Under the bridge ...

At Cougar Creek Park.

It's always cool and dark here, but sometimes a ray of sunlight peeks between the trees.

And over the lake:

Reflected fall colour.

Hallowe'en trick or treating starts in 18 hours. And it's already raining, in preparation. Kids won't care; their parents will. Ah, BC!

Li'l blue eyes

I've been too busy this year to devise a costume for Hallowe'en, so I've made myself a mascot for the night. Meet Petey:

Papier-mâché and pipe cleaners. 5 inches long, small enough to ride on my shoulder.

Bead and dressmaker pin eyes.

No attempt was made at matching any known species. She's a law unto herself.

Three pink dots in the grass

These flowers are tiny. I would have missed them if I hadn't been bending to look at the mud on my shoes.

I know I should recognize this, but I don't.

When Google image search, asked for pink flowers with three sepals, growing on wet ground, starts giving me cows, bran muffins, and snowy city streets, I know I've been wasting my time. I'm going to bed.

Out of character

He's polite, peace-loving, gentle, co-operative. A good neighbour, tolerant of youngsters, patient. A typical Canadian (YMMV).

He's a hermit crab, of course. They're like that; pleasant company.

And then he goes and transmogrifies into a stereotypical cartoon caveman*, when he discovers girls.

Oog, the hairy hermit, with his captive mate.

A mature male hairy, big and strong and about 3/4 of an inch long, chooses a female. She's smaller than he is, usually quite a bit smaller. He grabs her by the corner of her shell, near her face, and drags her wherever he goes. Oog, here, chose the top of the tall abalone shell as a perch; from here, he has the drop on any challengers. And there he waited, only coming down for lunch, still dragging the female with him. (She didn't get much; she was trapped and could only catch a few spare crumbs.)

From the time I first saw him with her, until she finally was allowed to go her own way, was three days. Night and day he held her; she lay quietly in her shell, not bothering to struggle.

He was waiting for her to molt. Only then could he fertilize her eggs. Until then, he wouldn't let any other male near her. On the third day, I was watching when she started to signal to him that she was ready; she stretched part way out of the shell, and tapped at his big pincer with hers. After a bit, he let go, so that she could get out of the shell to molt.

And then another male, slightly smaller, (Glok, I'll call him) decided to horn in. He came up and grabbed the female's shell. Not allowed! Oog attacked!

I have never seen such an angry hermit before. He tangled with the intruder, tugging and hitting and pinching until Glok had to drop his prize and run away, with Oog pursuing him furiously for half a tank length before he turned back to his mate.

Now he stood guard, at arm's length from her, watching, watching. Glok tried to sneak up from behind a blade of seaweed; Oog caught him and pounded him some more. Glok came around from the back; Oog chased him away again. And again. And again. Each time, the pursuit was longer, angrier.

I don't know if they ever managed to mate; I missed it, if they did. The next day, Oog was wandering around, sadly poking at random females without picking them up.

I haven't named the female. I don't know if I could recognize her again; her shell is much like anyone else's, and I never saw her features. I'll be watching to see if one turns up in berry.

*Re the "stereotypical cartoon caveman": I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that they've been maligned; maybe they were quite the gentlemen. And maybe they had nicer, more musical names, too.

Orange legged hermit crab

Watching me watching him

I wonder what he thinks of the huge, strange, face-like* thing that stares into his tank from time to time.

*Has two eyes, but not on stalks, no antennae, no flags, not enough mouthparts, and what are those holes in the centre? Just weird!

More hermits tomorrow.

Wordless # 3

Nemesia

Wordless #2

(Well, almost wordless. It's been a busy, stressful week. Purple vetch is calming.)

Wordless

Boundary Bay

So many babies!

I reached under a chair that sits by the back door, sweeping out dead leaves, when I noticed a fringe of spider web on the underside. Flipped over, the chair turned out to be sheltering a spider and her enormous brood of spiderlings.

Mother and egg sac, with frass, and a few of the spiderlings in the upper left corner.

A handful of spiders, about 1 or 2 mm. long.

She had been very busy; there were four of those egg sacs, two still apparently still holding babies. And at least 100 chubby "lings" scattered over the whole bottom of the chair.

Baker's dozen

Even with this October's uninspiring weather, photos accumulate in my files.  I've been tidying up. These are random shots from White Rock and Boundary Bay, in no particular order:

Gull, White Rock

Watching the coal train wall off the beach

White Rock tracks

Reflections, duck pond, Centennial Park. Laurie gets me to throw in stones to tangle up the shadows.

Laurie says he took this one by mistake. But I like it. Upper beach, Boundary Bay.

Red, yellow, green and brown.

I was taking photos of mallards in the shade at the duck pond, and I disturbed this kingfisher. He scolded bitterly as he flew to this dead tree, out of my camera's range . . .

 

... but not quite beyond Laurie's.

Texture on drift log, White Rock

Peeking.

On a driftwood log, there were two of these brown and orange fungi, standing out against the silvery sand and wood.

Stump, Centennial Park. With a heart-shaped hole, for Clytie.

White Rock, the last sunny day, with a smelt fisherman and 7 paddle-boarders.

More tomorrow. Gotta catch up!

Minimalist critters

Tidying up the garden, I moved a flower pot and found these springtails sheltered underneath.

Onychiuridae, blind white springtails, about 1 to 3 mm. long.

I haven't seen any of these here for a couple of years. It may be that it was a bit too dry for them to be close to the surface.

They look white at first glance, but it's a milky, transparent white. The smaller they are, the more transparent. Look at this one: * Update: The little grey one, down near the centre bottom here, is a different species, probably Proisotoma sp. (See first comment, below. Thanks, Andy!)

Grey springtail, centre bottom. You can see the brown central gut through the transparent body.

Zooming in on another group.

These springtails don't spring; they lack the furcula under the abdomen. So they run around constantly, somehow always staying near their mates, even though they are blind.

Aren't they cute?

Nothing to see but ducks

We've had a few days of those thick fogs, the kind that makes you glad there's another car a few feet ahead of you; you can see its tail lights through the mist, and it's up to that driver to know where you're going. Yesterday morning's fog was just this side of rain. The garden was wet, but the sidewalks were barely damp.

It lifted slightly around lunch time, so we went to the beach.

Not that there would be much to see; blue-grey sky, grey sand, grey mud, grey water, grey birds. The tide was out a ways, coming in slowly, so slowly it brought no seaweed with it, just more grey water.

Ah, but those birds! Thousands upon thousands of ducks, in great grey rafts all across the Mud Bay end of the bay, visible mostly as dark lines on the horizon where there should be only more grey water. We walked north, towards them, but never got near enough to identify more than a few mallards. Most of the ducks were smaller. Wigeons, maybe; there had been a small flock on the duck pond in Centennial Park.

We walked for maybe an hour. It was chilly on the shore; the sun made a weak attempt at shining through the fog at one point, but quickly gave up. Not enough people out to make it worth its while.

Then something disturbed the ducks, probably an eagle. Clouds of birds rose off the water, circling silently. If they were complaining, we were too far away to hear them.

Lifting off

Laurie's camera does distances better than mine. Or than my eyes. These were the ducks nearest to us.

Sky dust.

A few wheeled overhead, before re-joining their flock at the far shore.

Zoomed 'way in; a fuzzy mallard. Many of the ducks were smaller.

The cloud lifted, swirled, thickened, and drifted off behind the dunes, where the mud lies too deep for walking. All we could see then was the end of the raft, black where everything else was grey. We gave up and went back to Tsawwassen and a toasty coffee shop.

As we drove home, the sky cleared in patches; we saw blue through the clouds. Half an hour later, they had all burnt off, and the sky was a deep, summertime blue. No fair!

Today we're back to fog and damp. Ah, BC!

A Skywatch post.

Enough for company, but she's not sharing

This is the spider that I blame for me putting my head through another's web.

The extra leg, I think, is one discarded by her lunch in the fruitless struggle to escape.

That's a big meal! She'll have leftovers for the next day.

Tomorrow, weather permitting, we're heading to the beach for one of the last lowish afternoon tides this year.

Prospective tenant

The days are still sunny and warm, but the nights, this week, are getting cold, with the temperatures moving towards zero. I have brought my prayer plant in for the winter; the Christmas cactus will be moving inside in a week or so.

And the Western conifer seed bugs are also thinking of warm winter quarters. One was hanging out on my car door the other day. Not a good choice; the car sits outside all winter, in this climate.

This one (or maybe it's the same one, wising up) was waiting just outside the front door for someone to let him in.

"Can you spare a quiet corner? I'm a good house guest, friendly, don't smoke, don't sing, don't eat carpets."

Well, no. Not today. But I'm sure he'll eventually find his way inside when I'm not looking. And maybe my spiders won't eat him this year. Maybe.

Jewelled web

I was chasing a spider to post to Arachtober; a tiny, wriggly, leg-waving spider, busy preparing her lunch. I was so engrossed that I didn't notice this one until I put my head through her web, entangling her in my hair.

She scrambled out, back to her broken web, and held her ground there at what used to be the centre, giving me a good side view of the glue dots along the silk threads.

Strings of pearly beads, pink, blue, and white

(Right-click on the photo to open it in a new tab and see the beads full-size.)

Meanwhile, at Cougar Creek . . .

While I was busy trying to identify a tiny piece of critter all last week, fall landed in Cougar Creek Park. Laurie tore me away from the desk one afternoon to get some air; I'm glad he did.

Bicyclist and bridge, shadows and yellowing leaves

Maples hanging over the creek bed

Fallen leaf, still-hanging leaves

Grass 'n rocks

Bare stems, reflected

Oxymoronic happy cross spider, fattened up on mosquitoes and bluets.

Burdock, ready for transport

Ma crab and the "hairy spine thingy".

The mystery is solved!

We've got a fairly close identification of the "Hairy spine thingy". (First post about it, second post.) A couple of days ago, among other things, various biologists suggested crustacean pleopods, but I was unable to find any to match, and no-one could be positively sure.

Then, this morning, Dr. Tony Irwin, of the Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service (in the U.K.) posted a link to a previous ID made by the Natural History Museum (London). And there are good photos! I'm not sure about copyright issues here; so here are the links: Female crab abdominal carapace, the part usually visible outside. And F. crab abdominal plate, inside.

The pleopods are the end segments of the six hairy "legs", three on each side, folded towards the centre of the photo. Dr. Irwin says that in a large crab, they would be about 3 cm. long, the length of the piece that I found.

A crab is a decapod, which means that she has 10 legs.

As their name implies, all decapods have ten legs; these are the last five of the eight pairs of thoracic appendages characteristic of crustaceans. The front three pairs function as mouthparts and are generally referred to as maxillipeds, the remainder being pereiopods. In many decapods, however, one pair of legs has enlarged pincers; the claws are called chelae, so those legs may be called chelipeds. Further appendages are found on the abdomen, with each segment capable of carrying a pair of biramous pleopods, the last of which form part of the tail fan (together with the telson) and are called uropods. Wikipedia

Repeating myself from long ago: Simple and logical, isn't it?

Well, sort of. The legs and the mouthparts and pincers, which also count as legs for the name, are on the thorax. The abdomen, the part that crabs fold underneath so that they look as if they were all one piece, has its own set of "pods", but they aren't legs, so don't count for the "decapod" name, even if they are built more or less on the same pattern.

Males have two sets of pleopods, which they use to transfer sperm to the female. Females have several sets. These are used to hold the eggs under the abdomen while she is in berry, to fan them and oxygenate them.

I found a couple of photos of local crabs where the pleopods are recognizable:

Dungeness crab, a large crab, up to around 20 cm (8 inches) across the shell. 

"Hairy spine thingies", aka pleopods under her abdominal plate.

One of our small purple shore crabs, also showing off her pleopods. (Not very happy about it, though.)

Her abdominal plate, as it would normally be seen.

(All these photos are from Walla Walla University, Department of Biology.)

So there we have it. My "hairy spine thingy" is a pleopod of one of our larger crabs. I still want to find a dead one and confirm the species, if possible.

"Wacky appendages"

An update on the hairy spine thingy:

In brief, it still has me (us) stumped. History, to date:

The post with the photos and description (here) was cross-posted to my Facebook timeline and my Facebook page. A friend there (JG) suggested that I try the burn test for fabric. Was it vegetable or animal? I broke off a tiny piece and burned it; it smelled of hair or feathers. Animal, then.

Another friend (Fred Schueler from the U. of T.) asked the TAXACOM list of experts for help. They came up with various suggestions, from feathers to the tip of a whale's baleen plates, to an abdominal appendage of a crab.

"Crustaceans are jam-packed with wacky appendages:" - Doug Yanega (Entomology).

They sent me off to search crustacean pleopods. Some of the images look sort of, almost, but not quite,* right.

JG then volunteered to take the photos to the Marine Biology meeting of Nature Vancouver. I took more photos for her, destroying another tiny piece of the sample to look at its "innards".

I de-haired two segments as well as I could.

It turned out to be a semi-hollow tube. Here's the inner lining.

One side has a rough section, that on closer examination looks like a groove lined with some sort of fibers.

The inside of a broken segment. This was very fragile, and snapped like a too-thin eggshell. From the inside, what looked like a dark line turns out to be transparent; the dark colour came from the inner stuff.

The Nature Vancouver marine biologists suggested e-mailing Andy Lamb, one of the authors of the Encyclopedia I use, Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest. I just now got an answer from him: he's stumped, too, and is forwarding the lot to several other people.

So that's where we are now. My next step is to go to the beach at a lowish tide and find a large, dead crab, with all his appendages, and examine them. I'll report then, or as soon as anyone else provides an identification.

A big "Thank you!" to all who have helped so far!

*Pleopod of female blue crab. Not on this coast.