Flash mob

Baby crabs love the light. Swarms of them jitterbug on the aquarium wall by a side light. Here they are, dancing attendance on a visiting Nassa snail.

She may be eating a few as she goes.

When I collect an eyedropper-full of these and look at them under the microscope, most of them are the wriggly, leggy crab zoea. Some will be copepods, and there is a certain amount of detritus; floating bits of shrimp, snail poop, shreds of algae and the like. I wash off the slide in the water, and within minutes, the critters are dancing in the light again.

Bouncing back

Sometimes the resilience of tiny critters bowls me over. I carefully remove every hermit and crab I can find from the sand in the aquarium, then churn the sand around, back and forth, changing the water and churning again several times, to get all the crud out. Then I pour in clean water and smooth everything out, and a pinhead-sized hermit bounces to the top, not in the least disturbed by the upheaval.

I scrub down a wall, then notice that I've dislodged an infant anemone and it's caught in my towel. No problem; I rinse out the cloth, and the anemone drifts away in the current. A bit later, I find it happily anchored on a fresh piece of seaweed.

Tonight, cleaning the tank again, I ran my fingers through the sand in one corner, looking for a tiny clam I'd seen there two days earlier. I didn't find it; it will show up eventually. But once everything was back in its place, I happened to look at that corner, and there was a miniature tubeworm, standing tall, as if there had been no major earthquake in that spot just half an hour earlier.

Feather duster worm, about 1/4 inch tall.

My hermits get in a fight. One ends up maimed, with both pincers gone. She struggles along, avoiding confrontation, holding her food with her spare mouthparts, hanging around the roots of eelgrass, unable to climb it. And then she molts, and stretches out her new pincers, still baby-sized, but serviceable. Next molt, she'll be back to normal.

"See my new hands!"

In the absence of raccoons

I keep the BirdCam loaded and aimed at my birdbath, where raccoons occasionally come to drink. Every few days I check the photos. Usually, they're of juncos and chickadees, chickadees and juncos, and sometimes a raccoon tail, just leaving. This week's take was a disappointing series of me, out in the night murdering slugs.

As I went to replace the memory and start the camera going again - never give up! - I saw movement on the edge of the lens. A little springtail going around and around, following his own footsteps, like Piglet. The BirdCam delivers, one way or another.

"There's gotta be an end to this path."

"Maybe back this way?"

I'll have to send this in to the Springtail group for an ID; Entomobrya sp. or Orchesella, possibly.

While I'm at it, here's a carpet beetle that dropped in to visit. He's a giant alongside the springtail.

Not a raccoon, either.

Pink beach

I made a quick run to the beach to pick up goodies for my hermits and crabs, but it's been a busy day, and by the time I drove into Beach Grove, the sun was setting behind me.  The tide was halfway out, and the beach, when I finally got there, was dark grey, except where tidepools reflected the pink of the clouds above. There were a couple of ducks and a heron in the distance, and I could hear gulls arguing over supper, but couldn't see them in the dusk.

A perfect time to try out a new camera, right? I took a half dozen photos, then got to work looking for eelgrass. By shape; I couldn't see colours any more, other than the pink sheen on wet areas.

The ducks. At maximum zoom, in the dusk. The photo turned out lighter than what I was seeing. Yes, the water was pink. What looks like a dead body on the sand is a log.

With the pink light, even mud with worm poop looks good.

I chased down the heron, but he flew away and all I got was a blur of wings. And by the time I'd collected my small bag of seaweeds (mostly rockweed and a kelp holdfast), the first star was out. Time for coffee at Tim Horton's, and the road home.

My hermits are happy tonight, swarming over the seaweeds and peeling the skin off the holdfast.

New camera

One day without a pocket camera was one too many. I went out and bought another; a little Sony like the last one. This one is the DSC-WX350.

By the time I got it home and set up, it was too dark to take it for a run outside, so I took a few trial shots into the aquarium.

Red algae, a shred of sea lettuce, and the little blue anemone.

Hairy hermit.

Juvenile leafy hornmouth, bearing three very tiny baby blue anemones. 

One of the miniature orange hermits, on eelgrass.

So far, so good. It's about the same size as the one it replaces, but with better zoom. In this first test, it gives me good colour; difficult through algae-coated glass. It's fast, so it stops even walking hermits in their tracks. Unfortunately, the photos are noisy, and focussing is iffy on tiny things. But I do like its speed.

I won't be using it for my critters, though. The real test will be tomorrow: skies, stuff, buildings, roadsides, people.

Hard to believe

It's still February. Last year at this time, we were snowed under:

Snow in my maple tree, Feb. 23, 2014.

This year:

It's cherry blossom time!

Pink everywhere I look

The magnolias are starting to bloom

A tree full of white flames.

And today I took Laurie down to sit in the sunshine again, but it was so hot, even he had to move to the shade.

These last 4 photos are the swan song of my trusty little pocket Sony; it has now developed a bad smear of something inside the lens and I can't clean it. After 4 years of sand, salt spray and the occasional saltwater bath, rain, mud, sticky kid fingers, a few falls, and more sand blasting, it has earned its retirement.

So many choices!

Small hairy hermit in a shell that looks a bit too roomy contemplates a bargain basement selection.

The little white one looks like it would fit.

Pink and white

Laurie's Daphne is blooming again!

I love the rumpled buds.

These plants are slow starters, and picky about their conditions, to boot. And Laurie planted his at the wrong time of year, then it had a difficult winter, too much water in the summer, and no care this winter at all. I'm surprised to see it still growing.

They are supposed to be extremely fragrant, but I haven't noticed any scent. I just discovered why:

The scent is so thick that on warmer days it can envelop a neighborhood. (From Portland Nursery)

Oh. We haven't had any "warmer days". Not even warm days. I'll wait for a sunny afternoon, and check again.

Four eyes

Just another hermit portrait.

"Hi, there!"

In a full-face view, those two little dark spots in the mouth look like eyes, as if the hermit were carrying a little pet. A mousie, or a kitten, maybe?

Burning sky

We've had a couple of glorious days. Yesterday and today, I took Laurie down to the Garden Walk to bask in the sun. (He basked, I sought out too-narrow stripes of shade.) And then, on the way home this afternoon, I was treated to a head-swivelling, eye-blistering sunset. Pink everywhere overhead, to the south, east, and north; and to the west, flaming yellows and oranges, simmering down to reds in my rear-view mirror as I turned into our driveway.

The traffic was heavy, so I pulled into a bus stop by an open schoolyard near home to get a photo.

5:43 PM. 

This was 10 minutes past the "official" sunset time, as given by timeanddate.com. But isn't this a sunset?

Looking at one of the sunrise/sunset pages, I noticed that our "sunsets" fall after sunset, during the twilight period. To confuse the matter, there are three ways to measure this twilight: there's Civil twilight, Nautical twilight, and Astronomical twilight.

Definitions:

• Sunset is

 "when the last part of the Sun is about to disappear below the horizon (in clear weather conditions)." (And over a flat horizon.) (timeanddate.com)

• Civil twilight

... begins at sunset and ends when the geometric center of the sun reaches 6° below the horizon (civil dusk). Civil twilight can also be described as the limit at which twilight illumination is sufficient, under clear weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; at the ... end of evening civil twilight, the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under clear atmospheric conditions. (Wikipedia, CT)

• Nautical twilight begins

... at sunset and end(s) when the center of the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. In general, nautical twilight ends when navigation via the horizon at sea is no longer possible. (Wikipedia, NT)

• And Astronomical twilight goes on until 

... the center of the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon. From the end of astronomical twilight in the evening ... the sky (away from urban light pollution) is dark enough for all astronomical observations. (Wikipedia, AT)

There's a handy diagram on Wikipedia that sort of clears this up.

Wikipedia, by TWCarson

Complicated, and irrelevant to my purposes. I would like to propose a useful new category of twilight: Fiery Twilight. I'll define it as beginning when the first tinge of yellow or pink shows up in the eastern sky and ending when the last hint of glowing embers dies in the west. The length of time will vary, except that it will invariably be too short.

Another Skywatch post; two this week!

Mr. (or Mrs.) T.

The first plume moth of the season was waiting for me by the door when I came home this afternoon.

Morning glory plume moth, Emmelina monodactyla

I have found these around here before, and had tentatively identified them as the Morning glory* moth. Tonight, looking again at the samples on BugGuide, I found a helpful annotated photo, which more or less confirms the id.

The markings pointed out on the photo are:

• the curved wing tips. Check.
• Three dots along the centre back of the abdomen. Check.
• A dot near the centre of the wing. I think I see them, although I'm looking at it from below, so I'm not really sure.

Next time, I'll know what to look for.

The caterpillars of these moths feed on Convovulvus species, including our pestiferous bindweed. But one of my neighbours planted Morning glories last summer: I'll check her plants for the caterpillars later on.

Proof

The skies have been grey, blue-grey, grey, greenish-grey, grey, and rainy grey for days, but this afternoon Laurie said, "Look! Blue!" And there it was, a small blue patch that faded as soon as I went to the window.

On the way home, it appeared again; blue sky to the south, between clouds. Waiting at a traffic light between trucks, I took a photo through the car window. Good thing I did; 10 minutes later, when I parked at home, the clouds had closed in again.

Just goes to show; the sky is blue, after all.

A Skywatch post.

Yellow

Boundary Bay, end of January:

With tiny eagle, heron, gulls and ducks.

In a wet garden

In our gardens, it's spring. Leaves are unfolding, flowers budding or even blooming. Laurie's three-year-old leeks, that he planted hoping for leek soup, but that never grew more than a few inches, have sprouted again, for the third year. (They won't end up in soup this year, either.)

And Laurie is lying on his back in the hospital, staring at the grey sky through his window. So I took my little pocket camera and went out to take a few photos that I could then show him, back at the hospital. The minute I went outside, it started to rain. I kept going and took a few fast photos anyway.

Hellebores. Laurie's are whitish. Mine, back in the shade, are barely sprouting now. They will be deep purple.

One of Laurie's collection of ferns. With the leaves neither of us had the energy to remove in December.

Perennial bleeding hearts, just sprouting. Mine, in deep shade, are white; his will be a strong pink.

Running back to shelter across the lawn, I had to stop to look at this droplet on a branch of the linden tree. The building behind me and a tall evergreen are reflected here, upside-down.

I had to leave the camera open on the seat beside me all the way to the hospital, to let it dry out. And Laurie smiled at his little row of leeks.

The search continues

Somewhere there has to be the perfect outfit. Is this it?

White shell, black shell, fat shell, thin shell ... hmmm ...

Sand in his teeth

Found on Crescent Beach:

"That's not my spinach!"

Eelgrass washed up on the west shore of Boundary Bay and around the corner at White Rock piles itself up in great, knotty heaps of rotting black bands, smelly and usually covered with flies. On Crescent Beach, on the east shore, it blows up above the tide line onto the gravel, and dries into these short brown ribbons. No flies, no noticeable odor.

It is probably the effect of the wind, which is much stronger and more constant on Crescent Beach.

Black-eyed babies

The water in my aquarium was cloudy. It shouldn't have been; I'd just finished a complete tank clean-up. But all the residents seemed happy and busy, so I let it be.

Early this morning, just after the tank lights came on, I noticed movement along the wall nearest a light; little flecks of light, dancing in clouds of smaller flecks that moved like flocks of starlings, swirling, coming together, then washing away in the current, only to turn and spin into the flock again.

What were they? I fished some out with an eyedropper and got out the microscope.

Zoea! Crab babies! Cute, big-eyed, dancing babies!

This is one of the "big" flecks of light. Big eyes, long spines in front, long tail.

Side view

These were hard to photograph, since they are never still. But the tiny specks were even worse:

Three zoea, and a few of the tinies.

At first, I thought the littest specs were copepods, and the zoea were eating them, but looking closely, I realized that they moved differently, were a different shape, and were continuously waving a bunch of little legs. First molt of crab zoea? I don't know.

One dancing zoea, dozens of little critters. The dark spot in the centre is part of their body; the eyes are smaller, at the front. One near the tail of the zoea shows a clear profile.

There were thousands of these.

Three zoea, one showing off his headgear.

The female black-clawed crab had been carrying eggs when I first saw her. When I changed the water a couple of days ago, they were gone. I think these may be her babies, freshly hatched.

And mostly, freshly eaten, too. Many marine invertebrates, like crabs have thousands of offspring at a time; the world they are born into is so dangerous, so full of hungry mouths, that most of them die in infancy. The thousands I saw this morning are gone; checking the tank half an hour ago, I found only three dancing zoea. The barnacles and anemones have probably finished off the rest.

More info:

 Apart from the Dromiacea, all crabs share a similar and distinctive larval form. The crab zoea has a slender, curved abdomen and a forked telson, but its most striking features are the long rostral and dorsal spines, sometimes augmented by further, lateral spines. (Wikipedia)

One of Haeckel's drawings. A typical crab zoea, for comparison. (via Wikipedia)

From SeaGrant, Alaska, here's a photo to show the size of these babies; these are red crab zoea.

Zoea and pencil.

There's a photo of a group of zoea, apparently through a microscope, at that link. And Keith Davey, in Australia, has a couple of wriggly gifs, showing the zoea and the megalopa stages of baby crabs.

Does it fit?

You've got to try on quite a few outfits before you find one that really fits. This one may be just a little too roomy for a small blue hermit.

"It's pretty, but it would make me look fat, don't you think?"

Hungry legs

On a small stone in the aquarium, dozens of acorn barnacles are fishing:

Yes, those are their legs. Lots of hairy, sticky legs.

Some barnacles fan the water, back and forth, back and forth. Some unroll their long legs, wave them once, and immediately roll them back inside the shell, over and over. Of these, each one has his own rhythm, some faster, some slower.

These tiny ones mostly just keep their fans spread out, retracting them briefly from time to time to see what they've caught. Copepods, baby crabs, and leftover shrimp crumbles, probably.

Gold in the dust

Found in the dust in a corner:

Long-dead sowbug carcass, spider webs.

Just because I liked the colours.

Weight-lifting mama

They say ants are the best weight lifters, lifting 20 to 50 pounds their own weight. I think maybe crabs have them beat. Small crabs move stones or shells much larger than themselves, often laden down with seaweeds and other critters on top.

I've been watching the tiny black-clawed crabs in my tank. The female is still only about a centimetre (1/2 inch) across, and weighs about 2 grams, according to my food scale*. She has chosen the base of a large stone as her preferred hiding place, kicking out the larger male who lived there earlier. Yesterday, the stone was tipped almost onto its side. This morning, it was straightened up again, but turned at a right angle from its previous position.

I took the stone out and weighed it. A little over 250 grams, more than half a pound, That's over 100 times the weight of the crab that's shifting it around.

Two legs to hold the rock, four to lift it, and two pincers to wave at intruders.

(*I weighed her in a plastic cup, with a bit of water for comfort, and then the cup and water alone. The crab made barely any difference.)

Swimming lesson

So the bugs think it's spring, too. A western conifer seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, woke up from his winter's nap somewhere in my woodwork, and went exploring. The water in the aquarium looked good and he stopped in for a drink. I found him there, struggling, upside-down under the flow from the pump, and rescued him; salt water is no place for a landlubber bug!

I poured some tap water over him to wash off the salt, and dried him off with a J-cloth. Afterward, he was quite content to sit on the cloth and watch me, so I took a couple of quick photos.

"Thanks for the bath!"

He was quite interested in the camera, and left the J-cloth to walk up my hand for a closer look.

These bugs are always so calm, and so interested in their surroundings; as curious as kittens, but without the brain power to account for it. I wonder what goes on in their tiny heads. And whether they remember what they just discovered. Will this guy, once he gets back inside, go for a drink in the tank again?

I put him outside in the rain; it's warm enough already, and the water's fresh.

Happy cottonwood

The redwing blackbird males are back at the Centennial Beach duck pond, and tuning up for the big nesting site sale, starting when the first females arrive.

Cottonwood tree full of contented chirps, squeaks, and quiet "Konk-i-rees". Full chorus begins soon.

The powers that be have fenced off the duck pond and surrounded it with shrubbery. Not so handy for us bird watchers; once the shrubs have leafed out, we will have to stand on picnic tables to see the birds. But the ducks seem pleased, and the reedy island in the centre will be a better nesting site than before. More private, and with less floating trash, I think.

Why I left trash on the beach

In an expanse of clean sand, a crushed plastic gallon bottle spoiled the view. I picked it up, planning to remove it to the appropriate trash can, and found that it was being used as a roof by a mud shrimp.

Blue mud shrimp, Upogebia pugettensis, about 3 inches long

These crustaceans usually live in burrows about a metre deep; it is rare to find one on the surface. Apparently, if an adult is removed from his burrow, he can't dig a new one, so this exile may have become fish food as soon as the tide came in. At least the gallon jug kept the gulls from finding her*.

When I exposed her to the sunlight, she started crawling away. She's not very good at it on the surface; she kept unrolling her abdomen to push forward, but there was no purchase on the sand, and her legs didn't seem strong enough to carry her weight out of water. I took a few photos and dug her a new pool to crawl into. When she got there, I replaced her roof above her. Recycling takes several forms.

A couple of years ago, we found a Bay ghost shrimp in this same area:

Bay ghost shrimp, Neotrypaea californiensis

At first glance, these look very much alike, but the Bay ghost shrimp is pinker, more translucent, has no rostrum (the "hat" over the head area), and the pincers are more unequal in size.

The Blue has a hairy rostrum with a sharp point, rather difficult to see because of the hairiness. The legs and claws are hairy; you can see signs in the photo at the front bend of the large pincer. The colour varies from muddy brown to bluish. This one, in the slanting light of a late afternoon sun looked more orange; the blue shows up faintly in the legs.

(Compare; Google images of Urogebia pugettensis.)

*"Her": randomly-selected sex, because I don't like calling conscious beings "it". In these Blues, as opposed to the Bay ghost shrimp, males and females look alike at first glance.