Just tidying my files

 Seen in passing: random shots from here and there, in the last couple of weeks. In no particular order.

Turkey tail polypores on the end of a log. Near Echo Lake.

Red-flowering currants in the forest. Miracle Beach.

Crab molt on a pile of drying seaweeds. Miracle Beach

View of Mount Washington from the top of a rock.

Lookout trail sign, near Sundew Bog. With map in plastic wrap.

Tiny brown mushrooms and green lichens in a rotted log. Oyster Bay.

A Skywatch post.

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Cosas vistas al pasar: estoy poniendo en orden las fotos de las últimas semanas. 

1. Hongos políporos "cola de pavo" en un troncón. Cerca del lago Echo.
2. Las flores de Ribes sanguineum en el bosque de Miracle Beach.
3. La muda de un cangrejo depositada sobre algas marinas dejadas al sol. Miracle Beach.
4. Vista del monte Washington, desde una roca cubierta de musgos.
5. Un letrero apuntando hacia un sendero que lleva a un punto de observación. Con su mapa envuelta en plástico por la lluvia.
6. Honguitos cafés y líquenes verdes dentro de un tronco podrido. Oyster Bay.

Abandoned to their fate

 Looked like a good idea at the time.

Baby barnacles, free swimmers a few weeks old, start looking for a permanent home, somewhere to glue themselves down headfirst and build themselves a castle. I've noticed they don't settle on small stones on the beach, those that roll up and down rattling in the waves. Or maybe they do and promptly get knocked off; however it happens, the smallest stone I find them on will be over 6 cm. across. But the bigger, the better, the less likely to be rolled over in a storm.

So when these barnacles found a nice, big, heavy crab, it seemed like an ideal choice. Solid, and mobile, to boot, carrying them to all sorts of great eating spots. They grew fat and healthy, tinged with the red coloring of the crab's carapace.

Acorn barnacles on a piece of crab shell.

And then the thoughtless crab one day up and moved out of his shell and just left it lying on the sand, to be tossed and broken in the waves. So irresponsible!

I found them on the shore, still alive, and returned them to the water. But the rest of the shell will disintegrate, and what's a rootless barnacle to do? So sorry!

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Parecía ser buena idea en el principio.

Los bálanos jóvenes, nadadores activos con unas pocas semanas de vida, empiezan a buscarse un sitio donde adherirse cabeza abajo y construirse su castillo. He visto que nunca se pegan a las piedras pequeñas, las que hacen traqueteo en la playa, subiendo y bajando con las olas. O tal vez es que los malafortunados que escogen estas piedritas resultan golpeados y aplastados. Lo cierto es que la piedra más pequeña que he encontrado llevando bálanos mide por lo menos unos 6 cm. Pero entre más grande, mejor; así ni las tempestades les pueden hacer daño.

Y cuando estos balanitos encontraron un cangrejo grande y pesado, les pareció un sitio ideal. Sólido y además móvil, que les llevaría a lugares ricos en nutrientes. Se hicieron gorditos y sanos, pintados con el rojo del caparazón.

Foto: un pedazo de caparazón de cangrejo rojo, con su carga de bálanos.

Y luego el maldito cangrejo se mudó: se quitó el caparazón y lo dejó abandonado a la merced de las olas. ¡Increíble falta de responsabilidad!

Los encontré en la arena, todavía vivos, y los regresé al agua. Pero, ni modo; lo que queda del caparazón se va a desbaratar, y ¿qué podrá hacer un pobre bálano sin base? 

Caught my eye

Study in contrasts; a sun-bleached shore crab molt among beach pebbles.

The purple shore crab, Hemigrapsus nudus, as shown by the polka-dotted pincers.

The other common shore crab native to these shores, the Hemigrapsus oregonensis, is similar in size, colour, shape, and habitat (mostly intertidal), but is missing these spots. And he has hairy legs.

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Una muda de un cangrejito costero morado, Hemigrapsus nudus, haciendo contraste con las piedras de la zona intramareal.

Se le conoce por los lunares color morado (en la vida; aquí se ve blanqueado por el sol) en los quelípedos.

El otro cangrejo costero nativo a estas costas es el costero verde, H. oregonensis; es muy parecido con lo que respeta al tamaño, color, forma, y su habitat, la zona intramareal primeramente. Pero al verde le faltan los lunares. Y tiene las patas peludas.

In a crabby mood

 My computer keeps crashing today. So I'm crabby. So is he:

Crab molt, Oyster Bay shore.

Back to work, arguing with a stubborn machine.

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Mi computadora y yo estamos de malas hoy; se me congela la máquina a cada rato.

En inglés se dice, cuando uno está de malas, que está como cangrejo. Así que aquí está un cangrejito que también estuvo de malas. Y ahora dejó su muda en la playa.

Y vuelvo a mi pleito con esta computadora.

Over-exposed

At low tide on the open sandy areas north of Oyster Bay, almost all that can be seen are the sand dollars. Underneath ( I dug down) there are more sand dollars. Many more. And the occasional clam.

One of the sand dollars. To my naked eye, the live ones looked black, but the camera saw the red colour.

The exposed sand dollars were all waving their spines, trying to bury themselves in the sand as the water receded. They look helpless, but they're quite efficient diggers.

And one lonely crab molt.

Coming up to the ship graveyard, the sand dollars peter out, and other critters show up.

One of the old ships innards, draped with sea lettuce.

Those round lumps in the sand? Sand dollars, sheltering. Every few steps I could feel one crack under my foot. Sorry, guys!

Beside the ship above, I found this unhappy Opalescent nudibranch, Hermissenda opalescens. Also a worm poop.

The very low tides can be hard on creatures from the lower intertidal zones. Out of the water, those rusty iron ship bones get hot. I found a couple of limpets belly up in the heat beside this boat. I brought them home wrapped in cool, damp sea lettuce: one survived and is now cleaning the wall in my tank.

And this nudibranch was moving sluggishly, out exposed on warm sand. I took a few photos, then covered it with several layers of wet sea lettuce.

Orange starfish, with one new arm.

I found green anemones, a pink anemone, a very red one (mostly buried, keeping away from the sun), and this orangey one, under a couple of inches of water. A hermit crab is sheltering under its shadow.

A row of whelks, closed down to preserve moisture. The sea lettuce here is still wet, and if you look closely, you'll see a green anemone (or is it two?) still open for business.

Starfish can move quickly when they want. On the far side of the boat, I saw a big purple starfish. By the time I went around to that side, having to go up onto the headland to dodge shoe-eating mud, I couldn't find the star anywhere. It had probably buried itself under the sand; starfish don't like sunshine.

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Cuando la marea está baja, en la playa arenosa al norte de Oyster Bay, todo lo que se ve son los dólares de arena. Y debajo de la arena (excavé varios hoyos) lo que se encuentra son más dólares. Y una que otra almeja grande.

Los dólares de arena vivos se ven, a mis ojos, negros. Pero la cámara ve el color rojizo. Todos los vivos estaban agitando las espinas, tratando de enterrarse bajo la arena, fuera del alcance de los rayos del sol. Parecen no tener defensas, pero son capaces de desaparecer en pocos minutos.

Un cangrejo había dejado su muda de carapacho. Al tostarse se hace más rojo.

Estas mareas bajas son un episodio difícil para muchos animales de la zona baja; no toleran el sol. Y junto a los barcos viejos, que normalmente proveen habitat para muchos, ahora se siente el calor; los fierros viejos se secan y se hacen un hornito. Al lado de este barco, encontré dos lapas boca arriba, lo que no se ve si están sanos. Me los traje a casa envueltos en un poco de alga marina húmeda; una sobrevivió y ahora está felizmente limpiando la pared de mi acuario.

Y un nudibranquo, Hermissenda opalescens, sufría en la arena; apenas se movía ya. Le saqué unas fotos y luego la cubrí de varias capas de algae.

Luego había una estrella de mar anaranjada, con una pata nueva.

Y una anémona anaranjada en un poco de agua. Un ermitaño se estaba escondiendo en su sombra.

Vi anémonas verdes, color de rosa, y una de un rojo muy fuerte, casi por completo enterrada en la arena, escondiéndose del sol asesino.

Junto a los caracoles hay una anémona verde escondida entre la alga.

Las estrellas de mar se pueden mover muy rapidamente si quieren. Vi una grande, morada, al otro lado del barco. Pero cuando fui a verla, después de tener que dar toda la vuelta para evitar el lodo comezapatos, no la encontré en ninguna parte. Se habrá enterrada ya; a las estrellas de mar no les gusta el calor.

Beauty or war?

I mentioned the other day that a teeny, tiny crab was living in the kelp holdfast. I was mistaken; there's a whole family hiding in those roots. I've caught three, so far.

The largest is 5 mm. across the widest part of the carapace. The smallest is less than half that, a mere crab-walking speck, even in a white bowl.

I took a few photos of the two largest in a bowl, and then in the holdfast, dodging behind the roots.

Three "teeth" are visible at the corners of his carapace.

This one looks pinkish. The little striped "flags" he waves constantly flash bright red when they catch the light. 

Then tonight, doing routine maintenance on the tank, I found a freshly molted carapace; a good chance to get a look at those black claws!

Top view. He's lost some of his colour; the carapace is actually translucent, so much of the colour of a crab is from the body underneath.

And bottom view, showing the pincers and black claws.

This is the black clawed crab, Lophopanopeus bellus, aka Xanthteo bella. The species name, "bella" or "bellus" comes from the Latin, "beauty", although it has also been mis-translated as "war", from "bellum". Not without reason, in this case; these are aggressive crabs.

The crabs are variably coloured, ranging from whitish or grey to purple, but they all have black claws. They may grow to about an inch and a half across the carapace, and are known to give quite a hearty pinch for their size. (This one drew blood!) They live in sand under rocks, or in the holdfasts of kelp, eating a bit of everything, from algae to other crustaceans.

The holdfast also is home to a fair number of worms. Food for the crabs, or competition for the food available? Or both?

Tidewrack

With the tide at its maximum on Boundary Bay, I poked around in rolls of tangled eelgrass and under stones, and found nothing alive but a pair of barnacles broken off their rock. But the eelgrass had brought in many recently molted crab remains, their legs tied up in dripping green ribbons.

The waves and tide rip up tall eelgrass and create astonishingly complex knots with it.

"... the longer a string got, the greater the odds of knot formation became." From a study of the physics of knotted string, reported on Wired.

This little molt had been tossed up above the waves and was still intact.

Young molted crab, with sea lettuce. You can see, at the base of his carapace, where it separated to allow him to back out of his hard "skin".

I liked the rock he was on, too.

What makes that yucky-looking yellow foam? I'll explain tomorrow.

Tangerine ghosts

At first glance, it looks like an orange. A peeled tangerine, lying there on the beach, caught on an old crab carapace, washed by the retreating tide.

But on closer inspection, it belongs where it lies; it's a part of the departed crab, left behind for the gulls and the water-line isopods.

When the crab molted, he took away his soft parts: legs and eyes, his brain, memories and all, his antennae, all his mouthparts, and his gills. Besides the hard "shell", he abandoned his stomach lining, his esophagus and shreds of his intestine.

The gills are different; he takes them, but leaves the outer casing, as apparently intact as the calcified parts. Older remains left on the shore are whitish and translucent, but fresh, they're - well, fruit-coloured.

"Ghost gills" on the half-shell.

A second crab molt; looks like the gulls already took a nibble.

A third molted crab on the same stretch of shore line.

A molted crab, from above, looks intact. But check out the eyes!

Eyestalks, lens, black pupil spot. But they're empty windows: the watcher inside is long gone.

Toasted crab

The summer sun either bleaches or blackens most things that have finished out their days on the beach. The purple shore crab is an exception; his colours become even more vivid as they bake than when he was running about. This crab molt almost looks alive.

Crab, drift log, and black eelgrass remains.

There's still a hint of green in the hinge of his pincer.

Good excuses

Why it takes us an hour to walk one kilometre, on flat sand. It's easy going, with nothing to slow us down.

Boundary Bay, with Mount Baker, at low, low tide.

But we keep stopping to take another photo.

Clam in a tidepool, with refracted light, through a few inches of water.

Empty clamshell

Crab molt

Foot long polychaete worm, from my tank, returning to home base.

In every tidepool, hundreds of tiny, darting fish fled at our approach. These ones were "escaping" from Laurie, while I stood off to the side, without moving, except for my shutter finger.

Feather, pink and brown clam shell, worm poop, bird footprint, and a few sandy snails. As found.

Detail of feather. Worth clicking to see the tips full size.

Wave-carved sand patterns

Lugworm egg case. Most are large oval bags; this one is almost round. With worm hill and poop.

Tiny Baltic macoma shell. Most of the ones on this beach are pink. Very fragile; half the ones I bring home don't make it.

Speckled stone, with dwarf eelgrass, Zostera japonica. The stem just to the left of the stone has a row of seeds in a half sheath.

Rainy day crab watching

All day Sunday it rained, sometimes in buckets. That's three solid days, much appreciated. And a good time to stay inside and watch my crabs.

Just crabs

"Patch"

These shore crabs are babies still, some so small I hadn't even seen them until this week. I have discovered some, long ago, as small as a sand grain, unseen until they scuttled sideways in an entirely un-sandlike way. The largest of the half-dozen in the aquarium now, Patch, is maybe half an inch across the carapace.

Small or not, they are feisty. Often they sit by the glass, watching me as I watch them. If I aim a finger their way, they lift warning claws; "I'm going to pinch you!"

Patch was by the glass wall, facing me, as usual. But when I approached him, he made no move. Even a finger on the glass by his face made no impression. Odd.

Three hours later, I stopped by again. Now he had his back to the glass, and lying beside him was his old molted shell. No wonder he wasn't interested in anything else; he had urgent business to attend to. The shell was an obvious size smaller than he is now.

I lightened up the photo to make him more visible. Even so, his camouflage is perfect against the sand. Once he'd hardened up, he buried himself so that only his eyes - two sand grains among thousands - showed up.

(The lines at the bottom of the photo in the sand against the glass are worm tunnels. There are at least two different species of worms there, still only visible with a lens. They'll grow.)

A smaller cousin, with his latest building project

Even the tiniest of the crabs, a white-topped cutie about an eighth of an inch across, is a hard worker. Mostly, they're digging new quarters under stones or shells. I watch them backing down the holes, then crawling back up, pushing a load of sand with their pincers. (Tiny Tim - "TT" - moves a grain or two of sand at a time.) The pile is pushed up and far enough away so it won't slide back, and the crab goes back for the next load. Sometimes they surface carrying a stone or a shell in both pincers. Once I saw a crab carry up a snail larger than himself, holding it high overhead until he was on neutral territory, then giving it a good toss. "And stay out!"

In the photo above, the green crab is clearing out a burrow under the stone on the left. The oyster shell on the right is half-buried in the sand, standing on edge, narrow rim upwards. The crab somehow lifted that big white whelk shell up and balanced it between the rock and the rim of the oyster shell. Quite a feat, I thought, and went for the camera.

And when I got back, he had added those two stones, the pink one and the white one, also on the rim. I have no idea how he did it without tipping the whole arrangement onto the ground. He has a steadier hand than I, that's for sure!

Hermit crabs and "True" crabs

Hermit crabs are social beings. They rarely fight, except briefly over some exceptionally prized snack; they climb over each other, take rides on each others' shells, discuss shell economics peacefully, even between different species. And, like human teens, when one gets a new outfit, it starts a general rush.

It works like this: Jim's shell is a bit too tight; he's been growing. So he convinces Sally to pass down hers. She's willing, but then she needs a new outfit. She asks Tom and Pete for theirs; no, they're not ready. She finds a suitable empty and puts it on. But Tom and Pete now begin to notice how their shells are tight, or scratchy, or the wrong shape, and off they go to find someone willing to share. The idea snowballs, until hermits are queueing up; as each one takes the latest one available, the next hermit in line grabs his cast-off. And so it goes until they're all satisfied.

I happened to watch a threesome sorting out shells. It went fine until two were fitted, but the largest was stuck with a shell too small, so she went off with a bare belly, looking for a bigger suit. It's an urgent search, that usually goes off without a hitch. But the hermit is vulnerable in this state; all her weapons are in front, and the back end is tender and appetizing to fish, gulls and other birds, eels and octopuses. And crabs.

When I went back to check, the naked hermit was stranded up a blade of eelgrass, with a big shore crab at the bottom. She dodged back and forth and eventually managed to drop off onto a rock behind the crab. Safe for now.

I came to look later, and after a search, found her. The big crab had her in his pincers; he'd eaten her belly already. She wasn't moving.

I don't know why this makes me sad and annoyed at the crab; I find no problem with anemones eating copepods, or hermits emptying out barnacles. Or, outside my door, robins and worms, spiders and assorted flies. Maybe it's because of the face contact with hermits and crabs; they seem to be connecting with me, at least noticing me and responding.

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Wandering around the web, I discovered another intriguing fact about hermit crabs. I'll post about it as soon as I've read up on it.

Wet critter fix

Rain or no rain, we must needs flip rocks if we're on a beach ...

No need to flip rocks for this grainy hand hermit; he was walking along the edge of a tidepool. Very shy; unlike most, he kept peeking out, seeing me still watching, and zipping back inside.

Crab molt lying on the sand, torn apart by the waves. (Gulls would have made much more of a mess.) I was intrigued by the orange gills; they look almost like sections of a mandarin orange.

Almost every rock we flipped sheltered several shore crabs. Can you see the three good-sized ones here? The snails are periwinkles.

It was a good day for polychaete worms. This stone hid at least 7; 3 are visible here. On such a grey, wet day, their shimmery colours are muted, and they look black instead.

Ahhhh! That felt good! I really miss my intertidal critters.