Better late ...

Shut up in my house, without all the busyness that took up my time before the virus struck, I've turned to catching up on all those "when I get a round tuit" tasks. One has been sorting and culling over a decade's worth of photos on my hard drive.

I found these photos, taken in the Campbell River aquarium three summers ago, and never converted from the RAW files.

Lion's mane jellyfish

All the species in this aquarium are found locally and captured in the spring of the year. The lion's mane is commonly seen washed up on our beaches. Those long tentacles carry a sting; never pick up a lion's mane with bare hands!

Coonstripe shrimp, commonly found beneath the docks next to the aquarium.

Orange sea pen. This is a sub-tidal species.

This is not a single animal, but rather a colony of polyps arranged along a common stalk, the first polyp. (See Biodiversity of the Central Coast.)

Red sea urchin, on kelp.

At the end of the summer, all these critters were taken back to their respective homes and released.

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Ahora que estoy encerrada en casa, sin todos los compromisos que me mantenían ocupada en los dias "antes del virus", he vuelto a todos esos quehaceres que había dejado para mas tarde. Uno de estos es revisar y seleccionar las fotos guardadas desde hace hasta diez años en la computadora.

Encontré estas, tomadas en el acuario local hace tres años, y abandonadas desde ese dia.

La primera es una medusa melena de león, muy común en nuestras aguas. Esos tentáculos llevan nematocistos venenosos. Nunca hay que tocar una des estas animales con las manos sin protección.

La segunda es un camarón rayado; estos viven debajo del muelle al lado del acuario.

La tercera foto es una pluma marítima; se encuentran debajo del nivel de la marea. No es un solo animal, sino una colonia de pólipos.

Y la cuarta es un erizo de mar rojo.

Todos estos animales fueron capturados en los alrededores de esta ciudad en la primavera. Cuando se cierra el acuario para el invierno, se les regresa a su lugar de orígen.

Corn-fed shrimp

The label on the shrimp's favourite food says, "Crab Cuisine". It is intended for a variety of underwater scavengers, from crabs to hemits, lobsters and even crawfish. I read the fine print on the label tonight; the first ingredient is fish meal, but from there it goes on to corn, rice, wheat, and soybeans, and only then, krill and fish oil. Next, there's garlic (just in case I might want to eat my hermits?), yeast, and a long list of vitamins and minerals.

It must be good for them; they're healthy and happy. But - corn? And garlic?

Shrimp with a corn and fish pellet. Yum!

I also have dried shrimp, and when I can find them, frozen raw shrimp; everybody loves those, but they disintegrate and pollute the water, so I feed them sparingly. And there are "shrimp pellets"; the primary ingredient in these is ... wheat.

At least there's no high fructose corn syrup in there. And I'm glad that I supplement their diet with seaweeds and, in season, hydroids.

Piling critters

I noticed the smells first; salt, creosote, tar, old wood, engines, something mildly fishy. I was going down the ramp to the dock where the working boats, the fishing and tug boats, tie up, and the scents took me back to a time when I used to fish off a similar dock, catching supper. An old memory surfaced; old log pilings, tarred, at the end of a dock, and a big (well, maybe; I was little) octopus climbing up and peering out of the square opening.

I didn't expect octopuses here; starfish and anemones, probably. I walked down to the end of three long docks, squinting down every gap between dock and boat, every opening for pilings. There wasn't much to be seen; the boats are tied up, two deep, on each side of the dock. Very little light filters down underneath them. And many of the pilings are metal; fat, rusty pipes standing out of the water. Nothing seems to live on them.

But where I found tarred log pilings and a bit of reflected light, I found shrimp. And 'way down at the end of the last dock, where the sunlight penetrates to those log pilings, I found a starfish climbing out of the water. I got down on my knees, then lay flat, ending up lying for a long time with my head and camera down the hole between the pilings.

Because the pilings were alive with things crawling about.

The starfish, half out of water.

There were a fair number of purple starfish. Earlier, I had seen a few pale orange ones, deep down, one in not very good shape. But these were active, crawling about or hunched over something edible. They all looked healthy.

In the photo above, all that white stuff is styrofoam. Tiny, white balls of styrofoam. I found these all along the dock, along the water line of the boats, stuck to the tarry pilings. (Not the metal ones.) I had to keep brushing floating clumps aside to see the animals below.

There wasn't much in the way of seaweeds around the pilings or on the boats. I saw a few kelp streamers, loose in the current, and a few blades of red algae. There seems to be more underneath the dock, but I couldn't see more than bits of the edge.

Kelp crab, barnacle scars, and styrofoam.

The kelp crabs keep walking around and around the pilings; as one disappears on the far side, the first legs of the next show up. Round and round and round; I never saw any of them stop to eat anything, but they must be finding something worthwhile.

Older kelp crab, growing pale seaweeds on his back. He's deeper down; there's only a hint of styrofoam in the foreground. The little toe tips at the top belong to a pair of shrimp on the far side of the piling.

Much smaller crab, possibly the red rock crab, with barnacle scars and a few remnants of styrofoam.

Another coonstripe shrimp. With floating styrofoam. The yellow mound is some sort of sponge. And what's that down at the corner?

That mottled brown thing with the blue vanes showed up in quite a few photos; in each one, the vanes were in a different position. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed it while I was taking the photos, paying attention to the shrimp.

Mystery critter.

From the shape of this animal, and the waving vanes, I thought it might be a nudibranch, but I've looked at all those in my encyclopedia, and hundreds that Google found for me. Nothing looks right.

Comparing it with the shrimp, which was about 4 inches long, I would guess that it is probably about an inch long. There are brown, mottled nudibranchs the right size, the barnacle-eating nudibranch, Onchidoris bilamellata, for example, but the vanes would be gills, and they should be feathery, and maybe smaller. But they would explain the number of empty barnacle scars on these pilings.

Help!

Crossed antennae and toothy spears

Another day, another dock. At the main Campbell River harbour, where the fishing boats congregate, I found families of shrimp under the floats.

Coonstripe shrimp, Pandalus danae, about 4 inches long.

More photos and the story tomorrow, including another mystery critter. Maybe you can help identify it.

Productive procrastination

I've been procrastinating. I've got a video to do; I promised it sometime last week. Instead, I've been sorting old photos, rearranging my storage drive, looking for photos for #BirdPoker on Google+, and basically being very busy not doing the video.

And tonight, I discovered a whole folder of intertidal critters from July of 2010. I remember that I had intended to clean them up and discuss them here, and somehow they got forgotten. There are scale worms, polychaetes, flatworms, assorted snails, tiny hermits, baby shrimp, and some critter that I don't recognize at all. I'll post at least some of the worms tomorrow, the rest as soon as possible.

More great excuses to procrastinate! I'm good at this!

For now, here's a quick clean-up of one of the baby shrimp photos.

Two survived and grew up in my tank; they proved to be coonstripe shrimp.

It was cold and grey all day Sunday; maybe today, if it rains, I'll get the video finished, too.

Shrimp feathers, crumpled moth, eye of hermit...

I've been experimenting with settings and lens configurations on the baby Sony. I'm still impressed with what a tiny point-and-shoot can do. These are a few samples from tonight's work.

Through the glass of the aquarium:

Eye of hermit. Big Blue, IIRC.

Carapace of smallest shrimp, with one fuzzy eye. The carapace is transparent. I think the pinkish blob is a stomach. But what are those feathery shapes behind it?*

*Gills. Hugh explains in the comments.

Looking down a hermit's throat.

With this arrangement - camera lens zoomed to its maximum, homemade lens attached in front - I have very little leeway. The field is shallow, and the subject has to be less than 1 1/2 inches away. At least, in this camera, the flash works even nose to nose. That helps.

And I keep a couple of long-dead, dry-land critters to practice on:

Crumpled 1/2 inch long moth.

And a faded, dusty carpet beetle. 1 mm. long. I don't seem to find any live ones these days.

The whole moth, taken with all automatic settings and no extra lens.

Next, I'll take apart my lens, clean it, and rebuild it for a tighter fit. And hope I don't ruin it in the process.

Single-use camera

Christmas, December 25, 2011. (But I think we're really up to at least 2015.)

We dropped in to London Drugs this afternoon, hoping to pick up a pack of TP, and a cheap new phone for the entrance intercom. But we had to stop at the camera counter, and attracted the attention of our friendly salesperson. He had a camera he'd given his brother-in-law for Christmas, he said. His b-i-l loved it, and he was positive it was perfect for us. (I have to admit that my answer to, "How are you doing today?", which was, "Drooling," -- I was looking at the shelf of DSLRs -- may have encouraged him.)

It was a cheap Sony CyberShot, on sale, because a new lot is coming in. What he had to tell us, and show us, was how good it was at macros. He knows my weakness. It has a minimum of other functions; can't handle kids running, or sports, can't handle rough treatment, can't handle dust, or cold, or heat. But it switched to macro automatically when he pointed it at Laurie's sleeve from a couple of inches away, and took a photo that showed the texture of the individual threads, more accurately than my big old Olympus would.

What sold it, though, was that he held it flat against scratched, dusty glass, and took a photo through it. That's what I'm doing all the time with my aquarium; no matter how I clean the outside of the glass, there's always algae and other specks on the inside. The photo he took had no flaws, even zoomed in to its maximum. Wow!

Before I'd finished checking it over, Laurie said he'd buy it for me, for next year's Christmas. He's done that before. I think his calendar is off.

I brought it home and headed to the aquarium without even reading the manual. Here's the first shot I took, directly through the glass, on automatic everything.

Backside of a hermit, and the shrimp in the background.

This photo is as shot; cropped, resized for the blog, and sharpened, as usual, but not adjusted any other way. No need to fix the colour balance, nor the exposure, nor clone out the spots. Nothing to brag about, and the hermit wasn't co-operating, but better than I have been getting.

After a bit of experimentation, figuring out the optimal distances, I got the clearest photo of my big shrimp yet.

Coonstripe, now showing his stripes.

The pump was going for this photo, so the water was full of moving bubbles, and the sea lettuce he's sitting on was waving about. It still came out fairly clear, and with much more detail than I have gotten before, even in ideal conditions. Again, the camera was pressed flat against the glass. And the only adjustments I have made are the cropping, resizing, a slight increase in the contrast, and sharpening.

And I had never seen, before, that my shrimp has a toothed "sawblade" along the top of the rostrum. (From just behind the eyes to almost the tip of the front apppendages.) Right-click on the photo (open link, not image, in new tab) to see it full-size.

After all that, I went on to start reading the manual. I'm barely through the first part, and finding ways to improve already.

So, so far, I am pleased with the camera. I don't think it's going to the beach with me (sand and cold), nor will it be shoved in my purse (banging about), but except for extreme close-ups, it probably will replace the old Olympus, my preferred macro camera. I'll still use that for 1 mm. bugs, though. This one has a range of 2 inches or more; with the Olympus 55, I can get as close as 1/2 an inch away.

Thanks, Laurie!