The better to see you with

I'm pretty pleased with this: a fly on a bouncing leaf on a windy hillside.

Focus stack, three photos.

What I liked were those amazing eyes.

Last photo, as I came closer. Then he flew away.

Each eye is composed of 3,000 to 6,000 simple eyes. (How Stuff Works)

And I never had noticed before that they have antennae on their antennae.

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Esto me gustó. Una mosca en una hoja bailando en el viento. Lo que me llama la atención son esos ojos maravillosos.

Cada ojo grande contiene de 3 a 6 mil ojitos simples. Y además hay otros tres en medio, pero tan pequeños que no los puedo hallar.

Y nunca me había dado cuenta antes que las moscas tienen antenas en las antenas.

Using all three eyes

The camera sees more - and less - than my eyes do. Flipping rocks along the shore, left-handed, with the camera in the right hand, finger on the shutter button, I disturb crabs, who scuttle quickly under the next-door stone. Flip another; crabs. Another; more crabs. One stops to threaten me, pincers raised. "Come on, see if you dare!" I turn the camera in her direction, and she changes her mind and joins her friends under shelter.

Another stone. More racing crabs. Once they're gone, I see slow movement; flatworms. The camera sees them, unless the light is just exactly right, as brown smears. My eyes see the movement, the merest hint of it, going in a different direction than the slither next to it, the next flatworm.

Whelk egg cases, spiral tube-worms, and flatworms on the underside of a stone.

Wosnesenski's isopods, one lying upside-down for some reason, showing off his 14 legs. And a pair of crabs.

Sometimes, there's a nano-second of flurry, a miniscule splash; a baby sculpin, an inch long, gone to ground, now invisible. Maybe the camera will see him; I won't. But I saw the splash.

Some animals are only recognized, in these surroundings, by their movement. I learn to see them; the merest rise and fall of a limpet under the seaweed gluing herself down to the rock while the light threatens her; the split-second flip-flip-flip of a gunnel, the shrinking of an anemone, the characteristic sideways scuttle of a miniature hermit - snail shells don't move like that without a hermit resident; the writhing of a polychaete worm becoming one with the mud underneath, the squirting of a clam retreating deeper into the mud. The camera never sees those.

Spiral tubeworms, flatworms (the light was right- look for the eyes!) and a limpet, still on the move. I don't know what that tiny thing with the striped back"bone" on the stony patch in the centre is.

My eyes miss the very tiny critters. My reading glasses are in my pocket; they get in the way when I look through the viewfinder, and the light is too bright to see the screen. So I point and shoot, looking for the green square that says the auto-focus has found something interesting. Or find a safe, non-painful (broken barnacles are sharp!) place to kneel so that I can get my head down a few inches from the stones and look through the viewfinder.

White shells, a sea of white shells; must be barnacles. The camera knows better. Waving seaweeds; no, the camera discovers tentacles or antennae. Or a mass of worms.

The camera saw these. I didn't.

This photo includes two masses of ribbon worms; the upper one is a knot of Paranemertes peregrina (p. means wandering), the purple ribbon worm, with a very purple body and a creamy belly; the orange ribbon worm, Tubulanus polymorphus; and the green ribbon worm, Emplecotnema gracile, with its green top and yellow belly.

The lower knot appears to be all green ribbon worms.

And there are three flatworms and a trio of crabs.

Sometimes things are easier; I find an underwater species tossed up to die on the shore. These I can pick up and move to a better background.

Unidentified species of hydrocoral. Notice the yellow "bud" at the tip of the branches.

Habitat for the critters found above. The stripes parallel to the shore are probably old glacier tracks on sandstone.

Blocky eyes

The hermit crabs in my aquarium carry their eyes on stalks. The eye itself is round, with a pale stripe across the centre, and the circular lens in the stripe.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus.

Tonight, while I tried to photograph a snail eating algae, trying to get a glimpse of its radula, a small hermit photobombed the scene. Maybe it's the angle: the hermit is above me, staring straight down at the flashing light that had attracted her attention: the whole eye is dark, and looks rectangular. I'd never seen one like that before.

"My turn! Forget that boring, slowpoke snail!"

She stepped on the snail's head, and he (the snail) promptly retreated into the shell. End of photo op.

Red eyes, blue eyes, twisty eyes

Grainy hand hermit crabs have red eyes.

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus.

And Hairy hermits have blue eyes.

With two parallel stripes. Pagurus hirsutiusculus.

Another blue-eyed hermit.

Except when they're seen from the back of the head.

Then they're all twisty.

Zooming in. Brown and yellow spirals.

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.

Yes, it's spring!

My snowdrops are blooming. The shrub along the fence has come out in tiny green leaf buds. And it's raining. And raining. And raining. Looks like spring is here.

I went out for a drive in the rain and fog to look for more spring goodies, and found fat pussy willows hanging over flooded ditches, willows all decked out in yellow-green, a couple of trees dressed in white blossoms, eagles hanging out in pairs at the top of bare snags.

At the edge of the Comox valley, I began seeing snow geese trumpeter swans*. They're spread out, a couple or three dozen in each of many fields.

Acres of green veggies, and no mud!

From the side of the highway.

I left the highway and drove up and down farm roads, back roads, dead-end roads, a long, meandering circuit that, after an hour, led me back to the highway and home. I saw many swans, but none close enough for a good photo in the rain. But on a short gravel road, a deer and her half-grown kid crossed in front of me, ran a little ways into the bush, and turned to watch me.

It's quite dark in there, in the rain and near sunset. Her eyes reflected my flash back at me.

The eyes seemed too bright in relation to the flash; the light diminishes quickly with a bit of distance, and the deer were deep in the bush. I Googled deer eyes to see why. Turns out that they see the light twice.

The structure that causes glowing eyes in deer, dogs, cats and other animals is the tapetum lucidum. This is a layer of specially adapted cells behind the retina that reflect light. When light passes into a deer's eye, it strikes the many rod receptors in his retina, helping him identify the movement of potential predators. The tapetum gives his receptors a second shot at those rays of light, however, reflecting them back through the retina and doubling the chances of any rod receptor gleaning information from the outside world. When a bright light shines on the tapetum, it reflects a bright glow that can be seen from a distance. (From Animals.mom.me)

Deer are more active after dark; they often sleep during the daytime, so their eyes are more adapted to low light levels. They have larger pupils than we do, and these can expand to almost fill the visible eye. In all the photos I took of these deer, the entire eye glowed.

The youngster, about half his mother's height, but old enough to have lost his baby spots. His eye glows bluish; his mother's have a yellowish/red border. This could be due to the angle of the light.

Coming home in a downpour, I noticed that the tide was lower than I've seen it yet this year. Another sign of spring.

*Update: I've been told they are trumpeter swans. I was surprised: they had those long necks, but I had thought that the swans were still rare. Now I've been reliably informed that there are about 60,000 on this flyway.

Lifer! Probably for both of us.

Under the logs and lumber of any floating construction, down where the sun rarely reaches, the water level is constant, the currents weakened, myriads of animals and plants live their sheltered lives, away from the prying eyes of the humans who clomp along overhead. Unless there is a gap between the floats, the surface is mometarily still, the light turns down at the perfect angle, and a human just chances to look down that gap at that moment. And then, if the human happens to be of a curious bent, she flops down on her knees or belly, and peers down that gap. And sees eyes, staring back at her.

Spiny pink scallop, Chlamys hastata. She has dozens of eyes, lined up along her lips. She can't see as well as I do; all she saw of me (I think) was my shadow.

Another angle, showing a bit of her shell, and two anemones sheltering underneath. The blue "pillar" is a mussel shell.

I'll back off a bit, to show the mini underwater garden along the base of the float I was lying on.

Tunicates, purple stuff, more tunicates, mystery critters, worms, and hydroids. Yesterday's anemones were just to the left of this patch.

Moving to the right; more tunicates, and the scallop.

I cropped these photos down, to show the individual critters a bit better:

Tunicates, unidentified. (With intake, outflow siphons circled.)

As far as I can tell, the pale cyan blobs have siphons, as well, and would be another species of tunicate (aka sea squirt). The red line in the centre points to another animal that is so transparent that its internal organs, and its food are visible through the wall. I think the other red line points to a half-way shut down anemone. On the far left, there is a hydroid stalk, and on the left of the base of the big tunicates, the flowery shape is the feeding tentacles of a worm.

Tunicates, tunicates, worms, etc. And what are those two potato-like blobs?

And there's still that pink thingie:

I think it may be a compound ascidian. like the red ascidian, or maybe the mushroom compound tunicate. Or something else? What do you think?

Worms tomorrow.

The watchers

Watching me watching them at Cougar Creek.

Canada goose, with the sky through the trees in his eye. (Click to zoom in,)

Yellow-eyed cat, soaking up sunshine.

Mother and ducklings. "Mommy!" says the little one on the left, "There's someone in our creek!"

Which there was, since I'd already fallen through a hole and was up to my knees in mud. A bit more would never hurt.

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.

Keeping an eye on us

These critters all dropped in to visit this week.

Hornet under glass

Hundreds of eyes, and toothed jaws.

Winged ant termite*. Running.

Not running.

Crane fly on carpet. Sleeping with his eyes open.

1/3 of the crane fly. I cropped out miles of leg.

Shot in the dark. Fly on outside of window, 10:00 PM.

Mosquito, with double reflection from glass door.

June bug. He came to help with the watering.

And a cute jumping spider, very small, was running around on my kitchen stove. Luckily for him, I wasn't cooking.

Such nice fuzzy pedipalps!

Eyes in the back of his head. Very useful.

Sitting up to beg like a puppy. Sorry, I had no spider treats for him.

I took him outside; the stove is no place to practice your jumps on.

*See comments. Thanks, Christopher!

Garfield the hermit

Seeing eye to eye with a crab:

"Freckles"

"Peachy"

Did you notice the eyes?

Crabs' eyes are on stalks; the shore crabs' eyes are a graceful paisley shape.

Freckles on a raft of Turkish towel.

Hermit crabs' eyes are stalked, too. But they come in many shapes; round, vertical ellipses, even U-shaped. My hairy hermits have oval eyes with long, horizontal irises, with the pupil at the top; a heavy-lidded, world-weary, Garfield* the cat sort of eye.

"Moi seul sens ce tourment." (See Henri, Paw de Deux)

*Or Henri; watch for 1:30.

Eyes green as grass

I met this cat in a Strathcona alley. His eyes looked like holes in his head; I could see the grass beyond.

And he's wearing a red heart tag.