Blowing his own trumpet

I had promised to try to get a photo of the tiny tubeworm's "trumpet", so this afternoon, I propped the camera an inch away from the worm, and got him to sit for his portrait.

Red trumpet calcareous tubeworm, Serpula columbiana, back view of the mouth.

The worm ("Red, for short) wasn't the least bit shy; I kept taking a few photos, picking him up and repositioning him, trying again, moving him again ... "Red" would hide in the tube while I moved things around (wouldn't you, too, if a monster the size of a skyscraper picked you up?) but by the time I'd got back to the camera, there he was, waving his tentacles around enthusiastically.

And I finally got a clear shot at that tiny "trumpet".

It still looks like a badminton birdie to me. On a stem.

This is the door of the tube. When Red goes back into his tube, he pulls the feeding tentacles in, then the "trumpet", which he spreads across the opening, locking it down.

I noticed, in my photos, many even tinier plants or critters, like those white pinheads to the left above, or little green shrubs, too small for my eyes alone to see. I wonder if I can zoom closer in, to get a good look at them, too. It's turtles, or at least critters, all the way down!

Pink and white tentacles

Tonight, as I was putting my critters to bed, (checking their water quality and temperature, tidying crab construction zones, preparing to turn off the light) I noticed a new resident: an inch-long, white, twisty tubeworm.

It was glued to the remains of the warty tunicate's kelp holdfast, where it certainly hadn't been evident before. And the whole contraption, tunicate, holdfast, and tubeworm, had rolled up against the glass where I could see that it was alive and feeding.

Red-trumpet calcareous tubeworm, Serpula columbiana

These tubeworms secrete a mucus which precipitates calcium carbonate from seawater, which forms a hard tube, growing from the mouth end. (The calcium carbonate comes from dissolved shells of dead snails and other shelled creatures. Everything is used, reused, recycled.)

They settle on any hard surface. Seaweeds such as kelp aren't solid enough, but the holdfasts are as tough as wood, even when they're old and eroded, such as this one.

Delicate colours. These tubeworms come in colours from pink and white to brilliant red.

Each tubeworm has a lid, or operculum, which it pulls in after itself to plug the tube when it retreats. Open, it takes the shape of a funnel, or trumpet, which gives the tubeworm its name. In these photos, it can be seen, fuzzily, at the back, looking sort of like a pinkish badminton birdie.

Backing off to see the whole tube in context.

I'll have to take another batch of photos, to see if I can manage to focus on that operculum.