A doe in Maplewood Flats

Looking for a lost file, I discovered a note I had misfiled years ago. I'd forgotten the note, not the event. I even had an old photo.

Deer, Maplewood Flats Conservation Area, North Vancouver

This was taken some ten years ago with one of those little disposable cameras. I`m surprised at how well it turned out.

And here`s the note:

     She walked delicately

     along the path between the brambles

     on one side, salal on the other

     serene, silent.

     When we met, she stood,

     considering, nibbling a leaf.

     We were the intruders.

     But harmless; all we pointed was the camera.

     She stepped aside, knee deep into the shrubs,

     as if to let us pass.

     And slowly, step by cautious step,

     we changed places on that path

     until she was behind us

     and could continue peacefully

     into the clover beyond.

Maplewood used to be one of our favourite walking places, but now unfortunately is much further away than it was then. (We moved; it didn't.) Still, I've been telling Laurie that we must visit again one of these days.

I promised you snail orgies.

We found the tide almost at its minimum at Crescent Beach, and I waded out through inch-deep tidepools, trying to get to the drop-off before the water rose again.

Looking back at the shore from half-way out.

The eelgrass comes in patches in this section of the beach. The sand was mostly bare, but where there was eelgrass, there were snails.

The invasive Eastern mud snails, Ilyanassa obsoleta, in eelgrass.

This snail has just about driven out our other invasive, the mudflat snail, Batillaria attramentaria, that we see in the millions on the opposite side of the bay, at Centennial Beach. I saw a couple or three only among these herds of mud snails.

"Hurry, hurry! You're late to the party!"

The snails were in full mating frenzy, piled several deep, hundreds of them to a pile, writhing and rolling, a mass of squirming black bodies and grungy shells. Every so often one flipped completely upside down, stretching out to show her white underside, waving her siphon excitedly. What with all the gunk on their shells, the stirred-up sand, and the curtain of eelgrass, it becomes difficult to distinguish individual snails.

And along with the fun, comes the work. Once they have mated, the females find a hard surface and start to lay eggs. Here, the surface is usually an eelgrass blade, where they line up the eggs in rows.

Eelgrass with snail egg "beads". And snails three-deep beneath them.

Each transparent egg capsule contains from 30 to 300 yellowish eggs. They are firmly glued to the eelgrass, and feel like a cold, hard lump of jelly.

A closer view of some eggs. The furry stuff is probably a colony of hydroids.

Close-up of some capsules I brought home in 2008, showing the individual eggs.

A couple of snail heaps were not interested in sex. No writhing, no sand-stirring, no coupling, no egg-laying; they had something else on their minds. In both cases, the molted remains of a crab lay on the sand, with a tidy mass of snails around and under it. They're algae eaters, but they also love a scavenged meal of animal flesh.

A little after-orgy snack?

Too much!

Life is too full of good things. I can't keep up. I've got three blog posts on the go, including a video, beasties to send in to BugGuide before I post them, baby birds outside clamouring for attention. I've been rushing to finish a project for Laurie's blog, indexing and updating; almost done. And the garden is finally taking off, now that sometimes the sun actually reaches it; I should be out there deadheading, fertilizing, weeding. Or even sitting down for a spell, just breathing and looking.

Because next week will be even worse. Parties, shopping, and a wedding have to be fitted in. Something has to give, so blogging may be light for a bit.

Snail orgies tomorrow, I think. And for now, here's a gull:

Watching the tide come in. White Rock beach.

Off to bed. Goodnight, y'all!

Dusty yellow jacket

When I opened my window on a sunny morning, I found a yellow jacket jammed into the track, dead. How she got in there, I can't imagine. Maybe she was trying to make a hole to build a nest, but the metal window and track are unchewable and she couldn't turn around in the small space.

Bent double, to fit in the narrow groove. And now stuck in that position, and loaded with dust.

The abdomen is strongly marked. Each species of yellow jacket has a slightly different pattern, which also varies according to its station in life; the queen, the worker, or the drone. I think this one is probably Vespula alascensis, but not the queen.

 I soaked her in a mix of half alcohol, half hand sanitizer overnight to soften her up, and straighten her out. It didn't work very well, but at least she got clean:

Slightly surprised, clean face, wet-look hairdo.

Lazy day photography

Too weary to get out of the car, I snapped these roses through my window while I was waiting for Laurie at the mall.

Parking lot decor

Some days, you just have to slack off.

Asteroids and bear traps

A giant pink seastar, Pisaster brevispinus, had washed up with the incoming tide, and was lying in a half inch of water, probably dying. These stars, unlike the smaller purple starfish, don't do very well out of the water.

It measured 19 inches, tip to tip. They may grow to 2 feet across.

Flipped over. It made no attempt to turn back right side up.

Since it was so lethargic, we were able to take our time and get a few close shots.

Section of one of the arms, showing the ambulacral groove filled with tube feet, and the bony spines along the sides.

The tube feet are connected to the internal water system; the starfish pumps water into the feet to extend them. They excrete an adhesive to grip the surface, and an anti-adhesive to release it. The glue is strong; add in the suction produced by the hydraulics, and the starfish can exert a pull of up to 9 pounds per square inch. It is almost impossible to remove a clamshell from a determined starfish without ripping off the tube feet holding it.

The mouth is in the centre of the body, opening on the underside. The starfish has no teeth, no radula to scrape with, no jawbones. Instead, it extends the stomach outwards, trapping and partially digesting its prey before it transfers it to the inner stomach. (It has two.)
  

Partially everted stomach.

When feeding on bivalves (e.g. muscles, oysters) these seastars will prize the valves apart (using their tube-feet suckers to gain a hold) until they open by as little as 0.1 mm and then they will evert their stomach through this gap and digest their prey! (From Cronodon.com)

I should really have had a lens with me. Until we were looking at the photos at home, we had not seen the "bear traps", as some describe them.

See those little two-pronged pincers? Those are the "bear traps". 

Pedicellariae (the scientific name for these) in starfish come in two sizes. What are visible here are the large ones. Around the base of each bony spine is a clump of miniature ones, as well; they are the pale orange dots that fill the gaps. (If you click on the photo to see it full size, then enlarge it, the shapes are just visible.)

Image from Cronodon.com

The pedicellariae essentially "go off" when food hits them. So, some small shrimp, krill or other tasty bit of organic, edible goodness?? BAM! Snagged by the spine/pedicellariae!! Prey are held fast by the pedicellariae similar to velcro (to use Emson & Young's terminology). (From The Echinoderm)

Captured critters, such as amphipods, barnacle larvae, and even some small fish, can be passed on from one group of traps to the next, transferring them eventually to the mouth.

Other slow-moving animals often collect a living cargo of seaweeds and other algae, barnacles and limpets and  tubeworms, amphi- and isopods, as well as assorted parasites. Not the starfish; they're always clean. The pedicellariae make sure of that.

The "very messy limpet". No pedicellariae.

Beach assortment

We had a brief interlude of almost summer-like weather, a few hours only, so we hurried to the White Rock beach. Made in in time to see all these before the rain bucketed down again:

Eelgrass isopod and sea lettuce.

Greenmark hermit. Still no sign of a green mark.

Another three-spined stickleback, floating in the incoming tide.

A strongly marked sculpin, about an inch long.

There's at least one fish underneath this eelgrass. Can you find it?

Tidepool sculpin, almost invisible. The sand was full of them, but I never saw them until they scooted away.

Green canoe and paddlers

Gull and shady tidepool

Name this critter!

There's more; a good look at a bright pink starfish, tomorrow.

Birding from my desk

While the sun still shone, a pair of robins brought their youngsters to see the worm hunting grounds.

Waiting to be fed. They don't know how to find their own yet.

"Mommy? Where are you? I'm hungry!"

I love looking up from the computer to see my garden, the lawn, and this time of year, a constant parade of youngsters; caterpillars, squirrels, chickadees (5 this spring), white crowned sparrows, the robins, and some evenings even raccoons. And once a mamma mallard led her brood down the walk and out to the street, probably heading for the puddles in the vacant lot.

Here today, gone tomorrow

We had a good, hard, pelting rainstorm a few days ago, all day long. Across the street in the vacant lot, that means we'll find big puddles, slowly draining through the hard-packed clay soil. They're temporary ponds, lasting only a few weeks unless it keeps on raining, but while they last, they're busy. Crows congregate around the larger ones, bathing and arguing. A few times, we've found mallards resting there. Insects drop in for a drink; beetles and snails rest in the cool mud.

At the far end of the lot, I stopped to inspect a new pond, a few inches deep.

About a quarter of the puddle.

The top layer of clay had dried and cracked; the cracks remain, even underwater.

But what were those tiny specks in the water? When I bent down to look, I could see that they were swimming about. Hundreds upon hundreds, thousands of them, as small as dust, and about the same colour as the yellowish mud. I took a photo with the flash, to see if that would make them more visible.

They're all over, but hard to see against the muddy bottom.

Zooming in, no flash. There are a few springtails on the stick, about 1 mm. long, slightly bigger than the swimmers.

The same photo, cropped. Now the critters are recognizable as ostracods.

Ostracods are small crustaceans, typically around 1 millimetre (0.04 in) in size, but varying from 0.2 millimetres (0.008 in) to 30 mm (1.2 in) in the case of Gigantocypris. Their bodies are flattened from side to side and protected by a bivalve-like, chitinous or calcareous valve or "shell". (Wikipedia)

Under a good lens, an ostracod looks sort of like a swimming clam. If the light is right, a hint of the body can be seen through the shell; imagine an amphipod, all 14 legs vibrating constantly, inside a clamshell, with a few legs or antennae occasionally peeping out.

They live in both fresh and salt water environments, from the poles to the tropics. I have often found them in sand or seaweed from the intertidal zone. Some 65,000 species have been identified; there are probably many more to be discovered.

These ones, the ones in my puddle, have selected a particularly difficult environment. The water is clear, there is plenty of vegetation to serve as food, but if the sun shines, their home will disappear in short order. Some species of ostracod will live for up to a year; these guys won't have the chance. A few weeks, if they're lucky.

At one end of the pond, there is a mass of fibers. Old moss? Leftover trash, well rotted? I couldn't tell. But the ostracods were less active around them, easier to photograph. Click to see the photo full size; you can see the clam shape, and on one, up in the right hand corner, a tentacle peeping out.

An ostracod at home in a bowl. The one eye is plainly visible. Some ostracods have two.

How do these animals manage to live under these conditions? First, they don't waste time. They spend up to 80% of their lifespan laying eggs. These eggs are resistant to dessication; they can "sleep" in dry soil for years, until the rains come again. Some adults and young are also able to go into stasis when the pond dries up or freezes.

And also, they reproduce in vast numbers. Most of the ones in this pool won't survive the dry times ahead, but enough will to produce the next generation.

Also in the puddle were a number of these swimming bugs, very fast, zipping around the bottom, occasionally popping up to the surface for a second or two. I think they may be the Acilius diving beetle.

And a water strider, one of two.

Examining the photos, looking for a clear shot of an ostracod, I discovered this snail on the bottom. It is a species I have not seen here before.

The white oval to the left of the snail looks like an abandoned clam shell. (Look at the photo full size.) This may be a molted valve. Like other crustaceans, the growing ostracod  has to abandon the hard outer shell, in the case of freshwater ostracods, 8 times.

There's an excellent YouTube video here, showing the live ostracod kicking inside her shell. Watch all the way to the end, when she suddenly starts zipping around.

And this is mind-boggling:

Ostracods possess the largest sperm in the animal kingdom in both relative and absolute terms. Ostracod sperm can be up to ten times the length of the male's body! Some male ostracodes need a special organ (Zenker's organ) to aid in sperm transport.

However, about a third of freshwater ostracod species don't worry about that; they are parthenogenic, and need no males to reproduce.

On deadheading rhododendrons

A few observations:

• While it is theoretically possible to completely deadhead a rhododendron, it has never been done. There's always another head hidden away in plain sight.


• I am convinced that while I'm on one side of the rhodo, new flower heads on the other side are speed-budding, -blooming, and -dying.


• Want to hear a rhododendron snigger? Say, in its hearing, "I guess I'm done; I'll call it a day." Then turn around real quick and look at the area you just finished. See the new/old head? Right in front of your nose?


• The point of a rhododendron leaf, when poked into an eye, really hurts.

Just saying. Back to work!

Life's too short to dawdle

I went over to the vacant lot today, to see if the ant pupae I found last month were hatching yet. Not quite, but it should be any day now, so I'll check often from now on.

On the way back, I discovered treasure; a temporary pond swarming with ephemeral life. I'll post photos and info tomorrow.

And, while I stood at the edge of the pond, a yellow jacket dropped in to get a drink:

One quick sip, and he was on his way. Busy, busy.

I caught this hover fly in the air as he zipped by. His wings are those pale blurs on either side. Hurry, hurry!

And the four-spotted skimmer was much in evidence, speeding past me every few minutes, never close enough, never pausing even for a second, so I could get a photo. Rush, Rush! Time's a wasting!

Desktop wildlife

I'm forever trying to get a good photo of a carpet beetle. I think they're really cute, but I can't seem to capture their personality properly. One dropped in to visit yesterday, so I had another go at it. He was quite peaceful until I brought in a few flowers to keep him happy and a couple of lemon balm leaves for a background. Then he got really excited and ran all over the place, checking out everything, before he flew away.

An aphid on one of the flowers was much more cooperative.

Winged aphid, in the centre of a white bacopa.

The carpet beetle, slowing down. A second later, he spread out his wings and left. I found him again later on my desk.

If at first (second, third, etc.) you don't succeed, ...

I'll try again another day.

June flowers in the banana belt

Dazzling colours ..

Beach pea, Crescent Beach, last week

Evergreen rose, Beach Grove

Foxgloves, Crescent Beach

Giant allium, Beach Grove

California poppy, Beach Grove

Unidentified purple flower, Beach Grove

Down there by the American border, barely 15 kilometres away from us in Upper Delta, they're always at least two weeks ahead of us. Except at the tail end of the year; we get winter first.

I guess that's fair.