There's always something new ...
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| Transparent tunicates. With their shadows. |
In a corner between three floats, a stray ray of sunlight caught a group of whitish blobs, visible only from one awkward angle.
They looked like lightbulbs to me. The rope on the left is probably about an inch or a bit less across, so the largest of these bulbs would be two and a bit inches long.
There's a local solitary tunicate that looks like these, the Lightbulb tunicate, Clavelina huntsmani, but it has two very visible "filaments". The Transparent tunicate, Corella willmeriana, is slightly larger than the Lightbulb, and is mostly translucent, with a visible gut on one side. I found photos of these in two websites, one taken here in Campbell River, the other just across the channel on Quadra Island. There's another, very similar tunicate, an invasive, Ciona savignyi but it is much larger. It has showed up just across the border; I don't know if it has arrived here yet.
It's hard to see clearly, but I think this one is the Transparent.
A solitary tunicate is like a little jug, with two openings, an intake and an outflow tube. It attaches itself to a solid substrate at the base.
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| The structure of a solitary tunicate. Image: Washington U. |
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En una esquina entre tres flotadores, encontré estos animalitos, que parecen un foco. El cordón a la izquierda mide tal vez una pulgada de diámetro, lo que hace que el más grande de estos animales medirá aproximadamente 2 pulgadas de largo.
Son urocordados, también conocidos como tunicados, y solitarios; muchos de los urocordados viven en colonia; estos se juntan pero cada uno por separado.
Hay tres especies de tunicados como este que viven en nuestras aguas; el "Foco", el Transparente, y un invasivo, que es más grande. El "Foco" tiene dos lineas en el interior, como los filamentos de un foco a la antigua.
Creo que estos son el tunicado Transparente, Corella willmeriana. Encontré fotos de estos tomados aquí en Campbell River, y al otro lado del estrecho, en la isla Quadra.
Un tunicado solitario tiene la forma de un jarrito, con dos aperturas, por las que fluye el agua. Se fija por su base en un sustrato sólido.
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