Gutsy moss.

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamed of in your philosophy." (Hamlet)

Or, as R.L. Stevenson puts it, more simply;

"The world is so full of a number of things ..."

Forget heaven and earth, forget the world; there are more things in my little corner of it than I could have ever dreamed. The bryozoans I found on seaweed, for example.

Bugula pacifica (I think) and unidentified bryozoan.

Bryozoans. The "moss animals". The Latin name is derived from the Greek word βρύον (bruon), "tree-moss", from βρύω, "to be full to bursting, to teem" and from the Greek word ζῶον (zoon), "animal; a live thing". In other words, an animal that looks like moss. (The plants, Bryophytes). Which it does, sometimes. And often it doesn't.

The basics, first.

The moss animals are minute animals, each less than a millimetre long, living in tiny "boxes", usually calcified like barnacle shells, but sometimes leathery. Most of them live in colonies composed of many individuals; Wikipedia mentions millions in one colony. I am tempted to call them cities.

Each species arranges the colony in its own individual way. Some are like crusts, barely a scum on the rocks, kelp, or other animals. Others build mounds or coral shapes, still others attach themselves to each other in branch or leaf formations. These last are the "mossy" ones.

They are all aquatic, mostly marine dwellers.

I looked at my sampler under my hand microscope. Of course, all mine are dead; there is no sign of the animals inside the cases. But I got an idea of the shapes and arrangements. Apparent tubes, little barrels, balloons, and prickly pear cactus shapes, all made of white chalk or even glass. Breathtakingly beautiful; oh, for a microscope with a camera attached! (One day.)

Vocabulary: The body of the animal is called a zooid. (From zoon, life.) Its box or case, often called a "house", goes by the name of zooecium (zooecia, plural). Sessile: attached, not moving. Most bryozoans are sessile.

Anatomy: The bryozoan is basically a digestive tube in a box. At the open end, the lophophore, tentacles wave particles of food towards the mouth. On the same end, just beside the mouth, the anus discharges undigested remnants. Besides that, there is a muscle to pull the mouth closed (some have a lid, or operculum), and the reproductive organs (male and female; the animal is hermaphroditic).

This diagram, from Living Invertebrates, by Pearse and Buchsbaum, was helpful.

All that is background. Here's the weird stuff:

1. A zooid lives for a few days or weeks, then basically digests its innards, leaving a "brown body" inside the wall. Then the wall gives rise to a brand-new gut, etc. (That would be a handy trait for some of us whose "cast-iron stomachs" have rusted!) The brown bodies either stay inside the body, or are defecated through the anus, depending on the species.
   
   
2. A colony somehow keeps track and staggers this process so that the zooids with functioning guts can feed the rebirthing ones.

   Within a colony the individual zooids are not completely isolated. Each zooid is connected to its nearest neighbours by a strand of protoplasm. This enables nutrients to be transferred from one individual to another. Earthlife.net.

3. Each zooid has a nervous system composed of one bi-lobed ganglion (look on the diagram, just at the base of the tentacles) and a few nerves, connected to the internal organs and muscles, the body wall, and the tentacles. In many species, the ganglions also connect to a nerve network common to the whole colony.

   "Disturbance of the lophophore can result in rapid retraction of the lophophore by most or all of the zooids in the colony." Living Invertebrates.

   A hive mind, where we least expected it! Hail our moss animal overlords!
   

4. "The retractor muscles ..." (That long, straight line from the base of the tentacles to the bottom of the box) "... are among the most rapidly contracting muscles known, shortening more than 20 times their length per second, nearly twice as fast as the fastest vertebrate muscle."

5. Not all zooids of the same species look alike. They may take on different shapes and functions for the aid of the colony. In other words, the colony functions, in some way, as a single animal.
   
   
   • The basic zooid is the box with tentacles, mouth and anus. It becomes part of the digestive system of the colony; it passes nutrients to the other forms.
     
     
   • Some zooids become avicularia; they look like a bird head, with a snapping beak. (Look at the diagram again; there's one attached to the side of the large zooid.) They either bite invaders, or sometimes pin them down until they die and disintegrate. I found a fuzzy movie segment that shows their snapping action, here.
     
     
   • Some are vibricula, just a bunch of tentacles that sweeps the colony.
     
     
   • In some colonies, a few of the zooids at the base become little more than empty cases, serving as supports.
     
     
   • And when the zooids reproduce sexually, (They do this and also bud asexually. Can't be limited to one lifestyle.) some become gonozooids or ovicells, brood-chambers. I think those glassy "balloons" I saw would be these.
     
     
   • One more; zooids at the edge of some colonies sometimes produce spines. In some species they

     "form only on zooids ... after the prescence of nudibranch" (sea slug) "predators is detected ..."

   How they manage all that with one ganglion and a gut, I can't imagine.
   
   
6. Bryozoans are sessile. Except for those that aren't.

   "... but in some species, particularly those which live in freshwater, the whole colony is able to walk, or glide to a new locality. Species of Cristatella can move up 10 cm (4 inches) per day. However the fastest species is Selenaria maculata which can move up to 1 metre per hour." Earthlife
   

7. With (almost) anything you say about Bryozoans, you have to add, "except for these cases ..." No one rule holds for them all.

A few handy links for more info:

• Wikipedia, of course.
• The Earthlife Web
• A photo of Bugula pacifica, which looks like the one I found. From Marine Life on Floating Docks.
• A photo showing the branching glassy zooids of Bugula neritina.
• Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest has many good photos, too.
• And, of course, I always check Kozloff, Seashore Life ... first.
• * Update: Christopher Taylor, at Catalogue of Organisms, tells of a walking bryozoan colony.
  

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Just one more chapter to read ...

I'm still working on Bryozoans. The more I learn about them, the more I want to look up. And I'm getting a bit cross-eyed from examining photos. I'm going to bed.

Here's a patient chickadee:


He's been fed, and the bryozoans will be served up in the morning.

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Zoo in the palm of my hand

The incoming tide brings with it organisms from deeper waters. I plucked a few samples of red seaweeds from the waves on Boundary Bay beach and brought them home for closer inspection. On one piece of Turkish towel, barely two inches long, I found a miniature zoo.


I could distinguish at least four different animals on this piece, maybe up to 6. (It's helpful, with all these photos, to look at them full-size; just right-click on the photo and open in a new tab.) Most apparent are the looped pinkish tubes. The whitish patches are little tubes, short and pudgy, or taller and slimmer, arranged in rows. There are twigs with tiny greenish spots, and near the bottom, a few tiny spirals.


This is a closer view. Some of these tubes are arranged in a fan shape; they stand a bare millimetre or two above the leaf. A lacy pattern under them lies flat against the blade; still another species.


From a different angle; I was trying to get a decent look at those twigs.


And on one tip of the seaweed, two of these little egg cases were glued.

The egg cases were tough, but soft. Everything else growing on the seaweed was as hard as a barnacle shell. I picked at them with a metal hook; not one broke or came away from the leaf. Even the twigs were made of hard shell.

After the seaweed had dried, I examined it again. The various shapes are easier to distinguish now, so I took another round of photos.

Coiled tubes, the twiggy things, bunches of "grapes", "glass" bubbles (under the coils) and straight tubes.


The fan-shaped arrangement of tubes is clearer here.


Another view of the "glass" bubbles and the twigs.

I pried one twig to an upright position (so delicate and tiny, yet it didn't break) and held it directly up to the light. The detail is washed out, but you can see how it's formed; each leaf is smooth on one side, curved in to cup a nest of spikes on the other.

The whole zoo is less than 4 cm. long.

Some of these were fairly easy to identify. The leathery lemon donuts are snail eggs: I'd seen their photos before. A chink snail, Lacuna sp. The pink and white coils are the shells of Dwarf tubeworms, Spirobis.

As for the rest, I think they're Bryozoans. And these are fascinating animals, which deserve a whole post to themselves, so I'll leave them until tomorrow.

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Love in the treetops

It's honeymoon season in my back yard. A pair of squirrels plays tag up and down the tree trunks. Pine siskins are busily collecting palm fibers from my planters for their nests, the bushtits are feeding in couples, chickadees are calling, "Here, sweetie!" In the blackberry hedge, sparrows are exchanging tuneful sweet nothings. Even the crows are in the mood.

Courting twosome in elegant, formal black.

Being crows, however, they express their emotion in raucous, uncouth shoutings and insults.

"And furthermore, get off our lawn!"

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Favourite doggy game

Seen on Boundary Bay beach:

Waiting for the thrower of sticks.


I'm on my way!

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The "I can't believe it's a moth!" moth.

Spring! Finally! The sun shines, the birds are looking for construction materials, and the insects have appeared. About time.

On a sunny wall, last Saturday, a few dozen dark "grains of rice" were hanging. Close up, they turned out to be coated with sand.


A few were moving; they had some sort of larva poking out of the upper end.


I touched one, and it came off in my hand, so I dropped it in a plastic bag and brought it home.


Left alone in a tin, it crawled out of the case, and began moving around, dragging the case behind itself.

With a ladybug, for size comparison. It is about 8 mm. long.

I propped the viewing tin up on its side, to give the larva a wall to climb on. It went up to the top, over to the middle of the top, and dropped on a long silk to the bottom. Then it climbed up the silk, stretching out of the case, grabbing the silk, pulling the case up after itself until only the head was exposed, stretching out again ...


Later, it attached itself firmly to the top, and went into hiding. It is still inside, three days later.

What is it? I had no idea. What makes a case out of sand, besides the aquatic caddisflies?

A bagworm, Dahlica triquetrella. Which is a moth. A moth with no wings, eyes, or mouth. A female moth, in a population without males, at least while they're in Canada.

It gets weirder still.

The adult moth, in Canada, is parthenogenic; always a female, but needing no fertilization by a male. All the offspring are female. In Europe, where they originated, some are parthenogenic, but others do produce males, and reproduce sexually.

The parent produces her eggs, and then either lays them in the case, or dies there with them still inside her body. Laid or unlaid, they hatch. They even hatch if the case has been eaten by a bird; the eggs pass unharmed through the bird's digestive tract.

The newborn larva leaves the parent's case, and builds her own; a silk bag pasted over with grains of sand. The bag has three sides, a hole at the top for eating and moving about, and a hole at the bottom for waste discharge. Where there are males, in Europe, the mature male moth leaves through this bottom exit.

The larva wanders around, dragging the bag behind her, eating lichen, until the fall, when she attaches herself to a handy tree or wall to wait out the winter. She is still a larva; she will not pupate until the spring.

When the spring thaw comes, she pupates. This would be the stage where my specimen is now. I could not find out how long it lasts, but soon enough, the adult emerges. If "emergence" is the right word; the adult moth stays inside the case.

Not that we would recognize her as a moth, if we found her outside the case. She has only vestigial wings, if any. She is eyeless and has no mouthparts; she doesn't eat. She looks more like a worm than anything else.

She lives inside her case for a few days, lays (or doesn't lay) her eggs, and dies. If she leaves the case at all, it is only to lay her eggs back inside the case (through the sides, not the top or bottom hole), die and drop to the ground.

In this area, there are two species; this one, Dahlica triquetrella, and another, Dahlica lichenella, so far seen only near the Alex Fraser bridge. The only photos I have found of this latter one are distinguished by its choice of lichen as a covering material.

Seabrooke, over on the far side of Canada, has photos of a couple of species of bagworm; this one covers its case with sticks, and this one, the snailcase bagworm, uses sand, like the D. triquetrella. The Backyard Arthropod Project has a snailcase bagworm empty bag, and details of its lifecycle; slightly different than triquetrella, as far as diet and timing goes, but still parthenogenic and confined to her bag.

This kind of lifecycle leaves me full of questions. If the female never leaves her bag to interact even with other females, and each of her offspring is basically a clone of the mother, how does the species survive as a species? Would they not gradually change in different ways until each one is almost a species to itself? How did they survive when they first arrived in Canada (first sighting, 1941), if they were "used to" reproducing sexually back home in Europe?

And: how did anyone realize that they were moths?

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Jagged, spiky, blobby mushroom, with claws

I found these white fungal growths on a dry log on Boundary Bay beach:


They seem to be encrusted on a branch scar, which gives them the three-toed claw shape. Further down the log, the second clump looks almost like a different species:


And both of them are like and unlike the ones I saw last November, probably on the same log. Here they are, again:

Common Split Gills?

The underside, showing the split gills.

This year's crop didn't have the same "mushroom" shape, nor were gills apparent. And the spiky, blobby ones were twice the size of last year's.

I am still not sure what they are.

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Flight of the ladybug

On the first day of spring, we saw this ladybug on a sunny fence.

The Sevenspotted Lady Beetle, Coccinella septempunctata

She* got away.


So did this one.


But we caught this one, and brought her* home. I put her in my little viewing tin, and she tried to escape:

Lifting the wing coverts.


Stretching those wings.


Dragging the parachute.


Folding up again.

The tiny tin was hampering her style, so I let her go free. Fly away home!

*Courtesy pronoun. She's a ladybug, after all.

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Ask a simple question ...

I promised Dawn a post to answer her questions about New Westminster Quay.

There are things that you don't even wonder about until someone asks. I've been a regular at the Quay since the time, 15 years ago, when I lived just up the hill and walked its length every non-rainy day. And now I had to look up the word in the dictionary.

What is the New West Quay? Well, for starters, it's not exactly a quay, at least for most of its length. A quay is

"A mole, bank, or wharf, formed toward the sea, or at the side of a harbor, river, or other navigable water, for convenience in loading and unloading vessels." Dictionary.net

Upriver of the hotel, there's a long loading dock for large boats, and three smaller wharves for smaller craft. This was the original development which gave the whole area its name.

Here's a satellite view, courtesy of Google:


The right side of the photo is upriver. The quay goes alongside the parking lot, and the big boat is the Royal Casino. It's the only boat that docks there, these days. The pale blue roof is the Quay Market, now closed for renovations. (We will miss this, once the warm weather arrives; so will the pigeons and sparrows that forage around the outdoor tables.)

By the parking lot, and the disused loading dock, looking upriver towards the Patullo Bridge.



The Casino.

The three smaller docks service assorted tugs and fishboats,

Working tug

...the Samson V, a sternwheeler/museum, open all summer (for now),

"The Samson V is a wooden steam-powered sternwheeler built for the federal Department of Public Works for use as a snag-boat on the Fraser River."

and a dock for river tour boats.

Sternwheeler tour boat, with a glimpse of the Samson's paddlewheel at the next dock.

And now the quay has become a promenade. No boats tie up here; it is a half-mile of paved path and boardwalk along the river bank. On the landward side, in the narrow strip between here and the railroad tracks, luxury condominiums have sprung up.

This is the "Banana Belt"; here on New West's south slope, temperatures are mild, and spring starts early. And so do the gardeners, to good effect:

Mid-July along the "Quay".

Weekends, the walk is always busy; families with small children on tricycles, parents taking the kids to the playground at mid-point, joggers and skaters, older folk sunning on the benches, tourists giving their cameras a workout, shoppers on their way back from the market, dogs of all shapes and sizes, on leash. We usually come mid-week, when we have space to admire the gardens properly.

Jaya, collecting fallen rhododendron petals.


Fritillary

We walk down the promenade a couple of times a month. Often, the plants are new to us; exotic species from farther south, or newly-developed varieties, sporting colours and patterns never seen before. Most do not survive the winter. But come spring again, the gardeners will appear, bearing gifts.

The condos below the railroad bridge are surrounded by shallow ponds, in lieu of lawns. This is where we took those watery photos last week.

The dark green areas are ponds.

So, no, Dawn, it's not like Venice; no gondoliers on these ponds. Only the ducks and goldfish use them for transportation.

But we do have UFOs.

(Ok, I cheated. It was there, all right, but I deleted a tiny bit.)

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Sometimes enough's enough.

I've been wrestling with a balky computer for hours. I'm calling it a night.

"Ok, you can stop right there!"

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Water, water everywhere.

On the beach, the water is in front of us, and sometimes underfoot. At New Westminster Quay, it is everywhere. But our feet stay dry.

There's the river, of course:

B&W. Tug and goose.

And each building on the landward side has its own cement-bound pool, where ducks paddle in the reflected light.

Inner "courtyard".


On the lip.


In the back alley, the water is shady and green with algae.


A mallard stirs up the reflections.


"If I can't see you, you can't see me!"


Fountains break up the colours.


Can you find the duck?


Pigeon feathers, circling the drain.


Red buildings make the water at least look warm.


Back by the river, the sun shines, briefly.


Homeward bound.


Water underground, under control.

And it's still too cold for flowers. Crocuses and daffodils, and some first-year witch hazels. That's it. We'll try again in a couple of weeks.

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