Sea pork! Oodles of sea pork!

Purple sea pork! Big, whopping chunks of it! And a sea cucumber, a sand shark, possible sponges, and several mystery critters!

No, not here. Go on over to Dawn's Bloggy Blog, and see what the storm brought in.

They're promising us rain, rain, rain and more rain here for the next couple of weeks. We may end up on the beach in rain gear, if things don't improve.

Working tonight; see you tomorrow.

Knobby

A couple of days ago, I posted a photo that included the edge of a limpet shell, without comment. Several of these tiny limpets, from pinhead size to about a quarter inch across, patrol the glass wall of the aquarium, scrubbing off the algae and hydroids that grow there. The shells are patterned in cream and brown, and look very smooth. Not so from close up, though; they're toothed.

Limpet sliding about, eating as he goes. The edging turns out to be tiny, more or less equally spaced protrusions with a knob on top.

Zooming 'way in.

And the limpet mouth, wide open. The eyes are at the base of each antenna. I wonder what they see, clamped down tight to their food source, mostly rocks.

Thanks for mentioning this, Sara.

Rust

Doing a bit of housekeeping in the hard drive, I found this forgotten photo.

Abandoned can, New Westminster Railroad tracks, 2009.

I've been examining the tinies in the tank again. I think maybe yesterday's mysterious bubble beasties could be hydroids. I'll try to capture some where I can get a better look.

Tiny discoveries, and a mysterious bubble beastie

One of the anemones was getting itchy feet, wandering about, so I cranked up the camera to take his photo in transit. And got sidetracked by a few things I hadn't seen before.

First, the usual:

Hermit crab, with a tiny frozen shrimp. Nom, nom, nom!

Then, to smaller beasties:

A periwinkle snail. I keep trying to get photos of them eating.  This is the best so far, but a video would be better. 'nother day.

An amphipod, clinging to a blade of eelgrass, legs every which way. There are both green ones and brown in my tank.

Cropped down to show his marvellous compound eyes.

Amphipod eyes are compound as in other arthropods, and sessile, that is, unmovable.  Each eye consists of several hundred individual ommatidia, each of which has its own lens system, light-sensitive retinal cells, nerve leading to an optic ganglion, and each is thought to produce a single image.  Visual fields of adjacent ommatidia overlap, presumably producing good motion detection, but possibly less good resolution . . . it is probably safe to assume that they have good resolution and motion detection, and probably see in colour.  Hallberg et al. 1980 Zoomorphol 94: 279. (From A Snail's Odyssey)

And then I discovered a snail I didn't know was in my tank:

1/8 inch long, climbing on one of the thinnest eelgrass blades. I haven't identified him yet.

Smaller still; I went chasing limpets, to see if I could catch them eating. All around them, the copepods were cavorting:

Female copepod, carrying her egg case at the rear. She has one red eye, in the center of her forehead. (And when she is good, she is very good . . .) About 1 mm. long.

Something half the size of a copepod crawled off a limpet shell and went hiking up the glass wall.

A marine mite, about 0.5 mm.. I found 4 of them, all near limpets. The mess on its right middle leg is made up of diatoms and other debris.

Unlike the few insects and spiders which may be found in marine habitats but must breathe air, mites are able to absorb oxygen from the water so they can live at great depths. (From WallaWalla.edu Halacaridae.)

I didn't know this, so it seemed really weird to see this spider-like thing walking about underwater. It has 4 pairs of legs, like a spider, but holds one pair out in front as if they were antennae. Confusing little beastie.

Some marine mites are phytophagous (suck from plants/algae), some are predators, and some are parasites.

And while I tracked down these mites, with my hand microscope jammed up against the glass wall (and my neck twisted at an impossible angle; they insisted on hanging out on the wrong side of the tank), I noticed many even tinier groupings of bubbles on the glass. This was strange, because I'd scrubbed down the inside wall before I started taking photos. Where did these come from?

Two collections of bubbles and a copepod beside a limpet.

I thought I saw one group of bubbles move, so I zoomed in on it. But no; it was just there, not moving. And just as I was giving up, thinking maybe it was some sort of algae, it suddenly convulsed, waving 4 separate groups of bubbles about, like legs, for a moment, then settling down to rest again.

Other groups I checked showed the same behaviour. They come in different sizes and number of nodes or maybe branches, and they're all over the wall where the light is good, but not on the front (where my neck would be happier) with less direct light.

I haven't the faintest clue what they are. Help!

And I never did get a decent photo of the anemone. And now he's gone and jammed himself into an impossible corner. I hope he doesn't like it there.

Technology and the modern bird

Keeping his feet warm . . .

Boundary Bay, February.

I had a critter post half done, but really, I'm bushed. Too much gallivanting. Too little sleep. Critters can wait.

A friendly face

Meet Mr. Fangs!

Polychaetes always look worried.

This was a polychaete worm that grew from an almost microscopic red hair in the sand of my tank, to a fat, active, foot-long wriggler. He has been relocated to the beach; he's at close to his full size and mating season is coming up soon. Happy hunting, Mr. Fangs!

Actually, those two front projections aren't fangs. They're antennae; the other six projections around his head are tentacles. The front paddles are palps, for handling things. He seems to have four eyes, although I would need a closer photo to be sure.

I found a page that describes these worms beautifully, with a long section on the structures of the head. It includes this diagram, which I found helpful.

Image from Reefkeeping.

Ronald Shimek explains:

This diagram represents the head of a generalized polychaete as viewed from above. I know of no real animal with all of these structures in this pattern. However, there are worms having some of all of the structures illustrated here.

Faster than a speeding clam

Every time we go to the beach, I watch the gulls breaking clams by dropping them from a height onto the stones. And for the last year or so, I've been trying to get a photo of the actual drop.

I've been too slow, the camera has been too slow, the gulls too unpredictable, the clams too fast. But persistence pays. Persistence, and a faster camera, anyhow.

Gull following the clam down. The clam is just visible in front of the mountain.

Yay! Now to catch the two, clam and gull, just at the moment of release . . .

An oldie but a goodie

We don't have to go to the beach to find intriguing marine invertebrates. Last Sunday, we went to an antique fair, and I came home with an ammonite from Madagascar, split in two to show the chambers.

The two halves, face to face.

The ammonites were prehistoric crustaceans, living at the same time as the dinosaurs, and going extinct with them. They are related to our modern squids and octopuses, and more remotely, to the nautilus, which they looked like.

Artist's reconstruction of Astroceras. Wikipedia, art by Nobu Tamura (http://spinops.blogspot.com)

Fossilized ammonite shells can be found all over the world, with an interesting lode occurring just "next door", in Alberta; these can be highly iridescent, and are sold as gemstones. Others may be filled with chalk, sandstone, pyrite; whatever sediment and minerals are prevalent in the layer where the ammonite is found. My son has an uncut ammonite he found on a mountainside, a charcoal grey, fist-sized, coiled lump of granite. The fossils show up in all sizes, from 1 mm. to over 6 feet across. Mine measures just over 3 inches.

The animal lived in the front end of a series of chambers (camerae), divided by curved walls from the older ones. As the creature grew, always moving to the new room on the front, it sealed off the inner chambers, except for a thin connecting siphon, creating a sort of flotation device that could be filled with water or gas as needed to rise or drop in the water column.

The meaty part of the animal was not often fossilized; what we find are the empty shells, now filled with an assortment of minerals.

Beyond a tentative ink sac and possible digestive organs, no soft parts are known at all. They likely bore a radula and beak, a marginal siphuncle, and ten arms. (Wikipedia)

Sometimes the fossils contain smaller fossils: the animals that the ammonite had eaten, giving us a clue to their life style.

Ammonites were the predators of their time, feeding on most living marine creatures including molluscs, fish and even other cephalopods. By analogy to modern cephalopods, their method of attack probably comprised of silently stalking their prey, then rapidly extending their tentacles to grasp the target. Once caught the prey would be devoured by the ammonite's powerful jaws, located at the base of the tentacles, between the eyes. (From Discovering Fossils.)

This I learned from the web. What can I learn from the critter in hand, itself?

Closer view, showing half the diameter of the shell.

The outer chambers are filled with fine sandstone, with a few larger grains spotted about. Each chamber is divided off by a wavy wall (septa). As we move to the internal sections, the filling changes to crystallized stone, in varying tones of red, and translucent. (That inner spiral looks like sugared fruit; appetizing, but hard on the teeth!) Several chambers are hollow, lined with sharp crystals, slightly purplish, a pale amethyst hue. There seem to be the remains of communication pipes through the walls.

Zooming in on a pair of chambers. Two tubes enter or leave each side of the chamber.

I wondered why there was such a difference in the filling material. Why are the larger chambers filled with sand, and the inner ones with crystal? Back to the web . . .

The body chamber is the final, longest chamber, in which the ammonite animal actually lived. It is not divided by sutures and is often fossilised in a different colour to the phragmocone chambers, as sediment readily filled it after the creature died and its soft parts rotted away. The chambers of the phragmocone however, are largely sealed off from the body chamber, and because of this they are usually mineralised over a longer period, due to percolation of mineral rich water through the shell. (From An Introduction to Ammonites, UK Fossils.)

There is still more variation; each of the larger chambers has collected its own load of sediment, and seepage has tinted the outer sections, creating beautiful patterns.

Detail of first and second chamber filling.

Ammonites from Madagascar and Alberta can be iridescent. This one is from Madagascar. Unfortunately, it is badly worn, and only hints of the iridescent coating are left on the outside of the shell; glints of red and green along the broken edges.

Iridescent ammonite, from Wikipedia.

Sneaking up on gramps

More trial shots of the aquarium residents.

"I'm the king of the castle."

"Now you're not!"

I changed the colour settings on the camera, from RGBs to AdobeRGB. The colours now seem more intense, maybe too intense. What do you think?

More macro lens work

So much to learn! I've been working on focus.

I tried using the tripod, but it didn't seem to help. Tried manual focus. That works, so far.

The burrowing anemone, in the tank, through slightly algaed glass.

One of the three orange striped anemones, waving gently in the current.

These were taken hand-held, the first because I couldn't get the tripod around that side of the tank, and the second to be able to follow the swaying eelgrass. Not too terrible for a first attempt at Manual focus.

I'm having fun!

Against the light

Ducks and reflections at Cougar Creek Park

An inverted V, with mallards and a merganser in the lead.

On the beaver pond.

Miss B and the new lens

Tonight, Laurie spied a spider creeping out from under a bookcase to grab a tiny fly. One of Brownie's relatives; it's been a while since I saw one. We've had a long, almost critterless winter around here.

Time to test out the new macro lens. I took a dozen shots, then she objected to the flash and went to hide under the books again.

Photo #3, unedited except for lighting, and cropped to about 1/4 the original. (Click to see full size.)

The lens has its quirks. I'll have to do quite a bit of work to learn to use its good points and compensate for the problems.

I can't crawl in too close. That's good, and not so good. I'd never have gotten an inch from Miss B, here, as I would have had to do with the old cameras. But I'm also getting a lot of background, wasted pixels.

The closest I can manage to focus is at 6 inches. And there, the depth of field is next to nil. In the photo above, the tips of her legs and the back half of her abdomen are out of focus.

Miss B's fly, very small. Only a narrow strip of carpet is in focus; a quarter inch at the most.

The camera is quick, and has VR (vibration reduction) enabled. This really helps with camera shake, a big help when I'm on belly and elbows on the floor, hand-holding the camera, stalking a critter that moves about. Only three photos out of the dozen were badly blurred, a record for me.

And the flash works consistently, without a long wait to recharge.

Focussing, even in the semi-dark, is quick and accurate. When the spider wandered off, the focus followed her.

But. I'll have to work up to manual focus, to be able to aim at the part of the spider I'm interested in. Eyes and fangs, for example. The Auto focus just says, "Small object!" and aims for the center, ending up with a knee in focus and the eyes a blur.

Note: Steatoda bipunctata (Miss B and all her kin) make very messy webs. Even to their bug tie-downs. No neat butcher's packages for them.

Also: S. bipunctata's favourite food is sowbugs. With my nose on the carpet, I could see under the bookshelf. Miss B's stash of leftover dinners is a couple or three dried sowbugs.

Fisher folk at Cougar Creek Park

. . . the feathered variety:

Distant merganser, with the sunlight catching her hairdo.

Offended heron. (Aren't they all, always?)

Cormorant, one of a pair, coming to check us out.

The cormorant and the mergansers are short-term visitors; the heron is a year-round resident. And the beavers are still busy, keeping the ponds deep and wide.

Last year's pumpkins, with eagle

We always wonder about this: why do eagles often sit in the fields, when there are so many good trees around? They never seem to be doing anything, and there's no prey to be caught.

Unless they like rotting pumpkins and turnips.

Westham Island, just outside Reifel Bird Sanctuary.

Territorial dispute

The paths at Reifel Island Bird Sanctuary lead mostly between channels and ponds, with birds on both sides of us, but the from the outer stretch, the water is far away. From the path to the shore, the land is flat, an impassible (and out of bounds) barrier of brown, tall grasses and cattails, broken only by stumps and logs. At the far, blue end, we can see, often, flocks of geese or swans, just white specks in the distance. Boats go by, at times looking oddly as if they were sailing in the reeds. In between them and us, hawks patrol the wetlands, hunting.

Google map, colorized. Blue = Georgia Strait, brown = hawk hunting grounds.

Last week, we were watching a Harrier*, far enough out to be just a swooping speck. We still made the attempt to take photos; you never can tell. And while we watched, another hawk challenged the first one's ownership.

Unidentified hawk, and Harrier, recognizable by the white patch on the upper rump.

Hawk #1 chased the intruder off to the edge . . . 

. . . where she perched in a tree. (Juvenile Cooper's?)

Hawk # 1 took a lower branch in the same tree. "My tree!" said Hawk # 2, and proceeded to attack. She took to the air, making figure 8s, up to the left, turn and dive, up again to the right, turn and dive.

On the downward swing.

Caught her at the turn.

Over and over, she repeated her attack, for over five minutes.

At the outer tip of the 8. With a boat on the river to the north.

In the end, one gave up. We couldn't tell which; all we saw was the tail end speeding out of the tree and away.

Vanquished rival, at the tree tops on the lower center-left.

And the winner went back to cruising the outer shoreline, looking for supper.

*At least, I think Hawk # 1 was the Harrier. At the time, we thought it was an osprey, but then I checked out our photos.

A Skywatch post.

Reifel regulars

The second installment of Reifel Island photos, in no particular order:

Coot and his shadow.

I looked up voice recordings of the coot, on All About Birds (Cornell), because I was wondering how to spell the call I hear most often. Surprisingly, they have seven separate recordings, of various squeaks, clicks, and squawks, "krrps" and "priks", but not the note I was looking for; a hollow "glop" sound, sort of like a cork popping out of a wine bottle, or a like a booted foot, stuck in ankle-deep mud, reluctantly released;, a backwards "plop". That doesn't quite do it justice, though; the other calls are grating. This one is almost musical, a nice rounded tone, suddenly being cut off mid-note. Have you heard it? How would you describe it?

Cross-eyed eagle. Not his fault; he had a branch in his eye and I took it out.

Ma Wood Duck, showing off her many petticoats.

"Hurry, hurry! Someone has goodies!"

I am always surprised at the sharp hearing of the ducks. Even against a constant chorus of "Quack, quack, quack, oh quack-quack-quack-quack-QUACK!", as soon as someone a couple of ponds away rustles a bit of paper, ducks from all over drop what they're doing and race to the source. This time, all I had to do to wake up a hundred sleepy mallards was to slowly slide the bag of seeds out of my pocket.

Fat little towhee in a wild cherry tree. Or are those small crabapples?

Three more wood ducks and reflections.

More to come, tomorrow.

Reifel Island tidbit

We went to Reifel Island last week. The old favourites were there; the mallards and wigeons, scaups and coots, eagles, of course, and redwing blackbirds, very bold. The wood ducks were out in force, for once. And we watched an osprey and a hawk fight over hunting territories. A good visit; a great visit, even.

But right after that, Real Life™ got in the way, and I haven't been able to process the photos. At least now, I've managed to pick out a couple or three easy ones and resize them. The rest will come later, with the osprey/hawk argument, as soon as I catch up on a bit of sleep.

Redwing and cracked corn on a fence rail.

Orange afternoon sun highlights orange feet.

Does he know he's beautiful?

This was the last day for the old Nikon, and it was complaining. Several times, it just froze and refused to do anything until I turned it off for a minute. And Laurie's Pentax was having focussing issues. The next day, I bought the new camera. (See how you like sleeping in a drawer, old point and shoot!)