Salt-water chameleons

Maybe it's because they're transparent. Maybe it depends on what they're eating this week. Maybe it's where they've settled. Maybe they're akin to mood rings: whatever the reason, the orange-striped green anemones, Haliplanella lineata, in my tank are never the same colour twice in a row.

This is the largest of these tiny anemones, parked for the moment on sea lettuce in a bed of deep red Turkish towel and red leafy algae.

Open, showing mouth lining. Pinkish today.

Almost closed. Just the slightest hint of orange. And the green base is blue.

I don't know what those white lines inside the closed anemone are. Ingrown tentacles, maybe?

Tomorrow I'll be travelling, and won't be posting. See you Sunday!

Tentacles!

Still testing shutter priority mode.

The anemones in my aquarium cause me no end of trouble, with their semi-transparent tentacles always in motion, and their habit of picking the most awkward spots to settle in.  I've taken hundreds of photos and deleted almost all of them. A fast shutter definitely helps.

Double lines in Val's tentacles. She often twists them in spirals like this.

A quick shot, with minimal processing; cropping, resizing, white balance is all.

The largest of the Orange Striped Green Anemones, Haliplanella lineata, (What a big name for such small critters!) has a good appetite, and a full crown of tentacles to keep it in groceries. It seems to have eaten something dark, which has left a black mark in the base, invisible in normal circumstances, but not when it's parked on glass.

These anemones have from 60 to 100 tentacles, up to about 2 inches long. This one is getting close to that maximum.

Feeding, this anemone has a pale greenish cream column. The upper half is the same translucent off-white as the tentacles. I was starting to doubt my identification, when in protest against the hot weather and my slowness in providing more ice, it shut down, condensing itself to a half-inch round dark green mass, with the orange stripes it's named for. Chilled and happy once more, the stripes disappeared.

They breed like cloned rabbits

. . . underwater rabbits, that is. A couple of small anemones arrived in the aquarium towards the end of last November. By the first week of December, one had split iself down the middle twice. A few days later, there were 2 more. These 5 then cloned themselves, making 10. And so it went; at last count, there were about 50.

They started out on the wall of the aquarium, up near the water surface, but now that space is crowded, and they've begun to move to the seaweed and stones in the tank. One group is hanging out on the water pump, making a nuisance of themselves when I need to change the filters.

On eelgrass. The column is less than 1/2 an inch tall.

On a brown seaweed, against a background of Turkish towel.

As far as I can tell, these are the orange-striped anemone, Haliplanella lineata, an import that probably came from the far side of the Pacific. (The stripes may be either orange or white, against a greenish background. Most of the ones in the tank are quite pale, maybe because of the light levels or diet.)

These anemones may breed sexually in their home territory, but elsewhere they clone themselves, either by splitting down the middle, then moving apart, or sometimes by just moving over, leaving a tiny blob of tissue behind. A few days later, the blob is a fully-functioning anemone.

They eat tiny swimming organisms; copepods and baby amphipods, etc. Sometimes I give them a treat of mashed shrimp, or they'll catch a pellet of hermit crab food, swept their way by the current.

Anemones and other wanderers

Residents in my aquarium, some new, some old:

A medium-size grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus.

These hermits like a shell 'way too big for them. It seems impractical; all that weight and bulk to haul up the blades of eelgrass, but they persist. They don't seem to mind a tumble or three.

Look inside the shell; his small fourth leg, the one he uses to hold the shell in place, is visible.

Orange lined anemone, Haliplanella lineata, on vegetarian snail.

I brought this anemone home on a small stone. Within hours, it had packed up and left. I found it a few days later on the back of the big abalone shell, and a day later, inside the lip. A few days later, after more moves, it met this snail. The snail travels around the walls, down into the sand, up a wall again, eating algae. And the anemone, finally, is content to stay put and let the snail do the chauffering.

Stubby isopod, Gnorimosphaeroma oregonensis*, on a blade of eelgrass

A bunch of these, at least 30, came home on the eelgrass I brought for the hermits. Most of them are very tiny, barely little specks that alternately swim and crawl. When I try to capture one, it rolls up into a tight ball, like a pillbug does. This is one of the larger ones.

*His name is bigger than he is.

Val, growing bigger every day. Last I measured, her tentacles were 4 cm. long.

And she's another wanderer, more of a homebody than the snail rider, but never content to stay in the same corner for too long. Now she's at the far back of the aquarium, making me almost stand on my head to get a good look at her.

Barnacles and snails

Not even the barnacles stay put around here. Sure, they're glued firmly to their base, but in this case, the base is the empty shell of a larger barnacle, and it rolls about as the snails and hermits walk over it or the current takes it. On the beach, they wouldn't survive; they'd be tossed up on shore to dry, or eaten by a passing fish. In the aquarium the only thing they need to fear is Val, and the pump is set so that the current sweeps them away from her.