Survivor bee

In Crescent Beach, this week, the wildflowers are showing off. Not least, the bindweed; this year its flowers are bigger than I've seen them for a long time. And the winged hordes are stuffing themselves with pollen and nectar.

This bee was too busy to notice my camera a few inches away.

"Yummy!"

But wait! There's something odd about that bee. Something not quite right.

Missing something.

Her wings are half gone. One is a mere stump; the other a tattered shred, but longer. Besides, she's long gone bald. The thorax glistens as if it had been polished, and her furry, striped behind has been trimmed by a blind hairdresser.

The hair loss is probably due to age, but something, a bird probably, broke off those wings. I wonder how she managed to fly. Surely she didn't walk to the feeding grounds?

Finished with this flower.

Turning to go, she stood facing me, as if gathering strength for the next flight. The wing stubs are clearer here.

On the lip of the bindweed flower.

A brief rest, and then she flew away. Half a wing or none, she's got work to do! She's a survivor.

Here's one of her relatives, on a mallow, for comparison:

Lots of hair, complete wings.

The bees have four wings, but the pair on each side hook together, so that they look like one. On the first bee, I see no sign of those frilly underwings.

Lines in the sky

At Semiahmoo beach.

Rail and contrail, with little zapped cloud.

Parasails.

A Skywatch post.

All cracked up, and pooping

It all started with Val, the anemone. Beautiful though she is, she's deadly. All tentacle, mouth and stomach, and no mind, she sits in her corner where the water currents are strongest, tentacles waving merrily. Waiting. Sooner or later, something falls off the wall into her open maw, and the tentacles close in quickly, trapping and stinging the unfortunate wall cleaner. A minute later, it has disappeared into her stomach, and she spreads out her empty net again. The snail (and it's usually a snail) eventually reappears as an empty shell, ready for occupancy by a growing hermit crab.

Val, just beginning to open up after a meal. With a leftover snail shell.

The two bubbleshells were part of the crew of glass scrubbers. They wandered around happily, eating algae, mating, laying more eggs every day. Then one, the big one I called Hammy II, disappeared. Sir Ham, the smaller one, moped for a bit, then went back to work. I kept a close watch.

Then, a few days ago, I was just in time to see Sir Ham, all curled up, caught in Val's tentacles. I quickly reached in and flicked him out with a fingertip. (Val was not pleased; she sulked for hours.)

The bubbleshell was still moving when I moved him to a bowl of water. Barely moving. I needed a lens to see it. I was sure he would die, but I set him up in a "hospital tank", with fresh water and a protective covering of sea lettuce, and kept an eye on him.

Hours later, when I was going to bed, he was almost black, curled up tightly, not moving at all until I touched him gently. I left him overnight in the fridge; warm water would stress him even more. And he was still alive in the morning! I was surprised; he even seemed to be starting to stretch out a bit.

For three days, he hovered between life and death, but last night, he looked at the sea lettuce and found it interesting. And this morning, when I looked, this is what I found:

A trail of bubbleshell poop!

Sir Ham is eating again!

This evening, when I changed the water, it was full of little poopy pellets. Good on you, Sir Ham!

Sir Ham, convalescing.

But look at his photo now: The shell is cracked and scored. It wasn't before. I'm starting to wonder if maybe the largest crab hadn't tried to split it open to get at the delicious bubble meat inside. And maybe that's why Sir Ham wasn't strong enough to resist the current any more, and fell into the anemone's mouth. Predation in tandem: not fair!

So there he stays, for now, in the hospital tank, while I decide what's to be done. Return him to life as it is, dangers and all, or provide safer housing in a corner of the tank? And I need to find him a new mate; don't those eyes look lonely?

(Cleaning the tank, I found Hammy the Second's shell, all cleaned out. So he probably met the same fate, but without a rescuer handy.)

The Watershed recycles

In a healthy forest, nothing stays the same; everything is in a state of flux. Sure, a tree may live for 60, 100, 500, even 1000 years, but it is never static. A tree is a community; a forest is a complete world of sprouting, hatching, growing, dying, and birthing living creatures. Everything is reused, reshaped, repurposed.

Take the Watershed Park:

Cedar grove, surrounded by fast-growing red alder, paper birch, and salmonberries.

These are third- and fourth-growth trees, youngsters, as trees go. Their ancestors are now the rotting remains of enormous stumps. And they are already self-selecting, the stronger, taller trees hogging the sunlight, crowding out the smaller ones. In this photo, there are skinny logs on the ground; birches and alders mainly. One dead tree still stands, leafless; three or four more are in the process of falling, tipped over but still alive.

Even the dead trees are alive.

Herb Robert sprouting in a compost of dead leaves and twigs, on a Big-leaf maple.

Canker or rot on an old birch, on its way down.

Split and hollowed maple, growing moss.

Heart rot, caused by various fungi, weakens the tree without necessarily killing it. Insects move in, looking for shelter or food; woodpeckers bore holes to feed on the bugs. Sometimes the tree splits, but sometimes it looks solid from the outside, but is completely hollow inside. Red cedar is good at this, and many small animals nest inside, dry and hidden from predators. The list of possible residents is long: squirrels and chipmunks, chickadees, nuthaches, owls and flickers, wood ducks (near water), mice and bats - many bats - and woodrats, woodpeckers of all sorts, and on and on. Even bears; a female bear likes to den high up in a big hollow cedar.

Insects. One word to cover thousands of critters to be found in any forest. In this visit, on a dry day, most were in hiding, but the traces of beetles and wood borers were evident on every tree and log. Broken pieces of bark, pulled away from a trunk, revealed a fine, brown dust, leftovers from many buggy meals. And of course, there were spiders. I found one I do not recognize, and will send my poor photo to the good people at BugGuide.

Black and gold spider, under bark.

I found a centipede, many ants, several millipedes (scooting out of sight in an instant), and eleventy-three woodbugs.

Under the bark of a fallen tree, something has eaten paths in the cambium. An insect larva, maybe? A slug?

Laurie says this is a bitter cherry log.

I noticed several of these logs. The old bark holds on, shredding but still keeping its shape while the wood inside crumbles to dust. Several of the logs were mostly a hollow bark tube.

BC natives used this bark for binding the joints of tools and the hafts of bows, because it is so tough and long-lasting. It is still used as a decorative accent on basket work.

In a well-rotted log, something blue, some sort of fungus infestation.

Insect larva tunnels in the heartwood of an old fallen tree.

In a small semi-clearing, we stood amazed. What is that?

Is that a man in the tree? Or a mermaid?

Zooming in. I think it's a blonde mermaid.

And the tree is a cedar. It looks like it broke off, many years ago, perhaps in a windstorm, and then sprouted side branches curving upwards to become four new trunks. Cedar branches droop down before they turn upwards again; these bare branches show the pattern well.

What a wealth of critters that tree must house!

Something green to rest our eyes. Moss on a rotten stump.

Fur, lace, horses' hooves, and toasted cheese

The best time to visit the forested side hill of the Watershed Park, is after a week or so of solid rain. (Typical BC spring weather, in other words.) Then every downed tree, every stump, every mossy branch shelters mushrooms and slimes. They come in all sizes and shapes, from twisted threads to wide, flat, "cowpie" shrooms, in all colours; purple, blue-green, white, orange and yellow, brown, even black. We scramble over logs and through blackberry patches, getting wet and scratched and muddy, unheeding, following the glimmer of yet another beauty just beside that next stump.

And this year, we missed our window. The weather has been almost summery; we had started the daily watering of the gardens after several days without rain. And the Watershed is dry. The rainy-day mushrooms are gone, disappeared back into the ground until the rains return.

So yesterday's little pearly shrooms were all we could find. Or so it seemed, until we turned our attention to the "boring", as in "always there" polypores, the hard, woody, dull shelf fungi. And there they were; everywhere we looked, and as beautiful, if not as fragile, as the delicate mycenas and glowing orange slimes.

On the standing trees:

Tall birch, still growing, but already home to dozens of polypores.

On fallen logs:

Birch on the ground. And a couple of polypores. The large one is a tinder polypore, aka horse's hoof fungus.

Another two on a birch log. They grow on dead and dying hardwood trees.

A different hardwood. Young maple, maybe? And a broken polypore, showing the brick-red interior.

Back of a shelf polypore, showing it's pen-and-ink scribbles.

Probably a red-belted polypore. These are extremely variable. The fruiting body, usually the bottom while the tree is standing, is white on a young polypore, turning to brown as it ages.

Front view of the same fungus.

Dye polypore. This one is soft and spongy. It grows on dead wood, and on the ground near evergreens.

Young 'uns. Probably red-belted polypore. They look good enough to eat, like toasted cheese bagels with cream cheese. They're not.

Fuzzy brown and white. Unidentified shelf fungus.

Zooming in to show the fur cloaks and lacy petticoats of these fashion-conscious belles.

And some strange trees, tomorrow.

Mushroom appetizer

I've been working far too late, delving into rotting logs . . .

Tiny white mushrooms on crumbling wood, Watershed Park

. . . and now it's too late to show you what I've found. Umpteen photos of polypores, etc, coming tomorrow.

Beautiful invader

Along the trails in the Watershed Park forest, where a bit of sunshine sometimes reaches the forest floor, Herb Robert gets a toehold.

"Stinky Bob", as it is known south of the border, in the US. Flowers and seed capsules.

Given time and opportunity, it will take over the area, evicting the evergreen ferns and mosses, discouraging the mushrooms that thrive in the moist dimness, leaving a tangled mass of red-brown stems by midsummer.

I found one good thing about Herb Robert.

Freshly picked leaves have an odor resembling burning tires when crushed, and if they are rubbed on the body the smell is said to repel mosquitoes. (Wikipedia)

Very well, but it doesn't make up for the loss of the greens.

Window to the sky

Under the canopy of the Watershed Park, everything is dim, in deep greens or browns. Except the sky, some days . . .

Bigleaf maples, catching the sunlight, up top.

A Skywatch post.

Curves and colours

In a corner of the garden . . .

Voluptuous hosta leaves. With a visitor.

Rainbow tinted fly.

And a spider, patiently laying in wait on a sausage vine.

A wandering eye and a long nose

Too many fish! BC has over 400 marine species of fish. Some are well known, and easy to identify. Many, far too many, are small, elusive, camouflaged, and, it seems, too "unimportant" enough to invest in tracking them down.

I've looked at photos of hundreds of West Coast fish, trying to find one small, shy fish, with no luck. I need help!

Here he is:

Long-nosed minnow, thinking two blades of eelgrass can hide him.

There were many of these out near the low tide line in Boundary Bay, swimming about in a few inches of water. They don't act like the sculpins, dashing here and there, then settling into the sand. These stay perfectly still until I get too close, then speed away in a straight line. A short burst of speed; as soon as they reach any shelter, they stop dead, floating just above the sand.

This one, about 3 inches long, hid under the seaweed. When the current swept it away, he played dead, barely moving his side fins to stay in place.

What intrigued me is his unusual face; a long, flat, triangular nose, with a tiny mouth. He seems to be one of the poacher fish family, maybe. The side (pectoral) fins are bigger than the dorsal (back) fins, the body is long and thin. But I can't find any just like him.

I had better luck with the other fish we found. This one was recently dead, but still in good shape.

Starry flounder, Platichthys stellatus

This is one of the "right sided" flatfish. It started out life with one eye on each side of the head, like most of the fish we know. As it matured, it flopped over, to spend its life lying on the left side. An eye looking down into the sand is useless; it turned itself around, and migrated to the top side.

Lopsided face. The mouth lies at right angles to the ground, the eyes more or less parallel. They don't quite line up evenly; the wandering eye had to force its way around the bony structures already in place.

Other flatfish lie on their right side, with both eyes on the left side. Whatever works.

The bottom, or left side. The young fish, still upright, are coloured on both sides, but when they flop over, the new bottom turns white. (Colour is expensive, maybe?)

You can see where the eye used to be. I found a short video that shows how the eye migrates up and over the top of the head, to end up beside the other one.

WANDERING EYES from Science News on Vimeo.

Starry flounders become sexually mature at age 2 at a total length of around 35 cm. (About 14 inches) (U. of California)

This one was about 8 to 10 inches long, so it was still a young one.

We left him for gull food. If they hurried; otherwise the tide would cover it, and then it would be crab food.

Fishy business

I'm busy trying to identify a couple of new (to me) fishes that we found on the Boundary Bay beach at low tide.

This one I think I know, at least:

Toadfish on a bed of snails (and probably some hermit crabs)

The other two will wait until tomorrow.

Happy about a lousy photo? Yes!

I am really impressed with my new camera, the Nikon D7000, once more. Because of this photo:

Skunk in the dark

And this one:

Skunk in the darker shadows of the rhododendrons

This skunk came to my garden around 8:30 in the evening. The sun had already set, and the shadows of the evergreens, hiding the sky, made him difficult to see, even a few feet away. He slipped away under the fence in the direction of Laurie's flower beds, so we went the long way around, to head him off; he's sprayed under our windows before, and the stink persists for hours.

Sure enough, the skunk headed for Laurie's nice, soft dirt, and "fragrant" bag of manure. Laurie was there in time, (I had gone back for the camera) and threw a rock in his general direction, so the skunk changed his mind and hurried away. By the time I got in position with the camera, he was far away, and all I could see was a hint of movement in the shadows. Laurie couldn't see him at all.

I took a photo, anyhow; documentation, at least. The skunk dashed under the rhododendrons, where I caught him with a second photo.

And the photos, cropped 'way down, and lightened up, actually showed the skunk, and the green of the grass and leaves! Better than my eyes, far, far better!

The skunk was around again tonight. We smelled him, but never saw him.

Cyanide millipede

Among the browns and greens of the leaf litter on the forested slope of Watershed Park, a yellow dotted line appears, moving slowly from one rotting leaf to the next. Don't touch him; he will release toxic cyanide if he's annoyed. It has a pleasant, almond scent, but it will irritate your skin. Let him be; he's busy turning last year's leaves to this year's soil.

Harpaphe haydeniana

This one has 19 or 20 segments, but I couldn't count his feet. Males have 30 pairs, and females 31, for a total of 62 feet. Not the thousand that its name implies.

Green eyed monster

I never realized before that purple shore crabs have green eyes.

Purple shore crab, Boundary Bay.

This was a big crab, as shore crabs go, totally unafraid of me, not even bothering to threaten me as I prodded him into better light. Big enough to defend himself against anything on that beach, he's completely confident of his invulnerability. But watch out for gulls, Professor Plum; your weapons don't intimidate them!

Perhaps because of his size, I was also able to see the hinges on his legs and pincers; they're green, too.

Caught in the act!

Update on Bubbles in Love.

The hermits have been eating the egg ribbons. I caught one of them at it this afternoon, and there were no more to be found. But tonight, Hammy II laid another ribbon.

Egg ribbon on sea lettuce. Slime and bubbles.

H/she laid the eggs, attached to that brown fragment of eelgrass at one end. The last thing h/she did was to glue the whole thing flat against the sea lettuce.

(Poor photo; no time: I have to catch a plane.)

Sugar cube spider

A wasp dropped in to visit, and I wanted to take his photo. He wasn't co-operative, though; he kept running away. So I moistened a sugar cube and put it down in front of him to attract his attention, and get him to stand still.

I stumbled, and dropped the cube on his nose, which put an end to the photo session. The wasp hid under the door sill.

Running wasp.

Not to waste my damp sugar cube, I put it on a shelf outside, to see what other insects might be attracted to it. A moth, perhaps?

Later, when I looked, someone else had come up with the same idea; a spider was laying in wait on that sugar cube.

Sugar cube spider

Zooming in, while she waited on the shady side of the cube.

Great minds think alike, they say.