More sixes!

Strange: up until a month ago, I had never seen a six-armed starfish. And this last trip to the low tide mark, they were everywhere. Almost all the clamshells I picked up held at least one, and I even found a small one floating, holding onto fine algae hairs.

Baby star, belly-up

Dark brown star. They all seem to like the hinge end of the clamshells.

Two-toned six-armed star.

Pale brown, dark brown, and grey patterns.

I also found many mottled stars, all young. And none, not even one of our usual orange or purple stars, which were the ones most severely hit by the sea star wasting syndrome. Their loss may have been the opportunity for these less common stars to expand their territory.

It's a dog eat dog world out there.

About that family that Val ate ...

The eelgrass beds last week held a large population of proliferating anemones, riding high on the grass, feeding on the small animals in the diatom and hydroid fuzz.

Proliferating anemone, Epiactis prolifera, proliferating.

Like this one, most were adults carrying a column-full of babies and youngsters. Where they have been hiding up until now, I'm not sure; maybe half-buried in the sandy bottom, and now they have midgrated to the eelgrass to feed.

Another family, with one youngster already out on his own. The young stay on the mother's column for 3 months, then crawl away.

I transferred this blade of eelgrass to a bottle of water, and brought it home to the aquarium, where the family settled in happily.

The babies come in a range of sizes; they're not all birthed the same day.

Another view. The anemone in back has captured a chunk of hermit crab food.

Then their troubles began. The hermit crabs ripped the end of the eelgrass out of the clamshell I'd anchored it in, and it floated away. I moved it around to rest against the glass, and the mother anemone started to transfer to the wall. She would be safe there, but again, the hermits yanked the eelgrass away. I found her later, up against the back wall, busy moving onto a stone. That would have been perfect; only the crabs move stones around, and the three in the tank now are very small.

And then, before she was glued down, something moved her again and left her and her brood at the mercy of the current. Which was flowing towards the big burrowing anemone, Val, and her hungry tentacles.

Next thing I knew, Val's mouth was full. And the ends of the eelgrass were protruding. The only sign of the whole blue family was the hint of blue around Val's mouth.

Val's blue mouth. And a young hermit, trying to get at the crumbs from Val's dinner.

This morning, Val spit out the rest of the eelgrass blade, with a bit of slime, all that remains of the entire blue family.

Luckily, before the first move, two of the youngsters decided to leave home, and established themselves on the wall of the tank. They're still there, waving pale blue tentacles, eating and growing.

Young brooding anemone, not old enough to brood yet. 5 mm across the base.

And a couple more crabs

This one is a baby.

Red rock crab juvenile, Cancer productus

I pick up loosely closed clamshells, especially those loaded with barnacles. Almost every one is serving as shelter for young critters. This one held the crab, three small stars, and a scale worm. Look for the worm in the hinge, above, one of the stars in the background, below.

The poor crab didn't know how to deal with sunlight and a giant black eye staring at it. First he tried cowering, then ...

... the challenge. "I'm big and brave and I'll pinch you!"

"Or maybe not. If I roll over and fold up, maybe the giant won't see me."

All these poses took less than a minute. Then I closed the clamshell and put it back down under the eelgrass.

The stripy carapace will be discarded as he grows; as an adult, he will be mostly a dark red. The underside, however, will still have those red spots on white.

Most of the young crabs I've been seeing are the Dungeness crabs, Cancer magister.

Two-inch crab, running, under knee-deep water.

The two crabs are cousins, but the differences are fairly obvious. The Dungeness has a smoother carapace, rougher, toothed, pincer arms, and prominent teeth along the edge of the carapace. The Red Rock crab's carapace is bumpy, but his pincer arms are missing the teeth. The teeth on the edge of the carapace are wavy, and fluted like a pie crust.

The Dungeness gets quite a bit bigger; up to 11 inches across the top. The Red Rock will grow to 8 inches.

At every low tide this time of year, the crabbers are out with buckets and nets and crab traps, wading out waist-deep with the traps, or tramping through shallower water with long-stemmed nets. It's the big Dungeness that they're after; sometimes size is a disadvantage.

Messy crab, with a hat.

Three weeks ago, wading in the eelgrass beds at the bottom of the tidal plain, I saw hundreds of egg masses, pink and yellow, and their parents, opalescent nudibranchs and bubble shells. A couple of days ago, the tide was even lower, and I spent two hours making figure-eights in the same area. And there were no pink and yellow eggs, no nudibranchs, few bubble shells.

Everything has its own season.

This week, the beds are full of blue anemones, sea stars, and crabs. Unusual crabs: crabs I'd never seen before.

For example, this little guy.

He's less than an inch across.

He is completely covered in algae or diatom fuzz, and is wearing a comparatively huge barnacle on his back. Good for camouflage; not so good for the purpose of identification.

The carapace is triangular, with a long cap protecting his head area. It's hard to tell if it's smooth or bumpy, but the edges are wavy, rather than toothed like the shore crabs' carapaces, or sharp, like the kelp crabs. His pincers are bluish*, with orange tips; the legs are also tipped with orange.

I've been examining the photos in the Encyclopedia with a lens, trying to find a match. The closest I can find is the sharpnose crab, Scyra acutifrons, which grows to just under 2 inches across. Adult males have long pincers, but the females are similar to this one. Or maybe he's a juvenile decorator crab, Loxorhynchus crispatus. These grow to about 5 inches across the carapace.

Both these crabs "decorate" their shells, adding algae, anemones, barnacles, diatoms, what have you. And in both species, the males have long pincers, while the females' pincers are about the length of the legs.

Here he is upside-down, and struggling to right himself. From here, he looks like a male, with the narrow plate on the abdomen.

Here's how I saw him at first, under a foot of water:

Under the water, the diatom fuzz is more apparent. His pincers are definitely blue. His eyes look blue, too.

Do you recognize this crab? Can you help with the ID?

*The blue coloring could also be because he is young, and his skin is semi-transparent, so the blue blood shows through.

Candy on a stick

"Tis the season. For laying eggs, hundreds and thousands and millions of eggs. And the bubble shells are enthusiastic egg-layers. Almost every blade of fuzzy eelgrass in the lower intertidal zone carries, somewhere, another blob of transparent jelly filled with yellow eggs.

But not all the eggs are theirs. I was surprised to see a large, pale pink decoration on one stalk in knee-deep water.

Pale pink eggs, without jelly, in messy eelgrass.

I looked for more, and found a few, some very pink, some almost white. The clumps were not like the usual jelly masses that snails leave, nor like the ribbons most nudibranchs create. These were short sausage-like tubes, glued to the eelgrass at the centre and loose at the ends; each one waved separately in the current.

But what laid these?

I found another mass in shallower water, glued to the inside of a clamshell. And with it, another of the opalescent nudibranchs, Hermissenda crassicornis. A clue!

Mother and babies?

At home, I Googled opalescent nudibranch eggs, and there they were; in most photos, the eggs were white, but some had a pinkish cast. And I found a photo of one laying her eggs, on Flickr.

I brought one of the pinker masses home to look at more closely.

Pink. Candy floss pink.

Zooming in. Hundreds of eggs in each "sausage".

I added the egg mass to my tank, but it didn't last. A few hours later, I found a hermit happily eating pink sausages. The next day, they were all gone.

Looks delicious!

Six!

Among the hitchhikers on my handful of eelgrass, I found half a dozen infant stars*, no bigger than a pinhead, and still colourless. I photographed them on the orange lid of the pill bottle I take to the beach.

Miniature crawling snowflakes?

It wasn't until I was saving the photo that I realized what was different about them; instead of the 5 arms that most of our starfish have, these babies have six.

Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest lists four six-rayed starfish: Drab, Colourful, Rusty, and Polar six-armed stars. I have no idea which these are; they're too small to identify.

I dropped them in the tank, not really expecting them to survive. That was a week ago; this evening, one was climbing the wall.

*"Infant stars" sounds too formal for a wandering pinhead. I wonder; should I call them starlets? Or starlings?

Watch out for the coat!

On the underside of a rock at the end of the boat ramp at Boundary Bay - almost at the high tide line - I found a white and brown, squirmy, translucent bit of live jelly and wavy bits. It wouldn't sit still for its portrait, so I popped it in a bag with seaweed for protection, and brought it home.

He* wouldn't sit still in a bowl of clean water, either. I gave up and added him to the tank, where he promptly disappeared. He showed up two days later, and this time, he posed for me.

The opalescent nudibranch, Hermissenda crassicornis, hanging head down, belly outward. Isn't he beautiful?

Also known as the long-horned or thick-horned nudibranch, for the two long extensions in front. ("crassi ..." = L. "thick", "cornis" = L. "horn", as in unicorn, ".)

He's  about one inch long, usually, but sometimes stretches a good bit beyond. The "horns" are part of the foot. In this belly-forward photo, we can see the mouth and the two rhinopores. (More ancient languages, this time Greek: "rhinos" =  ῥινός, "nose", "phore" = φορος, "bearing".) All nudibranchs have these; they are scent or taste receptors. And on the right side, facing us, just above the head, that round, pearly button is the anus.

Along his back, he wears clumps of cerata, that function as gills; they wave about continuously in the current. In many of his cousins, the inner coloured area is orange; this guy only has tiny specks of orange.

Side view, showing the cerata and rhinophores.

He looks so soft and helpless; when my largest hermit came over to check him out, I cringed. Those huge pincers could have chopped him in two with no trouble, it seemed. But the hermit backed off and lost interest immediately. And "Herm" just kept on about his business, not in the least worried. He has his own hired bodyguards, in his coat.

This nudibranch eats anemones and hydroids. And digests everything but the stinging cells; those he stores in the tips of the soft cerata. And they still work, even in a foreign body, protecting the sea slug just as they protected the original anemones.

Browsing in the red algae; top of the head, with its distinctive markings.

He seems to have settled in happily to my aquarium; he wanders about, nibbling on whatever's growing on old stones and shells, and spending a lot of time in the red algae bushes.

 It eats hydroids, but the diet also includes small sea anemones, bryozoans, colonial ascidians (Aplidium solidum, botryllids), annelids, small crustacea, tiny clams, dead animals of any sort.  Will eat other Hermissenda. (From Wallawalla.edu.)

He shouldn't starve in the tank. Even though there's no other "Herm" for him to eat.

*These nudibranchs are hermaphroditic, with both male and female organs. Since this guy has no mate, he's not a mother, so "he" will do for him. For now.

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?"