Not a warm fuzzy

Every week, Digital Photography School lays out a new challenge for their readers. Shiny things, heavy things, panoramas, etc. I try to join in when I can; it's a way to keep learning. This week, the challenge was "Warm Fuzzies". The sample photos and the submissions were as expected: kittens, babies, ducklings, blankets.

If only I had a cat!

I thought about it a while, then decided this was not for me. My critters are not fuzzy, they're not cuddly, they live in ice water. Not a match.

Later in the afternoon, changing the water in my tank, I found the 15-scale scale worm (an inch long) hiding in a bit of sea lettuce. And yes, he was cute, and fuzzy, and a nice, warm colour; maybe he'd fit the bill after all.

He didn't agree. First, he hid under a shred of eelgrass. I took that away.

Then he insisted on hanging out upside-down.

I turned him right side up, using that eelgrass. Then he hated the light in his four eyes, and kept running and running, twisting and turning, round and round and round, looking for a dark corner, never stopping because the saucer had no corners.

Blurry, not fuzzy at all.

What he was supposed to look like, except darker. Photo from 2010.

But then, as I was looking at the photos before I deleted them, I noticed something odd. Scale worms often lose a scale or two, and this one had lost most of one near the tail. And underneath those scales, he's an entirely different worm, with contrasting black and white stripes.

Zooming in on that tail.

Another look. Is that a spark plug on the end?

I looked at umpteen scale worm photos on the web, and didn't find any showing the body without scales. What I did find was scale worms from warmer places, all in bright, showy colours. Ours are dull browns and blacks, but maybe they're just as showy under their coats.

And I'll skip this weeks photo challenge.

Disappearing plates

I've been finding quite a few scale worms recently, in the eelgrass beds, and in my tank. I got one to sort of settle down in a tray for a minute.

Fifteen-scaled worm, Harmothoe imbricata

I've counted and counted: I can only find fourteen scales on either side, but the tail end has been damaged, so some may have fallen off.* The scales are like little round, overlapping plates that protect the whole worm, right up to the 4 eyes. They may help in swimming, which these critters do much more gracefully than other worms.

These are free-roaming worms, sometimes crawling, sometimes swimming. I find them on clamshells, on stones, on eelgrass, out hunting. They eat amphipods and anything else small enough to be subdued. The largest I have seen is about an inch long.

*There's a beautiful photo of one of these on Flickr. And this one has the same problem with disappearing plates: I count 15 on one side, 13 on the other.