Ornery birds

The birds on Boundary Bay were not happy with us this week. The mallards and wigeons in the duck pond stayed down at the far end. The gulls sat out on the farthest sand bar; and it was a low, low tide that roared back in before we got halfway to the edge.

And the few birds within reach weren't cooperating.

"Hello? What do you think you're doing?"

"I'm outta here!"

Heron fishing

Heron leaving

Redwing blackbird female, hiding atop a newly-leafed willow

Redwing blackbird male, making things difficult

At least the flowers stayed put.

Yellow on yellow

At Beach Grove, Tsawwassen:

Daffodil

... on a beautiful, sunny day. With flowers, fish, and fowl. Photos to follow.

Crosshatched ripples

More reflections at Cougar Creek park:

Wandering carts often come to a bad end ...

Après-orgy

The orgy is over.

Among the couple of dozen hermit crabs that came home with me (under false pretenses) a week ago, were three couples preparing to mate. It's a bit early, but we have had a warm winter; maybe they're anticipating an early summer.

When breeding season comes around, the males capture a female, usually smaller. They get a good grip on the edge of her shell with their large pincers, and hold on, never letting go, even for a moment. The female usually just retreats into her shell, and apparently waits.

Male trying to climb a wall, female along for the ride.

But inside the shell, she is very busy. She lays her eggs, gluing them to one side of her abdomen, ready to be fertilized. As she does this, she releases pheromones, which influence her male to hold on tighter. Sometimes, they also attract other males; one of my couples turned for a while into a threesome, with two males playing tug-of-war over her. The larger one won.

Couple resting in a bowl. The male is the one upright. Females often are held upside-down.

Whether it was the effect of the pheromones, or just because it was time, the rest of the hermits in the tank got the idea, and every time I looked, I saw another couple linked together. There are three species of hermits in the tank; all three were pairing up.

When the female is ready, maybe after several days of being dragged around, she partially leaves her protective shell, the male follows suit, and they mate. I have never seen this happen; it's over quickly and I'm never there at just the right moment. And then the courtship is over and done with; the male goes his own way and leaves the female to deal with the family.

It's not an easy job. Ma Hermit has a humongous "baby bump" attached to her abdomen, and it can't be comfortable. She wriggles around in her shell, trying to fit, sometimes jerking back and forth, sometimes pulling half out of the shell and fanning the eggs, then making repeated attempts to squish herself back in.

Ma Hairy Hermit, with a mass of pink eggs.

She gives up, and goes searching for a new shell, something a bit more roomy. As I watched the shell battles, various females competing for the largest shell in stock, I caught on and donated a handful of the largest mud snail shells I had; they were all occupied in a couple of hours.

Sometimes they forced bigger males out of their shells. They, in turn, went shell shopping, having to settle, as often as not, for a shell too small for their taste. They got in fights; I watched one male drag another out of his shell and move in. The evictee was too big for the abandoned shell, and panicked, running around and over his old shell, snapping at the thief, refusing to go looking elsewhere. Eventually, he got his way; the usurper gave him his shell back, and went off to find a more co-operative donor.

Besides finding a good maternity shell, the mother has to keep her eggs healthy. Like a "true" crab, she brings them out into the water and fans them, to remove waste products and aerate them. And she has to keep them safe at the same time; hermits are vulnerable out of the shell, pregnant hermits even more so. She spends a good part of her time up on the seaweed, out of reach of the crab.

Blue berries

Some of the hermits have pink eggs, or "berries", while others' berries are a deep blue-black. I'm not sure if these are greenmark hermits, or if they're just in a different stage.

I'm hoping some of these survive. It's difficult in a tank environment.

Wordless

Bubble wrap critter

When I was a kid, I used to sit for hours on the beach, sifting sand, looking for miniature shells. Tiny mussels, snails, Baltic macomas in pink and yellow, dime-sized sand dollars, little stripy clams, limpets with chimney holes: I loved them all, and always went home with a pocketful.

I don't sit on the beach any more, but I still keep an eye out for the delicate mini-shells. Pretty clams turn up on the White Rock beach, macomas at Iona Beach, periwinkles on Crescent Beach. At Boundary Bay, besides the ever-present mud snails and big broken clams, the remainders of gull dinners, I don't see many others. Occasionally, I find a few pink macomas or a sharply-pointed snail shell. And rarely, maybe three times in all the years I've been looking, I find a bubble shell.

Probably Haminoea vesicula. Very thin, extremely fragile, translucent, and so light I could blow it away. This one is 7 mm long.

Underside. Or rather, inside bottom.

In spring and summer, they say the animal itself can be found in beds of sea lettuce and eelgrass. I had never seen it. And the rest of the year, it may as well be invisible; it blends in perfectly with the sand.

I found an oval bubble shell (the animal, not the shell) in a bag of eelgrass and sea lettuce that I brought home for my hermits. When I washed the veggies, a tiny slug-like thing oozed out and across the bottom of my bowl.

Haminoea japonica, top view. About 3/4 inch long, stretched out.

This is a mollusc, related to the aglaja that I found last year. Here's a mouthful:

it's "a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusc in the family Haminoeidae" (Wikipedia)

Opisthobranch means "gills behind" (and to the right of the heart). ... Opisthobranchs are characterized by two pairs of tentacles and a single gill behind and to the right of the heart. (Wikipedia, again)

I didn't see the tentacles, unless they are those two little protrusions on the sides of the head. It's hard to tell, because of the unusual head: the oval bubble shell is distinguished by hir forked head shield, like a flat helmet. And the front of the foot is flattened out underneath this shield, making it look from the side as if the animal had fat lips.

"Mouth" closed.

"Mouth" open. I think those two black dots are eyes.

Unlike the sea slugs, Hammy has a shell. But the flesh of the foot folds up around the outside of the shell, in two wings over the sides, and a smaller cover at the tail end. I took these photos as s/he slid across a piece of sand dollar; on the sand, the spotted body blends in so perfectly that only the top of the shell can be seen. Once it reaches the sand, s/he buries hirself quickly, in a few seconds.

Fully stretched out, crawling up the glass wall of the aquarium. The underside. The shell is visible, but encased in flesh. Head at the top, tail end floating free. A minute later, s/he let go, floated to the sand, and disappeared.

This bubble shell eats vegetation, like the sea lettuce and sea hair algae, as well as diatoms. (The aglaja, hir cousin, is a carnivore, and eats bubble shells.) S/he also eats sand, which can be found in hir gizzard. (And I thought only birds had gizzards!)

As s/he travels along, s/he leaves a trail of slime, which possibly may serve to guide other bubble shells to hir location. I noticed this when s/he climbed up the glass wall; behind hir, a string of tiny bubbles caught the light.

This whole sub-class, the Opisthobranchia, boasts some of the strangest animals in the ocean. It includes the nudibranchs, with their amazing colours and imaginative body shapes, the "flying" sea angel, the winged slug, the stomach wing, the sacoglossa sapsuckers, that look more like scraps of rag than animals. (This page has some of our local specimens Or see National Geographic's photos of nudis. Unbelievable!.)

"Hammy" at least looks sensible, but s/he has hidden talents. The bubble shells are hermaphroditic; each one is both male and female. After mating, s/he lays the eggs in small, yellow, sausage-shaped clumps, from 300 to 700 yoked eggs in each.

So far, this is unsurprising. But then, the some of the eggs hatch into tiny swimming veligers, free-living. These go through several stages, out on their own in the water, not eating, but risking being eaten, before they mature and settle down to a slug shape.

Veliger of a sea hare, a relative of Haminoea. 50 nanometres. Wikipedia.

Other eggs wait to hatch until they are mature, crawling little bubble shells. (CIESM Atlas) There are advantages to both strategies; the veligers get to populate new territory, while the homebodies are safer.

Haminoea vesicula (the empty shell above) is a native: H. japonica is an import from Japan, previously known there as H. callidegenita. It has now spread worldwide. It doesn't seem to be invasive, but may be carrying the organism that causes swimmer's itch. Carry a towel!

Appetizer

I'm working late, so the promised beastie is having to wait. And I've been wasting time staring into the aquarium because the hermits have caught spring fever, and are indulging in a mass orgy. I have photos, but most of them are still in the camera.

Here's an early one, though.

Hermit courtship

Story and photos of hermits in berry coming soon.

Eelgrass isopod

I didn't see this critter when I harvested the eelgrass; not until I was running my fingers down each blade at home, looking for tiny limpets, did I run into him; a monster compared to the limpets I would have seen first, but so well glued to the eelgrass that he was practically invisible.

Eelgrass isopod, Idotea resecata

He's a bit over an inch long. Very slow moving, most of the time, but a good swimmer when he feels the need.

And a beastie that's half snail, half slug, tomorrow.

Hairy hairies

Most of the hermit crabs I picked up the other day on the beach were the usual finds; little greenmarks, and slightly bigger hairy hermits. But a few were unlike any I'd seen before.

Yesterday's speedy hermit.

The hairy hermits are more or less hairy. These ones are super hairy. Fuzzy on the body, fuzzy all down the legs, all along the pincers.

This one's furry enough to hide his blue and white knees.

Compare them to the ones I'm used to:

This is a hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus. Yes, he's hairy, but not all over.

Another hairy.

One of the hairiest of the hairy hermits.

And the hairiest of the new hermits:

This may be a clue. Even his shell is furry!

In size and coloration (spotted antennae, blue and white knees, basic brownish green body, although these tend a bit towards the orange end of the browns), shape (long antennae, one pincer larger than the other), home site (upper intertidal) and habits (they like a small shell, and they move quickly), they are like the hairy hermits.

My encyclopedia has photos of very hairy hermits, but the colour pattern and body proportions are different.  So these do look like hairies, but why the extra load of fuzz?

The one with a furry shell makes me wonder if they haven't been colonized by hydroids, or some fuzzy algae. The hermits in a clean shell, like the one at the top, may have changed the shell recently.

I found a few images on the web with very hairy hairies, along with photos of normally hairy ones, at WallaWalla U. I notice that the really furry ones have a lot of crud in the hair; so do mine. It would be interesting to examine it under a microscope.

What else I found, I'll show you tomorrow.

Weight-lifting hermits

Val, the big anemone, has been eating snails. They're good workers in the aquarium, keeping the sand plowed and aerated, and cleaning up the crumbs that the crab always scatters. But they take their breaks, sliding up the glass walls, nibbling on algae, resting at the top. To get down, they  usually just let go and drop. This works fine, unless they're right above the anemone, who has now positioned herself right up against the wall. Any snail that drops in her mouth is swallowed instantly; a few hours later, she spits out a clean snail shell.

My cleaning crew was getting skimpy, so this trip to the beach, I scooped up a handful of snails, all piled together under a rock. I brought along a few small clumps of barnacles, too, to help filter the water.

I should have checked them then and there. I didn't. Careless of me.

At home, every single "snail" turned out to be a hermit. And each of the barnacle clumps was loaded on the back of another hermit. There are now about 30 hermit crabs in my tank. They don't mind the crowding; they're a gregarious bunch.

But they've set me a few puzzles, and given me a good laugh, besides. For starters, let's look at a few of those barnacle carriers:

There's a hermit under all that mass. A couple of his legs are just visible. I counted seven barnacles, plus one broken shell. On the barnacles are a few worms, some other unidentifiable critters, two colours of algae, and lots of grunge. That hole in the centre shows the central column of the snail shell, and the tip of one of the hermit's rear legs. And yes, with all that load on, the hermit can still walk. But he doesn't run very well.

An identical hermit, with just a plain, unbroken shell. He's a speedy runner.

More about this guy, later.

This tiny greenmark hermit is wearing half a snail shell; from the open end, part of his abdomen is just visible. On the left side, the shell is weighted down with one large barnacle, this one bearing three smaller ones.

And I had to laugh at this next poor beast of burden. (I know: he's not laughing. But I've given him his choice of new shells; that should make up for it.)

Chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry cone. The pink is some sort of encrusting sponge.

"Oh, my aching back!"

"Scram! I'm not a bus!"

"I never signed up for this! And they're not paying me, either!"

At one point, 3 other hermits were all crammed together on his back, picking at the algae on his cargo of barnacles. His poor legs were splayed out on the sand. He couldn't move.

I've donated a handful of clean, empty shells, in his size range, so he can abandon his pack.

The hermit puzzle, tomorrow.

Sand and water

Boundary Bay, on a sunny(!) afternoon:

Ridges and wavelets

Sand, water, sparkles. And Point Roberts.

And I found some surprising critters to bring home. Photos and story tomorrow.

Parched!

The rain finally came to an end. The sun came out. The puddles sunk into the ground. And, in the early afternoon, a raccoon made an unprecedented mid-day visit to my yard.

To get a drink.

"Excuse me, but somebody stole my pond!"

He drank quickly, then dropped to all fours and went on his way.

Spotty wonder

It's still raining. The lawn is all decked out for St. Patrick's Day, a luscious green that owes its bright colour more to the moss, thriving in all this wet weather, than to the straggling, drowned grass. My new flowers still sit in pots, waiting for a dry day so I can plant them; the leaf mulch on the back of the garden is a slippery, slimy mess. I may have to do the spring cleanup under an umbrella.

I was standing out there yesterday, keeping out of the rain under the overhang, staring dejectedly at my mud patch, when I noticed that the Pulmonaria has shot up two flower stalks topped with buds. Yay, spring!

Pulmonaria, and Creeping Jenny in back. In the rain.

This plant has stayed green and upright over the winter, without a complaint even when some of the hellebores froze and collapsed. I think it has grown some since last fall.

I had these when I lived up north; after 4 or 5 months under deep ice, they burst into bloom with the first sunlight of the year. And what blooms! A bold pink in the bud, opening to pink flowers that turn blue as they mature. The same stalk will have flowers in all stages; a mixed bouquet on one stem.

They grow happily in deep shade, in acid or alkaline soil, even in poor soil. It doesn't mind the rain, as long as it has decent drainage. And the slugs don't like them! (I wonder if they extend their influence to the plants next to them. I'll try planting the lettuce in a circle around this one. Maybe I'll even manage to get some salad before the slugs do.)

The plant is named for the leaves that look like diseased lungs; "pulmo" in Latin, giving us Pulmonaria, or lungwort (lung plant, from Old English "wyrt".) The name is easy to remember, true, at least if you've ever seen a rotting lung. But it does have other common names, more in tune with the cheerful flowers. Some, like Adam and Eve, Soldiers and sailors, Joseph and Mary, obviously refer to the two colours showing at the same time. The patterned leaves give us "Spotted dog". But did you ever see a green dog? And then there's "Lady spilt the milk", Spotted Mary, and Jerusalem cowslip. Take your pick, or make up your own.

Lungwort Trivia : Usually, when you see a silver leaf, the color is due to a layer of wax on the leaf surface or due to a lack of the green chlorophyll pigment in that region of the leaf. Lungwort is different. In this case lungwort leaves get their silver color from pockets of air trapped beneath the leaf surface. These pockets make the tissue above them opaque instead of transparent and the normally green interior cells of the Lungwort can no longer be seen. (From Plant Delights Nursery)

White collared moth

It looks like the mothing season has begun here. (About time!) We've begun to see those little flighty Indian meal moths here and there, and tonight, this one was sleeping on the curtain behind my desk.

White head, white collar, fringed wings. 1/4 inch long.

I don't remember seeing one like this before; even from a distance, that white collar was startlingly bright. The two little dots at the front are the tips of two curved, up-turned "horns".

I can't identify it, and after looking at 2000 photos on BugGuide, I checked the last page of their images. There are 4108 pages, at 25 photos each page! That's 102,700 photos of moths. I gave up.

I've submitted it to them, but I don't have much hope of an ID. With so many moths, who can come close to knowing them all? But then again, they have surprised me before.

UPDATE: 6 hours later; They've done it again! It's the White-shouldered House Moth, Endrosis sarcitrellla. Amazing people!

And thanks, Troy!

Candytuft

Plants in pots, sitting waiting for it to stop raining, so I can plant them:

They're perennials, so even if they're late going in, they'll be good.

Three days of non-stop rain, so far. Ah, March in BC!

And I didn't have the camera in hand!

My intertidal invertebrates are from a relatively temperate climate, where the water is usually warm enough even for humans to swim. And, being intertidal critters, they tolerate a variable temperature. So with my previous tankful, I set it in an open window; the normal Lower Fraser Valley air temperatures would keep the water in an acceptable range.

But Val, my anemone from Campbell River, is another story. She likes it cold. An average of 56 degrees would be good for her.

Most saltwater aquarists invest in a chiller, a refrigerating unit that cools the water and returns it to the tank. Very nice, needing some maintenance, but what doesn't? But they are expensive! The cheapest is more than the total I've ever spent on the whole setup. And they go on up to over $1000, besides needing a cabinet and a bunch of fittings, making a racket, and being a general nuisance.

So I've gone with the freebie alternative. I've filled a bunch of little plastic cups with fresh aquarium water, and put them in the freezer. Every morning and evening, and several times during the day, I dump some of the saltwater ice in the tank, and refill the cups with aquarium water to go back into the freezer. It takes about 3 to 5 lumps of ice to bring the temperature down to where Val won't go into a sulk.

At first, I would put the ice into the water very carefully, because the hermits would startle at the noise of a splash. They're used to it now. They don't even mind when an ice chunk bumps into them when they're climbing on the eelgrass.

So yesterday, I had dropped in the first two lumps of ice. There were several hermits climbing the eelgrass; no problem. One of the larger hermits made a flying leap onto the ice. His own hermit-sized ice floe! This is living!

Too bad it was melting so quickly; his claws lost traction after a minute, and he slid off the side and tumbled down to the sand.

And, of course, I had my hands full of ice, and the camera on the other side of the room. So you'll just have to imagine it.

To make up for that, here are three more tank pics. No hermit polar bears, though.

Another look at Val's column. She has pasted shells and stones and a lot of gunk all over it. If you look closely at the photo, you'll see an amphipod (bottom right) and, at full size, a number of copepods, some carrying eggs.

Just another Nassa snail, siphon extended, sniffing out his path.

Checking out a possible change of clothes. (He didn't go for it; didn't even try it on.)

These hairy hermits are among the most drab of all the hermit crabs; a dull brownish green, darker antennae with white spots, black eyes, and a hint of blue at the knees. Or so it seemed. This camera does colours so much better! The blue knees are vivid, the carapace patterned in blue-green and gold. And I love the stripy eye stalks! I never noticed those before. (It's worth right-clicking to see this one full-size.)

Purple

Hellebore in the rain

Whatever the weather ...

Hellebores are like the postal workers:

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
Inscription, New York City Post Office, adapted from Herodotus
Greek historian & traveler (484 BC - 430 BC)

It's rained steadily all day and night. My poor primulas are all tattered and moldy. Not the hellebores, though! Tough as nails, and not as prone to rust.

Why didn't I do this before?

More coffee break photography.

I was impressed by yesterday's photo of the anemone; I had been trying for a shot of that column for some time, and it was always just a blur of green. Working from a RAW file, the detail came out clearer even than I see it in the tank, with my magnifying lens.

So I did a small experiment today. I set the camera to record both in RAW and jpeg, and took a photo of a watercolour painting that hangs on my wall. Then I processed both copies minimally, cropping them down to a small section of the painting, which gave me 100% zoom on my processing program screen with the jpeg. (The RAW file can be zoomed in quite a bit more.) With the actual painting in front of me, I adjusted lighting to match on both, and on the jpeg, colour balance. Both got identical sharpening.

Results:

Can you tell which is which?

The top one is the jpeg, the bottom RAW.

• The second one has more definition; no blurring of brush strokes.
• The colours are truer in the second. I fiddled with the jpeg for a while, trying to adjust the colours to match the painting; it was never right.
• Even though processing the RAW file takes two separate sets of controls, and the jpeg only one, the RAW file was faster, because it needed less fine tuning at the final stage.
• For the same area of the painting, the RAW file gives me more pixels, which means I can zoom in even more without losing anything.
• Right click on each one, and open the link in a new tab. The jpeg is a small photo; the second one has over twice the area, so that much more detail. In this one, even the texture of the paper shows up.

That did it. I switched the camera over to RAW alone. (It takes about 10 times the memory, so I may need the space that the second copy would take.)

About the painting: it's a watercolour by a local artist, signed AA Brooke, 1954. His father had been a professional artist, and told young A.A. not to go that route, because he'd never make a decent living. As far as I know, the son became a farmer. When I knew him, in the early 1950s, he was in his eighties, long retired, and had a garden full of roses that he was hybridizing.

Every summer, he would take his wife and camera to Switzerland and take a bunch of photos. The rest of the year, he painted from those photos. He made one for me, a small cottage on a mountainside. I kept it for decades, and then it was stolen in a move.

This one, I inherited from my aunt, and whenever I move, it goes with me in the car.

Coffee break photography

I've been working late; I took on a project that is turning out to be much more involved than I imagined, and I've had my nose to the grindstone day and night since Friday.

I took a couple of quick breaks to play with the camera. In the comments, a few days ago, Ceratina has been encouraging me to try recording in RAW, so this evening I took a few sample shots. And this morning (after 1:AM; time to be quitting, anyhow), I looked at them.

Wow! What a difference!

I've grabbed one at random, given it a quick shakedown to clean up the glass that I neglected to polish, and resized it. And here's the result:

Val, the burrowing anemone; detail of her column. She sticks pieces of shell and sand to it, but doesn't quite hide the warts.

Could be better, but that's the best photo I have seen of her yet, (check out the full size photo: right click/open in new tab) and the original is untouched, so I can re-process it when I have more time. The jpeg of the same shot was faded and noisy, and the colours were flatter.

And now, to bed. More grindstone work tomorrow.

Blue

Crescent Beach, Friday afternoon:

At the south end, almost at Kwomais Point

A half-dozen juvenile eagles were soaring over the point. This young couple were especially playful. The one in the rear repeatedly flipped upside-down to fly underneath the other, almost belly to belly.

Wet rocks and waves.

Blue and white and deep, dark grey.

Not blue:

Someone had tied this kelp stipe around and around a leaning alder.

A Skywatch post