Sticky eggs

Every spring I hope to see the herring spawn. So far, every year I've missed it. But I got down to the shore a few days later, and found a coating of roe everywhere.

A handful collected off the sand.

Herring roe on washed-up eelgrass.

The herring come in huge, dense schools—sometimes several kilometers long. Once they reach the spawning grounds, each female releases up to 40,000 clear, sticky eggs. The eggs stick to everything; they stick to the eel grass…they stick to the sea lettuce…they stick to the kelp…they stick to the rocks…they stick to the shells…they stick to the barnacles. In fact, there’s so many eggs that they don’t all get a chance to stick before the waves and the tide wash them up on the beaches—sometimes forming masses of eggs a foot or more deep. (Return of the Brants)

The eggs weren't a foot deep on the shore of Oyster Bay, just several inches deep all along the outer shore, and on everything tossed up by the tide.

MIllions and billions of eggs.

I was looking for kelp, to maybe cheer up my plumose anemone, but along the whole length of the Oyster Bay shore, inner and outer, I didn't find even one piece. Next time.

Pacific herring eggs are negatively buoyant. By depositing many layers of eggs on fronds of kelp, the spawn of herring has been known to sink entire kelp forests. Upon hatching and the release of tiny, swimming herring larvae, the forests rise again. (Raincoast.org)

I brought home a few handfuls of egg-laden eelgrass for my hermits and crabs. They usually like anything that grows on eelgrass. But not this time; a few of the crabs nibbled on eggs, but the hermits left them strictly alone.

It makes sense; the hermit crabs are scavengers; they don't take live food. The minute it dies, it's fair game.

I looked at the eelgrass under the microscope.

A blade of eelgrass with herring eggs.

More eggs. They are white, without a purple or green eelgrass backing.

A few days later. Each egg has a white blob inside. I don't see any movement there, but around the edges teeny copepods swim happily.

After a day in the tank, the eggs started to fall off the eelgrass, and coat the sand at the bottom, just as they did on the shore.

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Año tras año, en la primavera, los arenques llegan a nuestras playas para depositar su hueva. Y año tras año, yo llego tarde para verlos. Ni modo: por lo menos esta primavera, llegué a tiempo para ver los huevos que habían depositado.

Cada arenque desova hasta 40.000 huevos. La mayor parte no llegan a nacer; se los comen los pájaros, las focas, mamíferos como por ejemplo los mapaches, y hasta los osos. 

Los huevos son pegajosos, y se adhieren a todo lo que tocan; algas marinas, piedras, los percebes y caracoles, hierba Zostera, kelp, y hasta la arena de la playa, donde forman una capa que puede llegar a 30 cm. de hondo.

Recogí una bolsita llena de hierba con hueva para los cangrejos y ermitaños en mi acuario; siempre les gusta una poca de variedad en su dieta. Pero los ermitaños no la comieron; son carroñeros y no comen comida viva.

Después de unos dias, los huevos se depegaron y cubrieron el suelo de mi acuario, tal como lo habían hecho en la playa. Pero no tan hondo, claro.

No sé si alguno de los pecesitos vayan a nacer en mi tanque. Ya veremos.

All those little eyes!

I had brought in a fresh batch of eelgrass for the aquarium, and a hermit crab in berry found herself a safe place there, far above the marauding crabs and nosy fellow hermits, where she could do a bit of housekeeping, and give her babies a bath.

I happened by just at the right moment to see what she was doing and took photos and a video.

Ma hermit and family.

This was three weeks ago, just before my family arrived and we took off on vacation. When I was back home and settled in again, she seemed to be baby-free.

I cleaned the tank, added fresh water, and, as usual, screened the old water before I discarded it. First, I strain out the big stuff, bits of seaweed and so on, look it over carefully, collect any stray critters, and dump the rest. Then I run the water through a fine sieve, check the sieve for moving critters, and replace them in the tank.

Finally, I strain the water through a coffee filter, and look over that under a bright light, watching for movement, even if the animals are too small to really see. And here, I found two tiny dots, about the size of copepods (under 1 mm.), that moved too slowly for copepods, and too fast for snails. I captured them with an eye-dropper, and looked at them under a microscope.

I could see, there, the tiny coiled snail shells. (I'm glad some of my baby snails don't make it, and leave their shells for other babies.) And in front of each miniature shell, I could also see the two tiny dots that were their hermit crab eyes, looking up at the world.

They went back in the tank. Maybe they'll have a chance to grow up.

It's good to be home

After the foray into the vibrant colours and light of Mazatlan, I've come back to the clouds, the rain, and the paler spring colours of home; lilacs and pinks and periwinkle blues. And down on the shore, instead of creamy sand, there are rocks covered in blackish seaweeds and sprinkled with snails.

It's good to be home.

And there are colours to be found on the grey beach; it just takes a bit of careful walking and rock-flipping.

Water's edge, with rockweed.

The tide was out, and when I hiked down to the edge, I found that it was in that mid-stage, neither going nor coming; the water was still, the floating seaweeds fixed in place. A good time to be turning over rocks that are usually underwater.

And, of course, there were zillions of crabs and snails and hermits. Under most of the larger stones, one or two gunnels were hiding; they flopped about madly as soon as the stone began to move, and by the time I had put it aside, they were squirming under the next. A kelp crab saw me first, and pinched my fingers; clams squirted their little fountains as I approached. One got me in the face.

Under several stones, I found tiny sea urchins, pink and yellow, the largest barely an inch across.

Sea urchin and purplish seaweed.

Assorted scraps of seaweed. The pale, lacy one is a torn and bleached sea braid; the others are fresh.

The Monterey sea lemon, aka false lemon peel nudibranch, Doris montereyensis.

The black-tipped tubercules distinguish this nudibranch from the "true" or "noble" sea lemon, which is all yellow.

These will grow up to 6 inches long, but the largest I've found this spring was still under 3 inches.

Another view. The two yellow bumps in front are the rinopores, sensory horn-shaped projections, shut down while he's out of water. In back, once the tide comes in, he will extend his feather gills.

Another Monterey, much smaller, bright yellow. With a frilled whelk, two other snails, the arm of a starfish, spiral tubeworms pasted over with flatworm eggs, and the remains of bryozoan colonies. No space is ever wasted.

Barnacle-eating nudibranchs, with their egg ribbons. These grow to just over an inch long; the largest here is about that.

Interesting egg masses that I can't find an id for.

Yellow whelk egg cases.

Juvenile red rock crab who thinks he's hiding.

Pink-tipped green anemone, Anthopleura elegantissima, mostly shut down, waiting for the tide to come in.

At the foot of several very large rocks, the water has carved out shaded pools a few inches deep, even at low tide. When I approached, I could see the water ripple as schools of tiny sculpins dashed for cover, usually rousting their companions out of the chosen spot, so that they, in turn, had to hurry to find a new one. Sort of like a game of musical chairs, where the music never stopped until I went away.

Greenish tidepool sculpin. Others were grey; one was a reddish brown.

Big plumose anemone in a tide pool. And something else ...

Those red and yellow things at the upper left? I'll have photos of them tomorrow.

Caught in the act!

Update on Bubbles in Love.

The hermits have been eating the egg ribbons. I caught one of them at it this afternoon, and there were no more to be found. But tonight, Hammy II laid another ribbon.

Egg ribbon on sea lettuce. Slime and bubbles.

H/she laid the eggs, attached to that brown fragment of eelgrass at one end. The last thing h/she did was to glue the whole thing flat against the sea lettuce.

(Poor photo; no time: I have to catch a plane.)

Bubbles in love

On a wide, flat beach, small animals seek shelter wherever they can get it. Under the eelgrass, in burrows, on the sides of waterlogged wood, under rocks; or in populated areas, under and around human artifacts, trash, boats, anchors, bottles. One favourite hiding place is an abandoned clam shell, the bigger and more solid, the better.

At low tide, I keep an eye peeled for large shells, especially the older, seaweed-encrusted, barnacle-thickened ones. I look inside each one; no telling what I may find. Sometimes it's a scale worm or two. A couple of weeks ago, it was a collection of those little, unidentified egg casings.

Scale worm, 1 cm. long.

Egg cases. I've seen them identified recently, but can't remember where. UPDATE: Possibly the Leafy Hornmouth, Ceratostoma foliatum.

On our last visit to Boundary Bay, 'way out near the bottom of the intertidal zone, a clamshell I collected had a live bubble shell snail inside. I didn't have a container big enough for the shell, and in a plastic bag, the critter would dry out, so I walked back towards shore, carrying this clam shell half full of water. But it leaked; there must have been a crack somewhere. So at every little pool, I stopped to fill the shell again. I needed some better way to keep it wet.

When we reached another tide pool full of eelgrass, I dug out several plants, roots, a handful of sand each, and all, and stuffed it all into a plastic bag. I carefully put the clamshell and bubble snail on top, and covered it with more eelgrass, dripping wet. That should hold it.

And my last handful of eelgrass roots and sand came up with a second bubble snail. Two in a day! It went into the bag to keep the first one company.

Hammy the second, at home in a plastic cup. Love the eyes!

They both made it home ok, and made themselves at home in the tank right away. They are not like the previous one I had, a Haminoea japonica (I think); it spent most of its time in the sand. This pair wanders around on the eelgrass, and often on the glass walls of the aquarium.

Belly view, just under the water surface. With a grazing snail. (See the little pink mouth.)

These two are a native species, Haminoea vesicula, the white bubble snail. They are eating the algae off the inside of the walls, and probably off the eelgrass. When they have been knocked off onto the sand, they usually head straight for a wall and go on up. They move quite rapidly, for a snail.

Hammy the Third (aka Sir Ham), the smaller of the pair, checking out the big world above the waterline. He looks like some fat owl in a waistcoat. The round "belly" is his shell, and the flesh folds over it.

I can always find one of these if they're somewhere on a wall, because they leave a slime trail behind themselves. It catches bubbles from moving water, marking their path for several hours.

A couple of inches of slime trail, with bubbles.

I had tracked Hammy II to a spot on the front wall, and went looking for Sir Ham. I found him at the beginning of Hammy's trail, hurrying along it, staying with it, like a bloodhound on a scent. When he ran into a gap where a snail had broken the string, he cast about, up and down, until he found it again.

When I checked back, the two were together, doing what snails do in the springtime.

Hammy II above, Sir Ham below. And an intrusive periwinkle. Ignore that; the bubble shells certainly are.

They twist around some. At one point, HII was floating free, except where he held onto Sir H. Slime swirled around. This I couldn't get on camera, but towards the end, a long, thick cord dangled down below them, several inches long. When they left to go about their separate ways, it stayed behind, and gradually dissipated in the current.

And the next morning, this is what I found on the eelgrass:

Ribbon of eggs. Thousands of eggs, it seems.

This helps to identify the bubble shell; each species makes a different egg mass.

And the next day, they mated again. This morning, there is a new egg ribbon. This afternoon, they were back together. Busy little beasties. I'll be looking for eggs again tomorrow. I wonder if any will survive to grow into new little Hammies.

These snails are hermaphrodites, so both can lay eggs. I don't know who is responsible for the eggs they've laid so far.

It's spring in the intertidal zone, too.

We caught the tide on its way out at Boundary Bay. The section we were walking on was still high in the intertidal zone, partly muddy sand, partly stony. At first, it didn't seem that there was much to see, apart from the zillions of Asian mud snails that grazed on the stones and crunched under our feet, no matter how careful we were.

Varied patterns and colours, all the same species.

Seaweeds on a clam shell

While Laurie examined seaweeds, I turned over small stones, looking for crabs or hermits. Instead, I found these:

Assorted critters on the underside of a stone.

The two green circles were new to me. They were slightly raised from the surface of the stone, and felt like firm jelly covered with slime. I found another and cleaned the slime off; the jelly was pale green with a darker green spiral inside.

Egg ribbon in aspic.

What made these? Most ID sites and my books rarely identify the eggs along with the parent, and I certainly had never seen these. I searched through my books, and then Googled. And struck pay dirt almost immediately; a blog (Why had I never seen this one before?) Buzz's Marine Life of the Puget Sound, with a whole page of eggs identified by species. And there in the middle was the spiral of green eggs. The critter that laid them was a polychaete worm.

Most polychaetes broadcast their spawn, but a few lay attached egg masses. Buzz's layer was a solid green, but the one on the first stone I turned was patterned:

Green and brown worm, about 2 inches long.

I have not been able to identify this species. The parapodia (paddle "feet" along the sides) are wide and leafy.

We found several different batches of jellied eggs; creamy, shapeless masses:

Small lump of jelly with cute miniature barnacles.

More jelly, and assorted amphipods, including a pretty spotted green one.

Bending over a shallow tidepool, I saw that the water was alive with teeny-tiny darting things, almost fish-shaped, but not quite, too small and fast to see well, or to catch. The camera worked a bit better than our eyes.

There are two here, highlighted against white shells, another near the upper left corner. 

If you look closely at the full-size photo (click) you can see a squarish body with two or three appendages in front, and two at the back, before the long tail. I don't know what these are.

Most of the snails were the batillaria, but smaller, fatter, ribbed snails were around the cream egg masses. Whether they are the parents or were feeding on the eggs, I don't know, either. So much more to learn, always!

These are all tiny.

And I found no hermit crabs.

(We're talking of setting up the aquarium again. I'll start collecting water and seaweeds next trip.)

"The latest trend in fine dining"**

The tide at Crescent Beach was almost at its maximum. We walked close to the incoming waves, where the water licked at our boots. Laurie flipped a rock to watch the crabs scuttle for new cover. Small snails coated the shaded part, on and around a mass of tapioca-pudding jelly. Snail eggs, probably.

So we turned more stones and rocks. Many of them held their smear of jelly, surrounded by snails.

Tapioca jelly and periwinkle snails. If you look closely, you can see the individual eggs in the jelly mass.

These snails live only in the upper levels of the beach. They have laid their eggs in shady spots, where they will remain moist, even at low tide, and where they will find just the right mix of algae to eat, once they hatch.

Most of the jellied rocks held more than parent snails, though:

Three or four different species of snail, and other party-goers.

The fat, round snails are periwinkles, probably Sitka periwinkles, Littorina sitkana. There are a few Asian mud snails, Batillaria attramentaria, and quite a few small, pointed snails that I think are probably Bittium. Several little Japanese Nassas have come to the feast, too. All but the parents are eating periwinkle eggs.

When I looked closer, at the beach, I found that most of the smaller snail shells held hermit crabs. And when we looked over the photos at home, we saw a pair of flatworms that somehow had escaped our notice, even as we focused the cameras on them.

Zooming in on the flatworms. Two different species, I think. And three hermits. lower left.

Arrows point at a flatworm, a mother periwinkle, and two tiny isopods.

Twenty seconds later, the flatworms were halfway across the jelly mass, and almost completely hidden. In the clear centre of the jelly, a pair of tiny worms, or maybe isopods are feeding, too.

I brought home two small stones, each with its blob of jelly. When I put them in the tank, the hermits and crabs leapt on them and started cramming big handfuls into their mouths. So much for baby snails, I thought, but this morning, about a quarter of the eggs were still in place, and now they're being ignored; snail caviar is good for a treat, but good old detritus is what sticks to a crab's or hermit's innards.

It seems a waste, really, for a snail to nurture all those thousands of eggs, just so that most of them can be eaten. It's the same with Ma Crab*; a bellyful of berries, which she carefully tends, only to serve as food for barnacles and anemones. But there are a pair of tiny, tiny crabs in the tank, eating and growing rapidly; the lottery winners. The strategy works.

*Turn about's fair play; Ma Crab eats snails' babies, anemones eat hers.
** Quote from snail-caviar.com.

Just a bit of fluff.

I found these egg cases on a frond of feathery seaweed from Centennial Beach;

I was going to anchor the weed in my aquarium, without paying it much attention; it was just a tiny bit of fluff to serve as a hiding spot for amphipods. Then the light caught these yellowish jelly beads, a couple of millimetres long.

Here's one, propped against a light; ten eggs in a round case with an exit hole at the top. If you look closely, you can see horizontal grooves in the casing.

I don't know what lays these; possibly a snail, but which, I have no idea. If they hatch in my aquarium, I might find out. That's if the hermits and anemones don't eat the babies first.

Watching where we step

On a mile-wide, featureless, sandy beach, what is there to see, besides sand and sky? Plenty. But it's mostly in hiding. I've been having fun blowing up our photos of Sunday's walk to full size, to see what we missed.

Sea lettuce and a mudflat snail, Batillaria attramentaria. No telling what's underneath.


Brown seaweed, probably a dulse. Eelgrass and roots.

So far, so good. Eelgrass and seaweed are easy to see. But look again! See those little yellowish dots on the eelgrass? They're egg cases, possibly of the Black Dog Whelk, Illyanasa obsoleta*.

Here are some more, doing their best to blend in with the bubbles.

Brown tuft, navel-lint algae. With eelgrass and snail eggs.

The snails are even better at hiding; they burrow right under the wet sand. I dug a few out; mostly Black Turbans, and a whelk or two. One on the upper left, below, looks like a mudflat snail, going by the shape.


In a photo of seaweeds and eelgrass, I found this tiny collection:

White tube discarded by a worm. And what looks like whelk eggs. (Nucella sp.)

If I had seen this at the time, I would have taken a close-up. But they were so small, I missed them even on the first two examinations of the photo.

This tangle of weeds and -- something -- is intriguing:

What is that red, segmented, tentacled thing? Worm or weed?


A close-up of the end, with "tentacles". Some kind of spaghetti worm? **

This is a worm, at least. We found it writhing in an inch of water. It's about 6 inches long.

Red-banded Bamboo worm, Axiothella rubrocincta. The red rings are bristled. (Barely visible.)


Clear view of the tail end. The head is already back under the sand, and digging fast.

Their tubes were scattered here and there around this area of the beach, mostly poking just an inch or so above ground. The worms stay in these tubes; I wonder why this one was on the surface.

On the opposite side of the bay, at Boundary Bay Beach (and this is all Boundary Bay, but this side is Crescent Beach), the sand is dotted with the fecal castings of lugworms. On the Crescent Beach side, the coils of worm poop are less frequent, smaller, and finer. Look for them around these geoducks:

Pacific geoduck, Panopea abrupta. Up to 9 inches across the shell, and 20 lbs. Lifespan: 168 years!

When I touched this geoduck (pronounced gooey duck) with a toe, it retracted itself back under the sand, squirting at me as it went.

A horse clam, covered with algae and seaweed, and accompanied by grey mounds of worm poop.

(Update: I had identified this as a geoduck. I was wrong. Looking more closely at the siphon mouth, I realized that the edge of the mantle is tentacled; this identifies it as the gaper, or horse clam, Tresus nutalli. (The tentacles are green, which distinguish it from T. capax, where they are gold. I still think, though I could be wrong, that the first one is a geoduck. Neither it, nor one other similar one that we photographed show any sign of tentacles, and the other one has the characteristic one siphon, two openings of the geoduck.)

Look in front of the clam siphon; that brown coil is not lugworm poop; it looks more like a ribbon worm of some kind.

Mouth of the gaper clam.

One last critter. There were quite a few of these. But we never saw them unless we were about to step on them; then they shot out of the sand, sped a few feet away, and -- disappeared, even though we were looking right at them. One moment they were swimming, the next, there was not a trace of them.

Can you see the tidepool sculpin here? I have increased the contrast to make him stand out.

Tidepool sculpin, Oligocottus maculosus. Supremely camouflaged.

So many new things! So much to learn! What fun!

* Photo in Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, MC198, p.228. Also, see my last year's post, No boots, no bags, some goodies anyhow, for macro photos.

** It's really an eelgrass root, with its rootlet "tentacles".

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