A good reason to watch my step

Sitting on the curb, waiting for Laurie to take off his wet beach shoes, I saw these flowers, barely an inch high:

English daisies

I love how the hairy stem catches the light.

Just a white speck in the grass.

Of paddles and orgies

One of the great things about a blog is that it serves as an aide-memoire; what I saw, when, where; it's all there, and searchable. So I was able to review my experience with the big polychaetes.

I find that I brought home a pair, both under 4 inches long, from the White Rock beach, in the first week of October, last year. Digging through the sand, then, I found a worm that stretched out to 7 inches long.

It's been almost seven months since then. Those three have turned into eight, at least twice the size of the biggest one, back then, plus a few more 4-inch specimens.

I had narrowed the species down to Nereis, possibly vellixosa, which grows to about 6 inches. I'll have to revise that. I think, now, that they are Neries vixens, recently renamed Alitta virens, or possibly A. brandti, which is also common and virtually indistinguishable from vixens. Both of these, the Giant piling sea-nymph and the Giant clam worm, grow to at least a foot, like mine.

One thing that confused me is that the parapodia on these big worms are different from those on the smaller ones. Those are like pencil points with hair on the end; these are triangular paddles, with no hair visible.

Yesterday's worm, with non-hairy paddles.

Last October's worms, with hairy pencil points. The smaller ones I have now are like these.

A website from Wales reassured me that I was on the right track; their A. vixens, which they call King Ragworms, have paddles, although near the head end, the hairy points are still visible. (Look at the middle of the second worm for the paddles.)

I found the explanation in Kozloff. He writes, about N. vexillosa,

"... the sexually mature phase of this species is rather unlike the phase typical of mussel beds and bay habitats. The fleshy parapodia become expanded into paddlelike structures for swimming, and periodically during the summer the ripe males and females swarm at night near the surface. ... The worms do not survive long after their nocturnal orgy, during which they simply spew out their eggs or sperm through openings that develop in the body wall."

The Giants swarm, too. Kozloff says it's an "exciting spectacle.I can imagine; think of yesterday's video, but with dozens of worms in the open water, thrashing about in the moonlight.

So I've sent my critters out into the big world, just in time to !!PARTY!! I'll have to keep an eye on the few that I kept at home.

I found a couple of interesting head shots of these worms; interesting, if not exactly cute. PZ picked up one from an underwater image competition, back in 2006. The original site is no longer available, but the photos are still on Pharyngula. The third one down is Nereis.

And Ugly Overload has two face shots, from Alexander Semenov. This second link goes to his Flickr page; it's worth clicking over there to see the rest of his macro photos. Amazing and wonderful!

Too many worms!

The hermit crabs were fighting. It was inevitable; there were just too many of them. They kept getting in each others' way. It made them irritable.

The problem was that they have been breeding. From a half-dozen or so, suddenly my little tank was buldging with a couple of dozen, or more, and new babies are appearing all the time. I would have to thin their ranks.

It wasn't only the hermits that were multiplying. From time to time, a miniscule red worm, barely a twisting hair, has appeared in the sand or among a bit of seaweed that goes into the tank. Some time ago, I started to see large worms poking their heads out of the sand, stealing the hermits' food, yanking seaweed down into their tunnels. Recently, the heads have been big, the worms fat. In the evenings, three or four would be out at a time. They circled the walls of the tank, stretching easily to eight or nine inches, with the tails still underground. And they lifted themselves straight up, climbing the walls almost to the top of the aquarium. A bit more, and I would be finding them on the floor.

I wondered how many there really were under there.

When I changed the water this time, I scooped out all the sand and washed the worms out. There were 8 big guys, several 3 or 4 inchers, and many tinies. The big ones crawled around two sides of my bucket; an easy foot, without half stretching.

They were beautiful; sleek and fat, wearing vibrant, dancing colours, reds and greens and neon blues, with pink triangular paddles along the side.

The camera doesn't do justice to these, probably because they're underwater.

Crawling up the side of my bowl. The top few inches are out of the water.

Beautiful or not, there were just too many of them. I returned the smaller ones, and three of the mid-sized ones to the tank. The rest went down to Crescent Beach with the hermits. At the first suitable setting, part sand, part rocks, well below the high tide line, I released the lot. Within a couple of minutes, all the worms were buried in the sand. The hermits had scattered in every direction; some had already found a cosy corner beside a rock. They'll do fine; they've had a good start, with no predators and plenty of food, and they're back in the same waters that they came from.

I've put together a video. Let me warn you; if snakes give you the shivers, you  might plan to skip the movie segments.



(The camera dulls all the video segments to a blah brown. I think I'm going to invest in some really good lighting for next time; that may help.)

*More about these worms tomorrow. Here: Of paddles and orgies.

Just another pretty face

I've spent all day getting this photo, without damaging the owner of the face:

The whole story, tomorrow.

Just a bit of fluff.

I found these egg cases on a frond of feathery seaweed from Centennial Beach;

I was going to anchor the weed in my aquarium, without paying it much attention; it was just a tiny bit of fluff to serve as a hiding spot for amphipods. Then the light caught these yellowish jelly beads, a couple of millimetres long.

Here's one, propped against a light; ten eggs in a round case with an exit hole at the top. If you look closely, you can see horizontal grooves in the casing.

I don't know what lays these; possibly a snail, but which, I have no idea. If they hatch in my aquarium, I might find out. That's if the hermits and anemones don't eat the babies first.

Illusion

End of the day; the sun drops into Burns Bog and flares up briefly.

Moments later, the light dies; I almost expect to hear the hiss of steam ...

(I know, things are not always as they seem. But at times, I'd swear -almost - that the fire was just beyond those trees.)

A Skywatch post.

Konk-a-ree!

Redwinged blackbird advertising:

"Attractive, musically talented male with excellent nesting site, quiet location, seeks willing female. "

Centennial Park duck pond.

Rocky road

For the past couple of years, I have been mapping our trips to the shore, hoping to eventually walk the entire Delta shoreline. We've covered a fair amount so far; the skipped areas are usually off-limits to the public (First Nations Reserve lands, for example) or far from any possible access by car.

One spot that was easily accessible, and that we have set out intending to reach many times, was Kwomais Point, at the mouth of Semiahmoo Bay. People walk the railroad tracks around the point often, going from White Rock to Crescent Beach and back, so it was doable. Our problem is that we get down on the rocks, and get sidetracked by the life we find there.

A month ago, we finally made it to the Point. We started at the south end of Crescent Beach. The tide was high, so we were confined to a narrow stretch of shore.

Looking south, towards the Gulf Islands.

This is critter heaven:

Barnacles everywhere, an excellent variety of snails, crabs and hermits, worms of all sorts where there's a bit of sand, clams, mussels, -pod creatures galore, limpets ... And off-shore, always a few flocks of waterfowl, there for the smorgasbord. Overhead, the eagles, checking out the waterfowl.

White stripe, with green algal coating.

Even the rocks are interesting; each one tells a story of our ancient past, a story I am unfortunately unable to read. I can look at the "pictures", though, and make guesses. Many are like this one, solid grey stone with stripes and swirls of a different rock through the center, each layer meaning a new geological era. Others show odd speckles, or indented patterns. Fossils, maybe? The history of the Strait in code on our shore!

Snails and other animals jam themselves into the interstices, sometimes so tightly that I wonder how they got there, and if they'll ever get out. I couldn't move this whelk.

Laurie's typical pose on the rocks. Looking at barnacles this time.

"Can't catch me!"

Near the water line, we moved a stone and disturbed this prickleback (aka blenny). This is the way we saw him, mostly, squirming and slithering into the nearest shadow. I can't identify it as to species without seeing the head.

When he thinks he's hiding, we get a quick glance at the beautiful pattern. The tiny tail fin helps to define him as a prickleback.

The ever-hungry whelk.

Whelks were plentiful, as usual. Some shells seemed to be empty; I brought a handful home for my hermit crabs. Turned out, once they were resting in a bowl of seawater, that they already had hermit owners. The grainyhand hermits (like poor old Mo) like a shell so big that they can hide 'way back inside, where they can't be seen, even looking straight into the opening.

This shore, by the way, is home to species that don't show up on the other side of Boundary Bay, just a couple of miles away. Over there, the hermits are almost all hairy, the snails mostly the invasive Batillaria attramentaria, with a few periwinkles and Nassas, and the worms are mostly lugworms and polychaetes. Here, the snails include a variety of whelks, assorted turbans and periwinkles, and more. I've found ribbon worms in two colours, and bamboo worms. Which is why it takes us so long to walk this section.

Looking north, back towards the mainland.

We persisted, cheating a bit at the end where the rocks got just too much, scrambling up to the railroad tracks for the last few yards.

Even up there, life is bursting out. Through the thick layer of dry, gritty stone the railway spread to keep the vegetation down, large horsetails sprout, as rough-edged as the stone around them. This was a month ago; these are probably a couple of feet tall by now.

And we made it!

Walker, Kwomais Point. Looking south, to Washington State, at the mouth of Semiahmoo Bay.

We walked around the Point, to where we could see the inner end of Semiahmoo Bay, and the rocks we'd reached, walking from White Rock.  I could close the gap on my map.

We walked back on the tracks. Sometimes we're just lazy.

Never thought I'd get here

Finished! Caught up! Finally!

I'm back on schedule; all the work on my desk is current, not overdue. *Deep, contented breath. Aaaah!* Now for the fun stuff!

Yay! Grafitti: Crescent Beach

Next post: on the rocks.

The rocks: Kwomais Point, at ground level.

Pink and black

While I've been busy lately, Laurie has been entertaining himself. He went out at dawn and took these photos:

Dawn over the vacant lot

And when the lighting is poor, he gets creative:

I don't know which way is up on this one.

The eelgrass dwellers

The tide was coming in.

(I remember how, when I was growing up on Vancouver Island's west coast, how our stories always began with the tide. It was high tide, it was low tide, the tide was going out ... For weather, we had seasons; rain every day, or fire season. What defined the state of our surroundings at the moment was the eternal tide.)

Last week on Boundary Bay, off Centennial Park, the tide was coming in. It was still far enough out that we could barely see the water beyond a great expanse of empty sand, so we didn't know that. I hurried straight out to the edge, hoping to get to where the seaweeds and crabs start. Too late; knee-deep in the water, I could see ahead where the green showed through the waves. Behind me, I could see that the crab shell I had placed just above the water line as a marker was now floating away. Time to head back.

All that first half-mile of the beach is lugworm and sea snail territory; we don't see much else, beyond an occasional crab molt or shattered clam.

The invasive Batillaria snails, and snail trails.

In the shallow pools near the edge, we noticed some strange brown blobs, floating like furry balloons on six-inch strings.

This one has several blobs. The dark patches are the shadows of the bubbles floating on the surface.

They were soft and mushy to touch, but held together when I pulled at them. They didn't break away from the stem. I dug a few up; they were on a strand of tiny eelgrass, and the roots went deep into the sand. But what were the blobs? Eelgrass is a flowering plant, were they flower heads? I thought they were supposed to be inconspicuous.

Blob, bubbles, and a barely visible eelgrass stem.

I dropped a few into my plastic bag to investigate at home. While I was at it, I collected a tangle of eelgrass roots from the dry sand.

The snails feed around these. There's one of the blobs in this knot, too.

Back home, I looked over my harvest. The blobs, spread out in water, turned out to be made of fine, brown hairs, baby-hair soft.

I had imagined that they would be populated by small critters; amphipods or snails, maybe. But there was nothing but the hair to be seen.

There was nothing like this in the Encyclopedia; I finally found it in Kozloff. The eelgrass is dwarf eelgrass, Zostera japonica, a small, introduced eelgrass, growing to about 8 inches tall; the leaves are half the width of native eelgrass blades. And the blobs ... I'll quote from Kozloff:

In certain places, especially during the summer months, the leaves of eelgrass become colonized by a variety of essentially microscopic plant organisms. Most obvious among these are the diatoms, which, if present in large numbers, constitute a furry, olive brown coating. If some of the diatoms present are of the chain-forming type, a good deal of the coating will seem to consist of fine filaments. Bacteria will also be plentiful, and once the biological ball starts to roll, detritus tends to become incorporated into the film.

The diatoms, bacteria, and detritus, as well as the decaying tissue of eelgrass leaves themselves, feed the mouths of many protozoa, microscopic worms ... and small crustacea.

It is still early in the season; the colonies were still free of detritus. Any other organisms were microscopic.

I turned my attention to the eelgrass roots. This is the larger, native eelgrass; the leaves are long, up to the length of my arm and more. The leaves grow out of a thick, brown rhizome that anchors it in the sand; small roots grow from the rhizome.

This rhizome, at least as it deteriorates, provides hollow tubes where small organisms can hide. Once, while I was nursing a broken flatworm back to health in a little bowl, I provided it with an inch of eelgrass rhizome for shelter. After a few days, it disappeared. I looked for it several times a day for three days, then it crawled out of the rhizome. So I put the eelgrass, roots and all, in water, and watched carefully.

There were amphipods, of course; there are always amphipods. And a couple of tiny snails. And a whole collection of worms:

Polychaete, (pronounced "Polly Keet"), after I'd liberated it into a tub of water and sand.

A ribbon worm. This is the head. It was blood-red under the light.

The ribbon worm entertained us for quite a while; it slid up to the surface along the rim of the bowl and spent the evening going round and round, occasionally lifting its head about an inch above the water line. Round and round and round; it only stopped when I dumped it in the tub outside. It was about 4 inches long, very red, very smooth, and featureless, except for the little triangular head.

Tube worm.

There were a couple of these tubes; this smaller one was about a inch long. I wouldn't have noticed it, except that it twitched occasionally.

The tube is decorated with sand grains cemented on.

The larger worm, about 3 inches long, kept extending its head (or maybe proboscis) and waving it around, in a searching pattern.

I looked it up in the Encyclopedia and on the web, but couldn't identify it.

And there was one more, not exactly worm-like, but I think it's a polychaete, going by the tufted "feet" along the sides:

Tiny worm, under the microscope. About 5 mm. long.

There are four appendages visible on the head end; two pale antenna-like things, and these two with a black spot at the tip, like a snail's eyes. My first photos didn't turn out, and when I went back to try again, I couldn't find it. It's somewhere in the tub; maybe someday I'll find it again, grown up a bit.

Smiling mallard

At the duck pond, Centennial Beach, last week:

The sun is shining, the pond is full of goodies, and she knows she's beautiful. What more could anyone ask?

Almost there

It's been a long haul ...

Ant bringing home the bacon

but I think I'm almost done with my current project. Then I can go back and pick up all those unfinished blog posts from the last couple of months. 'bout time.

Sea and sky

No need for words.

A Skywatch post

Mobile home. Without a floor.

I've been too busy of late. A couple of weeks ago, after I checked the birdhouse for slime molds, I was in too much of a hurry to hang it back in its place on the wall. I just plunked it on a table outside my window, alongside a fake plant someone gave me and my little cement angel. I would hang it later, when I had time. Besides, it needs a new floor; no sense hanging it until I fix that.

Then I forgot about it.

Shady back yard, grey day, through double window. The view from my desk.

I looked up from my desk yesterday, and there, just a few feet from me, a chickadee was examining the birdhouse. He (she?) hopped inside, outside, back in, out, checked out the roof, went back inside and rooted around, then finally left to get a snack at the feeder.

Never take a photo at dusk from inside a lighted room.

I grabbed the camera and fired off a half-dozen shots, without waiting to set up the lighting. At least I got a record of the event.

"Hmmmm. And the sunflower seeds are just over there..."

I was out today, so I don't know if he came back. If he does, and decides to move in, I'm going to have to leave the table as is all summer. If not, I think I'd better get busy installing that floor.

"This place has such good vibrations, dear!"

Pigeons nest in the strangest places.

Happy home under the SkyTrain tracks. Where the train rumbles overhead every 10 minutes, 20/7.

Cruisin' down the Fraser

I've been working late, rushing to catch up after the delays last week. I need to remember ...

on Sunday afternoon, at New Westminster Quay, watching a boat named, "No Hurry".


And here she is, against the light downriver, with the sunshine making everything glittery and sharp-edged.

No hurry. What gets done, gets done. What doesn't, will get done tomorrow.


I'm off to bed.

On the other hand, why eagles dislike crows ...

The waves were high, almost at our feet, and the rocks were slippery. But this eagle was too busy with his supper, and too beleaguered by crows to object to our approach. He didn't even flinch when I shouted out with laughter.

Watch the video closely. The crows move quickly!

Score; eagle 1 (meal), crows 6 (tail tweaks). I think the crows won that round.

Not quite speechless

It's been warm and sunny for a few days; time to check out the spring flowers on the New Westminster Quay.

What can I say? They are so brilliant this year; I am overwhelmed.

Tulips come in many colours and shapes.

There's a spider in this narcissus. Do you see it?

Rhododendron.

Wallflower. We stopped to smell these, too. Mmmm!

The center of a tulip.

Yellow tulip.

Pansies

These monkey faces always make me laugh.

And, to clear our palates, a beautiful black rove beetle on grey cement. But look at the blue of the folded wings under his jacket.

And a sparrow, in delicate greys and browns. I needed that.

More later ...