Now to upgrade it ...

Colorful seaweeds

I've spent most of an afternoon, evening and night sorting the photos from 2010; thousands of them! Some are queued in a folder that says "Blog this." Labelled, filed, forgotten, now remembered.

At the front of the line-up are these seaweeds from beaches in the Campbell River area.

At the top of the subtidal zone, just beyond the low tide line, the seaweeds form a tangled jungle, swaying hypnotically in the waves. On some beaches we could wade, carefully, through them; on others, the rocks are hidden and treacherous. It's probably better to stay out. Under and in that jungle, small animals crawl and swim; star- and sun-fish, sea cucumbers, sea slugs, gunnels and spinfish. And crabs, especially kelp crabs, with their long legs and pincers. We neither want to step on them nor be nipped by an angry crab. But we can stand on a safe rock, watching the play of textures and colours: astonishing colours!

(Update: IDs corrected as per Hana's comment.)

Feathery seaweeds, sea lettuce, something red, and rockweed.

Reds, purples, browns, with sea lettuce for contrast, and a purply sheen on the water.

On the flat sands just above this zone, we often found entire fields of these little yellow-green balls, growing to about the size of a meatball.

Round brown bag. Sea cauliflower. That's the name they go by.* &**

A small ball; it's hollow. The seaweed beside it is the stem, but balls this size are often floating free. The walls are sturdy so they hold their shape.

Top side.

Around and under the pier in Campbell River, tall forests of bull kelp wave their fronds in the current, or tangle themselves around the pilings. On the beaches, the kelps are smaller and varied; crinkly, spiky, frilled; green, brown, and red.

Sugar wrack and winged kelp.  Imagine upholstery in those textures.

Two more kinds of kelp.

Red algae, on the left. 

From Hana, in the comments,

Sometimes, red algae can look like kelp if they are brown! The fun way to tell reds from browns is the "boingy-boingy test". If you try to stretch your seaweed, and it is springy (boingy-boingy) then you have a red.

"Boingy-boingy"! I'm sure to remember that!

Even the decaying seaweeds are beautiful. This is a sun-bleached scrap of Turkish towel.

Everyday sea lettuce, with a small crab scrambling over it.

N

Coralline algae (See Hana's comment.)

There was one other that I expected to find in this folder; I must have misfiled it. Watching the waves toss the seaweed around, I saw what appeared to be an oil sheen on some fronds. I was angry; such beautiful, clear water, such abundant life, and someone upstream was spilling oil!

When I got home, browsing through my books, I found the seaweed. It's Iridescent seaweed, or rainbow seaweed. The structure of the cell walls gives it an oily blue gloss. It's nice to be proved wrong, sometimes.

*Update: Christopher Taylor adds, in the comments,

They're also known as 'o(y)ster thieves'. The name apparently derives from cases where they've grown in oyster farms in Europe; as the mature oyster thief becomes larger and filled with gas, it may eventually float away with the oyster attached.

**Update # 2: Hana has more info about these balls.

The round brown balls are known as Leathesia difformis - or "sea cauliflower". The oyster thief seaweeds look really similar, but are actually another species: Colpomenia peregrina. You can tell them apart because the oyster thief has a bit of a thinner texture. Leathesia feels kind of crunchy, where as Colpomenia is a bit more of a sac.

Thanks, Christopher and Hana!  I had wondered about these, but the description in my encyclopedia seemed to match the Colpomenia. However, they did definitely feel "kind of crunchy", which would make them Leathesia.

White wings, white sail

White Rock, July 2010.

Because sometimes, like on a rainy night between two drizzly days in the middle of the dark winter, I need to be reminded.

A confusion of pointy bits

"All decapods have ten legs..." (Wikipedia) Sounds so simple. And when the decapod in question is a crab, it is: five legs on either side, and a bunch of appendages around the face for eating, seeing, and smelling.

When it's a shrimp, however, things get confusing. The "walking legs" include the chelipeds, or pincers (two sets), which are right next to the maxillipeds, which Wikipedia counts among the five, but which would make up six on the shrimp. They also count as mouthparts. Then there are the 5 pairs of swimmerets; in diagrams, they look like legs. Luckily, in real life they're small, and mostly hidden under the tail segments.

I've been trying to count the legs on the largest of my shrimp, now that he's got a bit of colour. It's difficult. Maybe if he would just stop moving for a moment ...

Counting from the rear; 1 2 3 4 ... Aaargh!

Some things are easy; he has two sets of antennae, one long and one short. The long ones are very fine, transparent, always flicking about, and maybe twice his length. Can you see them here?

Photo cropped at tips of antennae.

5 legs countable. And with the chin up, separated from all those sharps on the head.

Let's name them.

Diagram from Louisiana Fisheries

So we've got 5 walking legs, the front two of which are also chelipeds, because they have pincers on the tips. Small ones, only visible in a few photos. If you look closely at the centre of the first clump of feet on the photo above, you can see one in the background.

Then there are the maxillipeds, which would correspond to our jaws (Maxilla): they would be the two straight blades sticking forward at the mouth.

Along the top, toothed like a saw blade, sharp as a spear, is the rostrum.  On either side of it are the two stalked eyes (another set of appendages), and the shorter antennae. (So far, so good.)

But then, what are the two flags he waves above his head? And what do they do?

Top view. Look at it full size (left click - open new tab) to see the various tools he's carrying.

The little shrimp, half the black one's size, are just beginning to show their stripes, and pick up a bit of colour. They wave tiny flags, too.

1/2 inch long shrimp. His innards are easier to see than his head accroutements.