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.

The worms crawl in ...

Flipping a rock on the beach usually exposes a scramble of leggy crabs, heading for cover. When they've gone, if the substrate is wet, knots of worms rouse themselves and ooze or paddle away, more slowly.

Flatworms flow like melted butter, slowly, insensibly, but surely. They're the first to disappear. Note the two eyespots; they're watching me! The green ribbon is a worm, too.

Purple ribbon worms, Paranemertes peregrina, with their pale, creamy bellies, twist and turn, and gradually untangle themselves. It takes them a while to get out of sight. All of the snail shells, I think, are rented out by young hermit crabs.

The polychaetes move quickly; they hate the light. But they're long, so they take a while to entirely hide themselves.

Detail of the longest worm, showing the dot-and-hair extension on each paddle "foot". I don't remember seeing this before. I've saturated the red colour a bit, to make the hairs more visible.

Billions and billions

Boundary Bay was in a quiet mood when we dropped in a couple of days ago. The tide was partway out, and didn't seem to be either coming or going. Though the sunshine was bright, there was a chilly wind, and the beach was almost deserted. A couple of boats were tied high and dry on the sand. There were no paddle boarders, no dog walkers, barely even any birds. Sand, stones, seaweed, and water; that was all there was to see.

Looking back towards Burnaby. One wader.

It all depends on your perspective. That beach is crowded, almost to capacity. A few hundred people, a dozen dogs, some flocks of birds; what are they but a passing trick of the weather to the billions and billions of living creatures that call it home.

From our usual parking spot at the Beach Grove boat launch, we walked south, towards the US border. Underfoot, on the sand, snails and hermits were making tracks.

Popular resting spot.

The stones in this section, where the currents are not too strong, so that even the small pebbles don't roll around like they do on the White Rock beach, are all coated with barnacles. In more agitated waters,barnacle babies may settle on any surface, but they don't survive unless their new home stays put.

Sea lettuce, about two inches deep, so very green, a super-concentrated springtime yellow-green. In the background, barnacle-laden stones, and another boat launch, covered in green scum.

Near the border, a couple of old logs broke the monotony of sand and stones. A small city, divided into residential districts: on the outer surfaces, sea lettuce, barnacles and mussels; in the dark crevices, more mussels, dotted with tiny white barnacles, and teeming masses of hermits in mudsnail shells; underneath, where the water stays even at low tide, the mudsnails, tiny crabs, and amphipods.

Near the top of the larger log. Medium-sized barnacles, and polka-dotted blue mussels. The dots are tinier barnacles.

Smiling stump. The flash revealed a thick coating of critters in the rotted centre.

Back at the boat ramp, I sat on the clean cement to examine a nearby rock.

Small barnacles, tiny hermit crabs (3), 3 snails, patches of egg mass, species unidentified, a flatworm, and under and around it all tiny, pinhead barnacles. The babies that wouldn't survive rolling.

Another look at those hermits, barely visible peeking out of their little shells, periwinkle and nassa.

A flatworm. There were many on this rock. At the bottom, tar spot seaweed, and a green worm.

More tar spot seaweed, a flatworm family, and that two-toned worm. It's a green ribbon worm, Emplectonema gracile. It eats mainly barnacles.

About that tar spot seaweed. It is an encrusting phase of the pretty Turkish towel that I bring home for my hermit crabs to climb on. In this phase, it coats rocks, and looks like tar or black oil. In this stage it is producing spores. As a red blade, it produces gametes (sperm and eggs).

Mastocarpus papillatus is an interesting seaweed species with two distinct lifecycle phases.  It has a long-lived "tetrasporophyte" phase, which looks like a crust or dried tar spot on rocks, with colors ranging from reddish-brown to black.  Each year, a new "gametophyte" phase grows from the "tar spot", known in some areas as "Turkish washcloth". . . . The female plants are covered with papillae - short, bumpy or nipple-like outgrowths which are the sites of fertilization.  . . . The male gametophyte has no papillae, is yellowish to light pink or light rose, and has a thinner blade.  The spore producing tar spot phase of Mastocarpus papillatus is a slow growing, long lived perennial (one source estimates up to 90 years).  The female and male bladed gametophyte phase dies back every year leaving just the encrusting "tar spot".   . . .  It grows on rocks, it can undergo considerable desiccation, and can withstand high temperatures.

From Seaweed Industry Association.