Busy bubbles

There are three bubble shell snails in my tank. They're doing their best to turn that into thirty. Or three hundred.

Lone bubble shell, Haminoea japonica. Belly view, through glass.

Two bubble shells. The one in back has been following the other's slime trail from the far side of the tank, and is about to catch up.

At last! And the two slipped under the sand together, to indulge in their favourite pastime.

These snails are hermaphroditic; at each mating, one takes on the male role, the other acts as the female. The next time round, they may switch. And both are capable of laying eggs.

Their second favourite pastime. Laying eggs.

The eggs are expelled through a genital pore just behind the head. Each yellow egg is encased in a tramsparent jelly capsule, that is just barely visible in these photos.

As she lays the eggs, she curls away, leaving a crescent shaped jelly mass glued to whatever surface she has chosen (in this case the front glass wall of the tank.)

I'd never seen a bubble snail's mouth before; it's usually completely shrouded by the head shield and the lower foot.

The eggs should hatch in about a month. Unfortunately for the bubble's plans of conquest, the infants don't survive in the tank. They're probably swept up by the pump within hours of hatching.

Slimy!

I always know where my bubble shell snails are; all I have to do is look for the trail of slime bubbles and follow it.

Bubble shell, Haminoea japonica, and Nassa snail, at water surface.

Bubble shells wear their shells inside the body; not much use for protection. Instead, they produce a prodigious amount of mucus and often shelter inside a circle of the stuff. When they leave, it remains stuck to the surface, sometimes on the glass of the aquarium, sometimes rolled into a blob of sand.

The rest of the slug and snail tribes, from our garden slugs to nudibranchs and limpets, are slimy beasts, too, if not as productive.

In snails and sea slugs (nudibranchs), each species has a unique chemical composition to their slime, and within each species, individuals can even be identified. (Ucluelet Aquarium)

This slime is useful stuff. On land, or underwater on scratchy rocks and sand, it serves as a lubricant for the tender foot as it slides along. For going up vertical walls, and sleeping on the underside of a rock, it's a glue.

But that's not all it's good for.

• It's a road map. A snail can follow her own trail home at the end of the day's hunt. Or another may follow her trail, hoping to mate when he catches up with her. I see the Nassa snails doing this often, on the wall of the tank.

• Or a carnivorous snail (or a worm) can follow the slime trail of his prey.

• The slime coating keeps an intertidal critter moist at low tide, when he is exposed to the air.

• It serves as a defense. Some nudibranchs, some sea stars, and other critters exude a thick layer of slime, really sticky slime, when they are disturbed or threatened.

• It may protect the skin against bacteria and parasites.

• And don't forget reproduction! Remember the leopard slugs, that hang from branches on two threads of their own slime to mate in the air? (Video) Other snails transport sperm in a mucus environment, if not as dramatically. And then the moon snail uses her slime to glue sand grains together to build her big "sand collar" egg case.

Bubble shell slime trail on aquarium wall

And I've discovered another function of the slimy goop. When a bubble shell is knocked off his blade of eelgrass, or off his spot on my tank wall, he rappels down to the sand on his slime rope, landing gently at the bottom. Helpful, when your shell is so fragile.

And a couple of days ago, a hermit crab knocked a zebra leafslug off the top leaf of the seaweed. As I watched, the slug floated across to the far side of the tank on a thread of slime, rather like a ballooning spider on her silk.

Handy stuff, that slime!

Bubble wrap critter

When I was a kid, I used to sit for hours on the beach, sifting sand, looking for miniature shells. Tiny mussels, snails, Baltic macomas in pink and yellow, dime-sized sand dollars, little stripy clams, limpets with chimney holes: I loved them all, and always went home with a pocketful.

I don't sit on the beach any more, but I still keep an eye out for the delicate mini-shells. Pretty clams turn up on the White Rock beach, macomas at Iona Beach, periwinkles on Crescent Beach. At Boundary Bay, besides the ever-present mud snails and big broken clams, the remainders of gull dinners, I don't see many others. Occasionally, I find a few pink macomas or a sharply-pointed snail shell. And rarely, maybe three times in all the years I've been looking, I find a bubble shell.

Probably Haminoea vesicula. Very thin, extremely fragile, translucent, and so light I could blow it away. This one is 7 mm long.

Underside. Or rather, inside bottom.

In spring and summer, they say the animal itself can be found in beds of sea lettuce and eelgrass. I had never seen it. And the rest of the year, it may as well be invisible; it blends in perfectly with the sand.

I found an oval bubble shell (the animal, not the shell) in a bag of eelgrass and sea lettuce that I brought home for my hermits. When I washed the veggies, a tiny slug-like thing oozed out and across the bottom of my bowl.

Haminoea japonica, top view. About 3/4 inch long, stretched out.

This is a mollusc, related to the aglaja that I found last year. Here's a mouthful:

it's "a marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusc in the family Haminoeidae" (Wikipedia)

Opisthobranch means "gills behind" (and to the right of the heart). ... Opisthobranchs are characterized by two pairs of tentacles and a single gill behind and to the right of the heart. (Wikipedia, again)

I didn't see the tentacles, unless they are those two little protrusions on the sides of the head. It's hard to tell, because of the unusual head: the oval bubble shell is distinguished by hir forked head shield, like a flat helmet. And the front of the foot is flattened out underneath this shield, making it look from the side as if the animal had fat lips.

"Mouth" closed.

"Mouth" open. I think those two black dots are eyes.

Unlike the sea slugs, Hammy has a shell. But the flesh of the foot folds up around the outside of the shell, in two wings over the sides, and a smaller cover at the tail end. I took these photos as s/he slid across a piece of sand dollar; on the sand, the spotted body blends in so perfectly that only the top of the shell can be seen. Once it reaches the sand, s/he buries hirself quickly, in a few seconds.

Fully stretched out, crawling up the glass wall of the aquarium. The underside. The shell is visible, but encased in flesh. Head at the top, tail end floating free. A minute later, s/he let go, floated to the sand, and disappeared.

This bubble shell eats vegetation, like the sea lettuce and sea hair algae, as well as diatoms. (The aglaja, hir cousin, is a carnivore, and eats bubble shells.) S/he also eats sand, which can be found in hir gizzard. (And I thought only birds had gizzards!)

As s/he travels along, s/he leaves a trail of slime, which possibly may serve to guide other bubble shells to hir location. I noticed this when s/he climbed up the glass wall; behind hir, a string of tiny bubbles caught the light.

This whole sub-class, the Opisthobranchia, boasts some of the strangest animals in the ocean. It includes the nudibranchs, with their amazing colours and imaginative body shapes, the "flying" sea angel, the winged slug, the stomach wing, the sacoglossa sapsuckers, that look more like scraps of rag than animals. (This page has some of our local specimens Or see National Geographic's photos of nudis. Unbelievable!.)

"Hammy" at least looks sensible, but s/he has hidden talents. The bubble shells are hermaphroditic; each one is both male and female. After mating, s/he lays the eggs in small, yellow, sausage-shaped clumps, from 300 to 700 yoked eggs in each.

So far, this is unsurprising. But then, the some of the eggs hatch into tiny swimming veligers, free-living. These go through several stages, out on their own in the water, not eating, but risking being eaten, before they mature and settle down to a slug shape.

Veliger of a sea hare, a relative of Haminoea. 50 nanometres. Wikipedia.

Other eggs wait to hatch until they are mature, crawling little bubble shells. (CIESM Atlas) There are advantages to both strategies; the veligers get to populate new territory, while the homebodies are safer.

Haminoea vesicula (the empty shell above) is a native: H. japonica is an import from Japan, previously known there as H. callidegenita. It has now spread worldwide. It doesn't seem to be invasive, but may be carrying the organism that causes swimmer's itch. Carry a towel!