Low tide zone littles

 Just poking around at the base of rocks at the low tide line ...

Mussels (4 alive), barnacles, and a pair of flatworms, flowing like warm honey.

Mostly barnacles. Just because.

After the heat wave, when so many mussels died, exposed to unaccustomed high temperatures as they were, I am glad to see some still surviving. Down in the lower intertidal zone, an odour of rotting sea creatures is still noticeable, but not nearly as strong as it was back in July. But there were more empty mussel shells to be seen than there were live mussels.

A bit of everything: pink-tipped green anemones, red and green algae, barnacles, limpets, a fragment of sand dollar test, and empty mussel shells.

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Examinando lo que vive a la base de las rocas en la zona intramareal baja ...

1. Mejillones (cuatro vivos), bálanos, y un par de gusanos planos, platelmintos. Estos fluyen como si fueran hechos de miel tibia.
2. Una piedra cubierta de bálanos. Porque sí.

Después de la ola de calor, cuando murieron tantos mejillones, expuestos al temperaturas no acostumbradas durante las horas de la marea baja, ahora me dió gusto ver algunos mejillones vivos. En la zona baja intramareal esta semana, todavía persiste un olor a podrido, pero no es tan fuerte como estaba en julio. Pero sí, vi más conchas vacías de mejillones muertos que mejillones vivos.

Tercera foto: un poco de todo. Anémonas de puntas color de rosa, Anthopleura elegantissima, algas rojas y verdes, bálanos, lapas, un pedazo de concha de dólar de mar, y conchas vacías de mejillones.

Rainbow under rocks

The Willow Point beach is rocky; hard, round rocks, mostly cemented into the substrate. In the lower intertidal zone, they are often covered with green sea lettuce and rockweed. Where there is sandstone, it is pitted with green anemone holes. And everywhere there are barnacles, scuttling crabs, and tiny black snails. At the water's edge while the tide was turning, I flipped rocks and combed my fingers through the rockweed. Slow going, but worth the effort.

Here are some of the beasties I saw, in no particular order.

A flatworm, flatworm eggs, and two amphipods. This flatworm kept flipping her edges up towards me, instead of slithering along, as they usually do. It almost seemed as though she were defending her eggs.

A small kelp crab. This one's not wearing the seaweed hat. There was another with it, wearing the hat, just one patch of green algae growing near the top of the head. It ran away before I could get down to their level.

Limpet, periwinkle snail (or hermit in a periwinkle shell), two flatworms, and a pretty orange-striped green anemone, without the green.

Three limpets. Limpets wander about, lifting the forward edge as if to see where they're going. As soon as I touch them, they clamp down and cement themselves to the rock. These ones are still on the move.

Limpets, a whelk, and 6 of the tiny yellow or orange hermit crabs in periwinkle shells.

I haven't been able to identify these hermits. They are always tiny, and brightly coloured. I had at first thought they were greenmark hermits, Pagurus caurinus, which are the right size, but they have unbanded antennae; these little guys have green and white bands on their antennae.

Catching a few rays: there's a starfish, or maybe several starfish under this rock.

A fat ribbon worm. At the upper right, there's a small polychaete that I didn't see until I blew up the photo.

A two-toned polychaete.

This was the highlight of my afternoon. This worm has a blue front end, but the rear half is a bright pink. If you look closely (click on the photo to enlarge it) you can see the four eyes on the head. It's about 18 inches long. (More or less, these worms shrink and stretch continuously.)

There's a wandering ribbon worm, Paranemertes peregrina, with its purple back and cream belly, at the lower left, and a tiny greenish worm at the lower right.

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.