Muddy buddies

For a few minutes, I looked at the mud between and under yesterday's rocks. It's busy down there:

From a distance, it just looks like brownish mud. Looking down at your feet, it's home to millions of pink-tipped green anemones. When the tide comes in, they'll all wake up and wave their pink tentacles above the surface of the mud.

I flipped a stone and found this iridescent polychaete worm. Also present: stubby isopods, mussels, barnacles, and a few crabs that scuttled away quickly. One didn't quite make it out of range. See it?

More stubby isopods, Gnorimosphaeroma oregonensis, and one large rockweed isopod, Idotea wosnesenskii. Names larger than the animals themselves.

That mud is slippery! I went down on my back, had to roll over in the mud to find something to grab and pull myself up. No harm done (a bit of a bruised tailbone is all), but this next photo was taken quickly while I hurried, dripping mud, back to the car. I should have, will later, stopped to look more closely.

Little black, sharp protrusions on the surface of the mud turned out to be the tips of an under-mud colony of mussels.

Watching it all, impassive:

Gull on a weedy rock.

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Por algunos minutos, me detuve a mirar el lodo entre y debajo de las rocas que mostré ayer.

El lodo, a primera vista, parece sin interés, pero mirando directamente para abajo, se nota que está densamente poblado con millones de anémonas "Anthopleura elegantissima". Cuando sube la marea otra vez, cada una extenderá sus tentáculos color de rosa por encima de la superficie del lodo.

Volteé una piedra y encontré debajo este anélido poliqueto de colores iridiscentes. También presentes: isopodos "chaparros", mejillones, bálanos, y unos cangrejos que se apuraron a esconderse. Uno no logró desaparecer completamente. ¿Lo ves?

Más isopodos "chaparros' y un gran isopodo "Wosnesenski". Los pequeños isopodos llevan el nombre científico, "Gnorimosphaeroma oregonensis", un nombre mucho más largo que el animal.

¡Ese lodo es resbaloso! Terminé cayéndome sobre la espalda en el lodo. No hubo daño, aparte de un moretón en donde no se ve, pero tuve que revolcarme en el lodo para encontrar algo sólido para ayudarme a ponerme otra vez de pie. Así que la foto que sigue fue tomada sin cuidado, aprisa, mientras me apuraba, escurriendo lodo, para regresar al coche. Debería haberme detenido para investigar lo que veía. Otro día será.

Se veía en la superficie del lodo un grupo de lineas agudas, negras. Al mirarlas más de cerca, descubrí que eran mejillones, escondidos bajo el lodo, con solo las puntas al agua. Nunca había notado esto antes.

Y finalmente, una gaviota, mirando todo impasivamente.

Crowned fisherfolk

Worms. It's too general a word, covering everything from a common garden earthworm to a variety of parasites, to flatworms and ribbon worms and scaleworms; to hunters and builders and diggers and tentacled fisherfolk.

The feather duster worms are polychaete worms, segmented worms (like earthworms) but with bristly paddles extending from each segment. They build long tubes to live in, rubbery tubes. (Other polychaete tubeworms make calcareous tubes.) And they have a crown, a bilobed cluster of feathery radioles that opens up at the mouth of the tube, and may have up to several hundred pairs of these radioles. These capture floating particles, sorting them into food or construction material. Near the base of each radiole, they have an eye, a light-sensitive spot that enables them to detect movement nearby, and retract the crown into the tube. The crown may be almost any colour: red, blue, purple, green, tan, pink, orange; solid coloured or striped.

In an angle between two floats, these feather dusters spread their crowns out into the sunlight. In the shade, they all look blackish.

Assorted feather dusters, purple, mauve, tan, maroon. The spiky thing near the upper right is a sea urchin.

Other animals settle on the tubes. Here, tunicates, sponges, algae or hydroids.

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Los gusanos: la palabra abarca demasiados animales, desde la lombriz que vive entre las raices en nuestros jardines, hasta las orugas que se van a hacer mariposas, pasando por una gran variedad de anélidos, platelmintos, poliquetos, etcétera.

Los plumeros de mar son "gusanos" marinos poliquetos; o sea, que están formados de una serie de segmentos, cada uno con par de "patas" o parápodos, estos cubiertos de setas. Se construyen largos tubos flexibles, como de hule. (Otros poliquetos que viven en tubos los hacen a base de carbonato de calcio.) Y llevan una corona, un plumero con radioles (como tentáculos cada uno con sus ramitas). Estos radioles capturan partículas flotantes, dirigiéndolas al uso apropriado, sea comida o material de construcción. Y cerca de la base de cada radiole, tienen un ojito que puede distinguir cambios en el nivel de luz y advertir al plumero a tiempo de esconderse dentro del tubo. Las coronas pueden venir en una gran variedad de colores: morado, azul, rojo, cafe, crema, color de rosa, verde: de un color sólido o con rayas o espirales.

Estos estaban en un ángulo entre dos flotadores, donde les pegaba el sol. En la sombra se ven casi negros.

Otros animalitos se congregan en los tubos: aquí hay tunicados, esponjas, y algas o tal vez hidroides.

Shy Polly

In the sand at the bottom of my aquarium, there lives a polychaete worm. I don't know how old she* is; I saw her first months ago; then she was just a few inches long. The last time I took her out of the sand, cleaning the tank, she was around 6 or more inches long. Hard to measure, because she squirms around constantly, trying to bury herself again. She's a shy critter, rarely shows her face above the sand, and at the least movement nearby, instantly retreats.

Sometimes she tunnels close to the glass. Then I drop some goodies; shrimp pellets usually, nearby, and sit watching, hoping to see her come out to grab a pellet. Usually, she's too fast for me, but I caught her on camera last week.

Looking for that shrimp pellet

Fat, isn't she? This is just about 1 inch at the head end. The rest stays under the sand unless she's really hungry and the food is far away.

The worms are segmented, like our common earthworm, but each segment has a pair of "paddles". Here you can see 6 of these paddles, each with from 3 to about 6 "fingers". 

On the head, she has four eyes and a collection of antennae and palps. And a big mouth, that she can open wide to grab a pellet as fat as she is.

Wide mouth and flexible jaw.

While I watched, she tentatively eased out, waving around to smell where the food was, retreating several times because a small crab walked by. She found the food and opened her mouth wide, wide, grabbed the pellet and disappeared into her tunnel.

When I checked an hour later, she'd filled in the tunnel.

*These worms may be male or female: I don't really know which this one is, but since I've named her Polly (for polychaete, which means "many bristles"), I give her female pronouns.

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Bajo la arena en mi acuario, vive un poliqueto, un anélido común en nuestras playas. Cuando lo vi por primera vez, hace unos meses, medía unos cuantos centímetros. La última vez que la saqué del tanque para hacer la limpieza, ya medía 15 cm. o más. Es difícil medirlo, ya que continuamente se retuerce, tratando de enterrarse otra vez en la arena. Es un animal muy tímido; pocas veces sale a la superficie, y al notar cualquier movimiento, rápidamente se vuelve a esconder.

A veces hace sus túneles cerca de la pared de vidrio. Entonces, coloco un bocadito de camarón cerca. Y me siento a esperar. Muchas veces sale; apenas veo un tentáculo cuando se espanta y desaparece. Pero la semana pasada logré capturarlo con la cámara.

Es un anélido con segmentos, como los de la lombriz de tierra común, pero en cada segmento tiene un par de parápodos (como patitas) con extensiones, de 3 a 6 o más, los que usa para nadar, y también sirven para respirar.

En la cabeza tiene cuatro ojos, varios tentáculos y órganos de tacto. Y una gran boca, que se abre a todo lo ancho del animal.

Mientras miraba esta vez, salió al agua, meneándose para olfatear la comida, regresando varias veces a su túnel cuando pasó cerca un cangrejito. Encontró la comida, abrió la boca bien grande, agarró el bocado y se desapareció.

Cuando pasé una hora más tarde, había rellenado su túnel.

Forgotten beasties

From the "hold" folder, a few beach critters:

Wosnesenski's isopod. I think I held this photo because I wanted to id the tentacly bit near the isopod's rear. I still don't know what it is.

Three snails. Shell road beach, September, 2018. Half the snails I see turn out to be hermit crabs; I think the one on the left may have a hermit in residence; see the tips of her toes.

Three crabs; red rock, green shore, and a hermit. I like the pie-crust look of the red rock crab's carapace. April, 2018

Unidentified polychaete, stretching out of its tube.

A thin slab of wood, riddled with teredo clam burrows. The white bits are remains of the clam's burrow lining.

Rainbow under rocks

The Willow Point beach is rocky; hard, round rocks, mostly cemented into the substrate. In the lower intertidal zone, they are often covered with green sea lettuce and rockweed. Where there is sandstone, it is pitted with green anemone holes. And everywhere there are barnacles, scuttling crabs, and tiny black snails. At the water's edge while the tide was turning, I flipped rocks and combed my fingers through the rockweed. Slow going, but worth the effort.

Here are some of the beasties I saw, in no particular order.

A flatworm, flatworm eggs, and two amphipods. This flatworm kept flipping her edges up towards me, instead of slithering along, as they usually do. It almost seemed as though she were defending her eggs.

A small kelp crab. This one's not wearing the seaweed hat. There was another with it, wearing the hat, just one patch of green algae growing near the top of the head. It ran away before I could get down to their level.

Limpet, periwinkle snail (or hermit in a periwinkle shell), two flatworms, and a pretty orange-striped green anemone, without the green.

Three limpets. Limpets wander about, lifting the forward edge as if to see where they're going. As soon as I touch them, they clamp down and cement themselves to the rock. These ones are still on the move.

Limpets, a whelk, and 6 of the tiny yellow or orange hermit crabs in periwinkle shells.

I haven't been able to identify these hermits. They are always tiny, and brightly coloured. I had at first thought they were greenmark hermits, Pagurus caurinus, which are the right size, but they have unbanded antennae; these little guys have green and white bands on their antennae.

Catching a few rays: there's a starfish, or maybe several starfish under this rock.

A fat ribbon worm. At the upper right, there's a small polychaete that I didn't see until I blew up the photo.

A two-toned polychaete.

This was the highlight of my afternoon. This worm has a blue front end, but the rear half is a bright pink. If you look closely (click on the photo to enlarge it) you can see the four eyes on the head. It's about 18 inches long. (More or less, these worms shrink and stretch continuously.)

There's a wandering ribbon worm, Paranemertes peregrina, with its purple back and cream belly, at the lower left, and a tiny greenish worm at the lower right.

Caught in passing

I was watching hermit crabs in the aquarium when a red worm zipped by.

Spiny polychaete. Each "foot" is tipped with a brush, and armed above with a long spine.

He's tiny; on the right, three copepods are playing. They're about a millimetre long. The round dots along the edge of the shell are oyster eyes. And I don't know what that yellow and black striped creature (or tentacle, or foot) is, peeking out from between the folds of the oyster shell.

A large isopod reached out from a seaweed clump to investigate a mass of green-centred bubbles, probably disintegrating algae.

These isopods are plentiful under rocks and clutching rockweed in the intertidal zone. Sometimes they come home with me; they live happily in the tank for a while, until a crab catches them for dinner. As long as there is at least one branch of rockweed, they stay out of reach.

Little Brother worm

When I changed the water and cleaned the aquarium yesterday, I separated out the empty snail shells, to look them over later. Maybe they weren't as empty as they looked, I thought.

Most of them turned out to be temporary hideouts for amphipods. One held a baby anemone, so small I needed the microscope to identify it. A few had been colonized by the rose seaweed. And one is home to a curious polychaete.

Side view, showing his fleshy palps and many tentacles. The shell is about 1 cm across. The worm has made himself a tube for protection.

Curious critter; if I jostled the shell, or even the tray, he instantly retreated into the shell, but less than a minute later, there he was again, reaching out, casting about, looking this way and that. Curious, or hungry.

Top view, showing his bristly paddle feet, one pair per body segment. He has four eyes, but in this photo, only two are visible.

Earlier, sifting the sand, I had carefully removed another worm, maybe the same species, but this one is now 6 inches long. They're fragile, out of their protective coverings, so I make sure they're safe before I wash the sand. And then, they're the first critters to be replaced once the tank is clean; within seconds they bury themselves in the sand, not to be seen again until next cleanup.

Little Brother's shell went back into the tank, gently buried under a fingertip's depth of sand. I found two more in the tray; tiny red hairs, identifiable as bristle worms only under the microscope.

Miniature water garden

No matter how often I scrub the inside walls of my aquarium, it usually has a haze of green and red algae growing back. And a school of copepods browsing among the plants.

I usually scrub it all off, just before I take photos. This time, I left things as they were.

Yellow-green and red algae start off with circular spots, becoming splotches. Green-green algae start off as blobs, become bigger blobs. Sand grains (regular fine beach sand) show the comparative sizes.

The copepods have one eye each. The ones carrying a round trailer are females; look closely at the one on the left: you can see the egg cases.

In the sand below, miniature polychaete worms scoot up and down their tunnels, waving twin tentacles to capture today's lunch, bits of detritus, scraps of the algae.

Here, the tentacles extend up into the water column. Food particles travel down a groove to the hungry mouth below.

My flash disturbed the worm and he shrunk back into his tunnel. But he soon forgot about it, and pushed back up to the surface to keep on fishing.

Today, I also saw a two-inch long green ribbon worm, out looking for prey. He's an active predator who likes barnacles. He hid in the sand before I collected the camera.

The worms crawl in ...

Flipping a rock on the beach usually exposes a scramble of leggy crabs, heading for cover. When they've gone, if the substrate is wet, knots of worms rouse themselves and ooze or paddle away, more slowly.

Flatworms flow like melted butter, slowly, insensibly, but surely. They're the first to disappear. Note the two eyespots; they're watching me! The green ribbon is a worm, too.

Purple ribbon worms, Paranemertes peregrina, with their pale, creamy bellies, twist and turn, and gradually untangle themselves. It takes them a while to get out of sight. All of the snail shells, I think, are rented out by young hermit crabs.

The polychaetes move quickly; they hate the light. But they're long, so they take a while to entirely hide themselves.

Detail of the longest worm, showing the dot-and-hair extension on each paddle "foot". I don't remember seeing this before. I've saturated the red colour a bit, to make the hairs more visible.

Just worms. Beautiful worms.

They hide their bright, flowery faces in the deep shadows underneath rocks. When the tide abandons them, they flee. When the water comes back, it pays to kneel in seaweed and peer into their hideaways, cautiously; the slightest disturbance will cause them to retreat into their tubes and slam the doors.

Red trumpet calcareous tubeworms, Serpula columbiana. Taken with flash: it's dark down there.

The worms live in white tubes attached to the rock, curved outward at the head to spread their feeding tentacles. The central circle is a funnel-shaped door, or operculum. It seals the tube when the tide goes out, hiding the brilliant head.

Zooming in. I like the rayed funnel on the one on the right.

The spaghetti worms cannot retract their tentacles, as most tentacled worms do. And they really do look like wet spaghetti dumped in the sand, with a sculpted carrot for a body.

Spaghetti worm, Terrebelid sp.

The white "spaghetti" are feeding tentacles. Just beneath them, some of the red gills are visible here. The worms build themselves a soft mud tube, but are not always protected by it. In this photo, only the tail of the worm remains in the tube.

The polychaete worm is not as spectacular as its cousins, but viewed closely, has lovely, shimmery colours, blue, green, pink, and sometimes red.

Zooming in to display the iridescence.

A wormy post

Marine biologists count some 67,290 species of sea worms. (I checked each wormy page on this site and added them up.) And with millions - trillions - of individuals of the more prolific species, no wonder I find worms everywhere I look!

These were waiting out the low tide in the shelter of loose rocks on the Tyee Spit shore.

Shiny, multicoloured polychaete

I find these in the sand underneath the rocks, rarely on a rock or stone. They are shy and quick; mostly, if I look first at the rock, then at the sand, all I see is the last few segments of the worm squirming down underground. The only way to get a photo is to hold the camera ready and aimed, then lift the rock.

Their mouths vary depending on their diet, since the group includes predators, herbivores, filter feeders, scavengers, and parasites. Most have a pair of jaws and a pharynx that can be quickly turned inside out, allowing the worm to grab food and pull it into the mouth. (MESA)

There are 12,000 species of polychaetes. My encyclopedia lists 44 more or less free-living polychaetes in the Pacific Northwest.

A Mud nemertean, Paranemertes peregrina, and something green in a long tube.

Paranemertes, aka the Wandering ribbon worm, or the Restless worm, is easy to identify. It's a long ribbon, up to 25 cm. long, with a purple back and a creamy belly, usually found wandering alone, searching for its dinner: other worms, even worms much larger than itself.

On contact with nereid prey, P. peregrina pulls its head back and everts its light-colored proboscis, which wraps around the prey.  The prey is soon paralyzed, ...  P. peregrina then swallows the nereid.  After feeding it follows its own slime trail back to its burrow.  It eats about one prey worm per day ... (WallaWalla.edu)

I can't identify the green worm in the long tube, other than to guess that it's another ribbon worm.

A typical squirm of green ribbon worms, Emplectonema gracile. And a lone, brown flatworm.

The green ribbon worms are gregarious; where you find one, there are probably several more entwined with it. It eats barnacles, mostly the small acorn barnacles, slithering into cracks or the open mouth of the barnacle, using a poisonous needle-like stylet* to paralyze its prey. (That isn't going anywhere, anyways, but you never know.)

The flatworm also eats barnacles, and is so thin and flexible that it seems sometimes to be simply a brownish coating on the barnacle it's attacking.

In this photo, I've been puzzling over a perfect circle in the bottom of an empty barnacle shell. (Just above the flatworm.) It looks like the edge of one of those finger cots that I use instead of bandaids. A short worm, maybe? A mini Ouroboros?

*Photo of the stylet, here, at the bottom of the page, Row 1, on the right.

Forgotten worms

I was tidying up my files, and found this batch of photos, stashed in the wrong folder since last year. I had been changing the water in the tank, with the assorted residents waiting in bowls and trays of water. A few worms hiding in empty barnacle shells got a whiff of the treats I'd put out for the hermits, and came out to see if they could snag a bite.

Head of polychaete

A different one, reaching.

Mouth, with jaws showing.

The polychaete worm has two black, chitinous jaws. Usually, they're hidden inside the mouth, which is retracted behind the palps and tentacles, but to feed, they reverse the order, pushing the jaws out in front.

Polychaete head with jaws everted. From U. of Cal, SC.

Paddle-foot

I caught up with a polychaete worm out hunting, right up close to the glass wall. He's made himself a hideout with a rolled-up piece of red seaweed, and slides out tentatively, stretching without ever leaving his shelter completely. At the least disturbance, a hermit treading on the far side of the seaweed, or the shadow of my camera, or the flash, he zips back into the tunnel, so fast my eye can't follow him. But he's out soon, waving his tentacles about until he finds something tasty. Then he snatches it and drags it into his dark dining room. He won't be out again for a while.

Searching, searching ...

Zooming in to see the rows of paddle feet, each with its long spine. This is the underside, so at the head what is visible is the mouth, the stubby palps, and assorted tentacles, good for sniffing out yummy meals.

These worms tie together bits of shell, sand, rotting seaweeds, and anything else they can gather, live or dead, into messy clumps and strings. When I take this hodge-podge out of the water and pull on a shell, it's usually so well glued on that I can't get it off without ripping the whole shebang apart and killing the worm.

Wonderful glue; I wish I could find some that good in the stores!

Four-eyes

Two weeks ago, the underwater filter in my aquarium shorted out and electrified the water, then smoked it as well. Several of the largest of the grainy hand hermits died. I changed the water several times in a row, to leach poisons out of the sand, and I've bought and installed a much better filter, one that hangs on the outside of the tank.

Now all seems to be well. The rest of the grainy hand hermits were lethargic for the first week, but are back to normal. The other two species of hermits, the hairies and the tiny orange ones, didn't seem to be affected at all.

So I've been doing a complete inventory of the critters in the tank these last few days, checking to see that everyone's healthy and happy.

One resident that doesn't seem to have suffered at all is this big polychaete worm:

Standing tall, about a quarter out of his burrow, looking for shrimp pellets to steal from the hermits. The snail is on the glass in front of him.

Just poking his head out of the hole, with his mouth open.

I count 4 tentacles, a fat palp, and then a smaller tentacle, just on the right side of his head. It makes me wonder: do each of these tentacles have a different function?

And then, there are the eyes. This worm is quite tame, and let me get a fairly clear view of them; usually, these guys disappear into their burrow the minute anyone comes near, or a light is aimed in their direction.

Four purplish-blue eyes.

Out of the sand, he's about 6 inches long, and as fat as a large earthworm.

More tank residents tomorrow.