Thursday, May 19, 2016

Shoulda, coulda, didn't

It's a mistake to be too easily satisfied, too quickly beguiled by the obvious. Flipping rocks at low tide, there's a tendency to say, "Look, a clingfish! Look, a pretty anemone, an angry crab!", to take a few photos and go on to the next rock without stopping to really pay attention.

And so doing, I miss out.

At least in some of my photos, taken with a wide enough view, and with a minimum of hand shake, zooming in back at home, I can discover many of the beauties I should have seen in situ.

This was supposed to be a photo of the rose anemone.

Busy scene.

Once I zoomed in, look at what I found:

You may want to click on this and enlarge it.

There's a juvenile wolf eel in there. And I had never seen one before; I wish I had noticed it while I was on the beach.

Another one; this was supposed to be a photo of the clingfish. But there's a complete brittle star, out in the open; I missed it live.

Two starfish, orange and purple, two large snails, several tiny ones, a kelp crab, two grainy hand hermits, pieces of gorgonian, pink and purple encrusting stuff, a long calcareous tubeworm, baby sea urchins, an adult sea urchin, spiral tubeworms, assorted polychaete worms, and the brittle star. Oh, and the clingfish.

About those baby sea urchins; really tiny sea urchins, barely visible in this photo, even at full zoom.

There are at least 5 sea urchin babies here, besides the medium-sized juvenile. I've saturated the red stuff, so as to highlight the pale pinhead urchins.

A purple sea urchin may live up to 70 years. The green sea urchin, a bit smaller than the purple, and more short-lived, grows about 1/2 inch per year. I found both of these, green and purple urchins, on this visit to the beach. A scuba diver told me he's seen thelarger red sea urchins here in the subtidal zone; they grow to about a foot across, counting the spines, and may live up to 200 years. I don't know what species the babies are, but they must be only a few months old.

One more photo; worms that I didn't notice, in a photo of an unco-operative gunnel.

A purple ribbon worm, three different polychaetes (one is striped, upper left), and a spaghetti worm (upper left, orange and yellow). And a four-armed green starfish, a hermit, two purple crabs, an urchin, and a brittle star.

Next visit to the lower intertidal zone, I think I'll sit me down in one spot and look at everything. Easier on my back, too.


2 comments:

  1. Hi, Susannah. I do the same thing all the time. In the field, I just have trouble getting in the right position to have my eyes focus on what I'm looking at. I'm just glad to have a digital camera that so easily captures those things I miss.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's quite amazing what you can miss. I was recently visiting Emiquon NWR and missed at least one Black-necked Stilt and a Pied-billed Grebe whilst photographing coots. I'm fairly certain this happens to everyone. That's why we take so many pictures.

    ReplyDelete

I'm having to moderate all comments because Blogger seems to have a problem notifying me. Sorry about that. I will review them several times daily, though, until this issue is fixed.

Also, I have word verification on, because I found out that not only do I get spam without it, but it gets passed on to anyone commenting in that thread. Not cool!

Powered By Blogger