An hour to kill

I'm still sorting our vacation pictures, in no particular order. My whim of the moment; that's the deciding factor.

The mouse landed on Saltery Bay today.

A destination arrived at.

From Saltery Bay, the ferry would take us to Earl's Cove. But we had over an hour to wait.

Nobody in the ferry lineup

So we walked into town. What there is of it: on Google maps, I counted 20 houses, on two streets. We covered half of one of those.

Cliff on the first corner. There's a house on top. Great view!

A patch of lichen growing on the rock.

It's a leaf lichen, with brown fruiting bodies.

More rock dwellers, with a polka-dotted leaf visitor.

Hawk-weed on the lip of the cliff.

Red stems, green leaves, white flowers of salal.

Lamb's ear. I love these furry leaves. The whole plant smells like bubblegum.

Crow and long shadow.

In front of the road-side burger-and-breakfast stand. The people were friendly, the crow hungry. But we'd already breakfasted, so he got no scraps from us. Next time, maybe.

Mock orange intertwined with blackberry canes, in an abandoned garden.

Reflections in a log-cabin window.

Near the landing, this tiny spider caught the light just right. It was too small for the naked eye: all I could see was the web and a dot in the centre.

Araneus sp.?

The centre of the web has an unusual bubble pattern. And the camera sees four eyes, and the "owl" pattern (or is it a cactus?) on the back. Sometimes my camera surprises me.

Ferry line-up. Time to go back to the car.

And here's the ferry, comin' for to carry us home. (Homeward, anyhow.)

Lily Magnolia

Or just Maggie, to her friends:

She supervises the management at the motel where we stayed near Campbell River. About as big as a small cat, but very business-like. Here she checks on us: "Everything ok? Enjoying your stay? And, do you have any treats today?"

Salted earwig

A pair of earwigs were foraging around the logs at the top of Oyster Bay beach. But these were like no earwigs I had seen in my garden. They were twice the size, and sturdily built:

Anisolabis maritima, the giant seaside earwig

They ran away from us, very fast. Laurie chased one; I went after the other. I took a few photos of sand where an earwig had been a second before, or of a blurred set of pincers, then tried to head her* off before she scooted under a log. I was not too comfortable with handling her - those pincers (forceps, they call these) look vicious! - so I pushed a handful of sand around her. And then, by some fortunate accident, I dropped a bit of sand on her head. Didn't hurt her, as far as I could see, but she froze in her place. I got this photo.

Then she started to run again. I salted her with sand, and she lay still. Wonderful! (Like that old chestnut about catching a bird by putting salt on its tail. But this actually worked.)

After a minute or so, she roused herself again. I added more sand. Oops! She had a new response this time:

Waving forceps at me, wide open.

Looks like she means business. Grievous bodily harm, most likely. I took this one photo and backed off.

Laurie was kinder to his earwig, so he never got as close. But he got one tiny shot that shows the creamy neck of the 'wig.

These earwigs are twice the size of our common garden one, and unlike most other earwigs, they have no wings. (See "normal" earwig, here. The wings are obvious.) Our garden earwigs are scavengers, eating particles of organic debris; this giant is a predator.

It lives under drift logs, seaweed and other debris near the high water mark where it feeds on small crustaceans and insects. It can capture prey with its forceps and holds the captive while it is devoured. (From E-Fauna BC article.)

*Females have straight pincers; those of the male are curved inward. And yes, they are capable of giving a good pinch.

Distant sunset

On the way home from Vancouver Island, we spent the night at Powell River. We were lucky to find a motel on the hillside, overlooking the water. Many of the guests, like us, stood on the steep driveway for the better part of an hour to watch the sunset:

9:06 PM, from the top level.

Same time, Laurie's camera, from the level below me.

9:38 PM

9:42 PM; almost done.

From there, the light faded to deep purple; an amazing colour that my camera registered as blue-black. Still can't match the human eye.

A Skywatch post.

Eye to eye with a big bird

How do you read an eagle's expression?

A stern warning: "Don't try any funny business with me!"

Alert; "I see you there!"

Somewhat worried: "What are you up to?"

Interested: "I never saw a human so close before!"

On edge: "Is she planning to climb my rock, too?"

Resigned: "The price of fame. Have to put up with it, I guess."

On the other hand, they could have just been considering supper. Who am I to try to read the mind of an eagle?

White Rock beach, this afternoon. It's good to be home among the eagles again!

A squirm of worms

What can be fat, flat, floppy, stiff, short, l o n g, armoured or nude, have no feet or many, wear a crown of tentacles or a bald pate, and be any colour of the rainbow? A worm, of course!

Every beach along the stretch of coast south of Campbell River had a full measure of worms. The wormholes, castings, and tubes we are accustomed to down here in the Fraser Delta, we passed by with a casual glance, and maybe one or two photos:

Worm tubes, Miracle Beach

But down in the lower intertidal zone, under mats of seaweeds, we found these:

Red-banded bamboo worm, Axiotella rubrocincta?

At first glance, I said, "A bamboo worm!". But now, examining the photo, I'm not sure. I don't see the bristles that the bamboo worm would have, but I can't find any other worm with those red bands. We have seen one like it, also out of its tube, at the bottom of Crescent Beach; its bristles are barely visible. So I'm sticking with Axiotella, for now.

Red calcareous tubeworm, Serpula columbiana.

There were many of these tubes cemented to the rocks. Many are just left-over empty tubes, but some have this red mouth. Underwater, the worm inside will extend its crown into a circular, brightly-coloured fan. When the tide goes out, it seals off the tube with a trap door, or operculum, which is all that we see here.

The worms usually get to about 2 1/2 inches long, but there are reports of 4 or 5 inch ones in the north of BC.

Orange ribbon worm, Tubulanus polymorphus.

These get up to 3 feet long. This one was not quite half that; maybe a bit over a foot, stretched out. Hard to tell; it wasn't co-operating with my idea of stretching it out in a straight line, and kept burrowing into the sand.

Ribbon worms are basically a digestive system in a tube. They capture food by extending a long proboscis (from the Greek; "front feed"), equipped with venom or glue.

Intertidal flatworm, with dwarf tubeworms.

Under a couple of rocks, we found clusters of these flatworms, which immediately slithered off in all directions. The two eyespots are visible here, at the widest point of the front end. The coiled pink tubes are dwarf calcareous tubeworms (Pileolaria spp.); the tubes are white and translucent, but the crowns of the worms inside are orange-red.

Another flatworm.

Two flatworms, a white ribbon worm, and several mud nemerteans, Paranemertes peregrina.

These purple and cream worms turned up at the edge of one of our flatworm group photos, somewhat blurry.  We hadn't noticed them, as we were chasing flatworms. Nor did I see the white ribbon worm until I was cropping the photo.

Another accidental mud nemertean, and a flathead clingfish, Gobiesox meandricus.

More on these fish, later. The worm here would be about 6 inches long. It may eventually reach 10 inches.

The mud nemertean is another ribbon worm. It can shorten itself up, becoming fatter and lumpy, or stretch out to a long, thin ribbon, with no segmentation.

Polychaetes. Blue-tinted polychaetes.

These are like the blood-red worms I have in my aquarium, but the ones we saw on Vancouver Island beaches were dark, and shimmered blue and green. These are quite small; the larger one is only a few inches long.

Three kinds of worms.

This pink ribbon worm was long. Really long. I pulled it gently out of almost liquid sand, and pulled and pulled; it kept coming. And by the time I'd reached the tail, the head was buried in sand a foot away. I never did get it all out at once. I'm not sure of the species; perhaps the rose ribbon worm, which grows to 6 feet long?

The cream-coloured worm behind it is not a ribbon; looking closely, I can see separate segments. I was so occupied with the pink one, that I never even noticed this one, nor the tiny section of red/pink polychaete at the upper left of the photo. (I can identify it as a polychaete by the bristles along the sides.)

What the ...?

This one has me completely befuddled. The front end has a crown of long, brown tentacles, then a segmented orange, "carrot" body, which enters a flexible tube coated with bits of shell and sand. Out the far end of the tube comes an orange, then green segmented worm, thinner and smoother than the head.

Here's the head end:

A bit of worm is visible inside the tube.

When I picked this up, it squirmed madly. The tail end tried to go south and the head went north, both ends looking for ground, the tube flopping around to meet the demands placed on it. I replaced it on the sand, and it lay quietly, half in and half out of its tube.

Here's a better view of the tentacles:

Tentacles like long, wavy, brown hair.

Our footing was precarious, and I had nothing solid to lean on. We gave up trying to get a good photo and covered the worm over with the seaweed.

Now I've gone through the encyclopedia and all my other books, searching for this. I can't find it. Does anyone recognize it?

*Update: Christopher Taylor says, in the comments, that it may be a terebellid, or what is commonly called a "spaghetti worm". I think he's right. None of the terebellids I've seen in my books or on the web look just like this, but the body structure matches: flexible tube, long tentacles at the mouth end, segmentation. I don't see gills, but they may be hidden, or not extended while the worm is out of the water.

This Doris is a lemon.

We were walking - oh, so carefully - along the bottom edge of Stories Beach. Carefully, because everything - rocks, sand, pools, critters - was covered by a thick coating of extremely slippery seaweed. To find a crab entailed bending double (no kneeling here; no telling what your knee would be on until it was too late!) and pushing aside the brown and green algae. And possibly getting pinched by a large kelp crab in the process. Or grabbing a frantic, thrashing fish. And losing your balance as you reacted. Slip, splash, wild flailing of arms, grabbing for support; straighten up, bend double again ...

My back ached. And we were thoroughly enjoying ourselves.

It was a real treat to see this bright blob of yellow on a rock above the water level, and with a semi-dry spot above it to lean on.

Sea lemon, noble Pacific doris, Anisodoris nobilis

I got a hand underneath and gently pushed at it. It came off the rock easily.

It does look like a lemon.

This was about 2 inches long, grainy on top, and semi-firm, not hard like a starfish, but with less give than a worm or a clam siphon. It lay on the rock where I put it, not moving, not trying to escape. I flipped it over:

Underside. Definitely snail-like.

I recognized it as a Dorid nudibranch, the sea lemon. A young one; they grow up to twice this size in the intertidal zone, twice that in deeper water.

The scattered black spots on the back and the white gills (next photo) distinguish it from the other local sea lemon, Archidoris montereyensis. "Archi" has black spots, but they extend up some of the tubercles, those bumps on the back (second and next photos). And "Archi's" gills are yellow or brown.

Sea lemons typically have a strong fruity odor when they are disturbed. I bent to smell this one, but all I smelled was salt water and seaweed. I guess I must have been gentle enough, even while I flipped it over.

When I returned it to the water beside the rock, it quickly turned and moved away into shelter. At least I got a photo of the gills before it was out of sight.

Sea lemon, heading for cover.

Here, you can see the round gill* plume on the rear. Up towards the front are two conical spikes, the rhinophores, which are the sensory organs. While the nudibranch (which means "naked gills") was on the rock, it kept these and the gills retracted.

*In the case of Dorid nudibranchs, like this one, they are not actually gills, but gill-shaped branchial plumes. Other sea slugs have different respiratory organs, such as the cerata of Melibe leonina, like the one we found on the White Rock beach.

It disappeared, and we straightened up and stretched our backs, and took another cautious step. There were acres and acres of seaweedy beach to examine still.

Turkey vulture sighting

On the way down the Sunshine Coast, we passed this turkey vulture ripping at something on the yellow line. By the time I'd braked, it was far overhead.

I hadn't seen one before, at least, close enough to identify. But even at this distance, the distinguishing features are evident: the red, bald head, the two-toned underside of the wings; black wing linings and dark grey flight feathers. I noticed the way they hold the first four wing feathers (primaries) separated from the rest and each other. Later, I compared them with eagles' wings in flight: the eagles' primaries are separated, but blend into the others at the inner end.

There were two; one was waiting in the trees. After we had been stopped for a while, one of them returned to the road. We aimed the cameras, and a car came around the bend. Goodbye, vultures!

We would have waited more, but the pair circled a couple of times, then headed east, over the cliffs and out of sight.

One rock makes an entire habitat

I came home to a long note on my kitchen table, and my trusty encyclopedia full of purple sticky notes. My granddaughter had come over to water the plants, and had taken the time to mark all (or most, she says) of the "neat stuff" she saw scuba diving off Whytecliff (Horseshoe Bay) on the weekend.

"There are probably hundreds more, but ... lots of stuff is so small I probably didn't even know I was looking at it."

She's right, except that there are probably thousands more. Here's one rock I found on the beach near Stories Creek on Vancouver Island, for proof:

Looks like a painter's drop cloth.

That's too much to see, in one photo. I'll break it down a bit:

Green. red. white, orange ...

The red patches are some sort of encrusting sponge*. The green is a bryozoan. The white circles are possibly the same bryozoan, except that the green one is tinted with algae. On the right, the orange and cream stuff is a scramble of bryozoans. The curly red ribbon is the tube of a calcareous tubeworm, probably red trumpet, Serpula columbiana. The rock is sprinkled with tiny barnacles, and smeared underneath all with a deep wine-coloured encrustation, possibly encrusting coral.

Another section of the rock:

A scrambled mess.

Lots of stuff, but hard to see. The central yellowish stuff is a sponge; the large holes are exit holes (osculae) for the water it filters. The tiny pores are intake holes.

For the rest, let's break the photo up a bit:

A fan or leaf-shaped bryozoan, in bright orange.  Compare the regular pattern of holes (lophopores) to the randomized arrangement of the sponge next door.

A "feather duster" organism. I don't know what it is, yet.

And further along the rock:

Red/pink/green bryozoan, encrusting the rock, itself, and barnacles. The limpet has escaped. For now. The bright green stuff is sea lettuce, masked by red algae fronds.

This one's difficult.

Examining this photo carefully, I find a variety of bryozoan colonies, a few barnacles, a limpet with red encrustations on the shell, a couple of calcareous worms, at least half a dozen tiny coiled tubeworms, and a smear of yellow sponge. And I think that white thing towards the left bottom looks suspiciously like a white nudibranch. I wish I'd noticed it at the time I took the photo.

(I loaded these photos in the usual format, 1024 x 768), but you may want to check the full size ones over on Flickr.)

One more:

A few nice, neat bryozoan colonies, in a warm brown, on a substrate of assorted purple and bluish encrustations. With barnacles and pink "somethings".

And I wonder what I've missed here. I could have spent an entire afternoon on the beach with this rock and a portable microscope. (Which I forgot to pack; I won't next year. I promise.)

*The encyclopedia observes,

"Sponge classification and recognition is a most problematic and frustrating subject for a naturalist. Indeed, academic professionals who spend their careers studying the group are likewise challenged -- a fact that leads to much uncertainty in scientifically oriented sponge publications."

I'll just stick to "yellow sponge, red sponge, etc."