Blue thighs and black eyes

 More photos from the aquarium on the pier:

Widehand hermit, Elassochirus tenuimanus. With limpets and algae on his shell.

"The blue colour on the thighs (inner surfaces) of its appendages is a distinctive feature." (Marine Life of the PNW)

Thighs! I never thought to apply that word to the segment of a hermit's legs. I think the "proper" term is Ischium. But I like "thigh".

Unidentified nudibranch

This little guy occasionally let go of the wall and started to swim about, twisting back and forth; sort of dancing in the water.

Swimming scallops, Chlamys hastata.

Look for the eyes; little black dots around the rim of the orange flesh. Or white, where the light hits the tiny mirrors inside.

Another scallop and a red and white striped greenling. (Painted?)

And a very spiny crab. Unidentified.

This year I've got a season's pass, so I'll be back. Maybe I'll be able to identify the fish and the crab next visit.

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Y hay más fotos de los animales en el acuario en el muelle.

1. Un cangrejo ermitaño "de patas anchas", Elassochirus tenuimanus. Lleva una pareja de lapas y algas verdes y color de rosa en la concha. Dice mi enciclopedia — El color azul que lleva en el muslo de sus extremidades es una característica distintiva. — ¡El muslo! Nunca se me hubiera ocurrido darle ese nombre a un segmento de una pata de ermitaño. Creo que el término "apropriado" es isqion. Pero me gusta "muslo".
2. Un nudibranqio sin identificar. Esta criaturita de vez en cuando se saltaba de la pared y empezaba a nadar, torciéndose como si estuviera bailando.
3. Vieras natadoras, Chlamys hastata. Busca los ojos; puntitos negros al borde de la carne anaranjada. O blancas, cuando los espejitos en el interior reflejan la luz.
4. Otra vieira, con un pescado "greenling", vestido en rayas de rojo y blanco.
5. Y un cangrejo muy espinoso. No lo pude identificar.

Este año tengo un pase de temporada, y voy a poder visitar con frecuencia. Tal vez logre identificar al pescado y al cangrejo en la próxima visita.

Grandpa Red

 How old do hermit crabs get? I looked it up; land hermits can live up to 30 years, but the marine hermits are supposed to live from 2 to 4 years.

I was wondering because the oldest hermit in my tank was looking sad. He came to Campbell River with me; that was 6 years ago. And he was an adult then, a good size for a grainy-hand hermit. He hasn't been growing; he has molted several times, but always goes back to the same old shell. He's an old geezer and the familiar outfit is comfortable.

But now he was looking under the weather. For days he hid under seaweed in a dark corner of the tank. He didn't come out when I offered him food. He hunkered down inside the shell if I moved his seaweed. I worried.

Maybe it was just his time to go.

And then the other morning, I found him under the light, antennae waving happily, and sporting all new light green and blue legs and body. Freshly molted, and doing fine. Hungry.

"Grandpa", in his new suit. And the old shell.

Here he is, just moved into that old shell when it was shiny and new. This was in March of 2018.

"Big Red", I called him then. Now, "Grandpa."

Maybe because he is old the molting took more effort than it does for the youngsters. I can relate to that.

And maybe the age limit was wrong.

And here are the last two tank photos from last year:

A volunteer plumose anemone, Metridium senile, just getting started.

And a carinate dovesnail, showing here his black and white siphon.

These are tiny snails, carnivores, that are obviously breeding in the tank. They eat tiny worms and crustaceans; of these, they find plenty the right size in my tank, hundreds of amphipods. The siphon serves as a sensitive nose, sniffing out suitable prey.

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¿Por cuántos años viven los cangrejos ermitaños. Lo busqué en el web; los ermitaños terrestres pueden vivir hasta los 30, pero los ermitaños marinos apenas viven (dicen) de 2 a 4 años.

Quería saber porque el ermitaño más viejo que vive en mi acuario se veía triste. Vino conmigo cuando llegué a Campbell River hace 6 años. Y era entonces ya un adulto, de un buen tamaño para un ermitaño de manos granosas, Pagurus granosimanus. No ha estado creciendo ya cada que muda, regresa a la misma concha vieja. Es un viejo, y lo acostumbrado ha de sentirse cómodo.

Pero ahora no se veía muy bien. Por varios dias se escondía bajo las algas en una esquina oscura del acuario. No salía cuando le ofrecía comida. Cuando yo movía el alga que lo cubría, se escondía bien adentro de la concha. Me preocupaba.

Tal vez, pensé, que ya era su hora.

Y luego una mañana de esta semana, lo encontré bajo la luz, agitando las antenas alegremente, y llevando todo un traje nuevo; las patas y el cuerpos en azules y verdes claros. Recién mudado, y sintiéndose muy  bien.

Foto #1: "El abuelo" luciendo su traje nuevo. Y su concha vieja.

#2: Aquí está en marzo de 2018, estrenando esa concha cuando era nueva y limpia.

Puede ser que porque ya es viejo, le costaba más cambiarse de ropa. Yo lo entiendo.

Y puede ser que los que daban el límite de vida de estas criaturas se equivocaban.

Extra: aquí están las últimas dos fotos del acuario del año pasado:

#3: Una anémona nuevecita, Metridiuim senile.

#4: Un caracol marino muy pequeño, Alia carinata, mostrando su sifón. Estos caracoles se han establecido en mi acuario. Son carnívoros, comiendo gusanos marinos y crustáceos, de los que hay cientos, los anfípodos, justo del tamaño para estos caracoles. El sifón le sirve como nariz, para oler su presa.

Triple exposure

 I was goofing off, playing with the camera, shooting through the pages of a book at the computer screen. And this turned up.

One shot collage

A bit of a surprise, and it took me a while to figure out what had happened. The computer was running a slide show, and I must have clicked on PrintScreen just as it switched photos from a hermit crab to an alder tree.

I like it.

I'll have to goof around some more.

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Montaje de fotos. Yo estaba perdiendo el tiempo, jugando con la cámara, sacando fotos através de las páginas dobladas de un libro, enfocando en fotos que pasaban en la pantalla de la computadora. Y esto salió.

Foto: un cangrejo ermitaño superpuesto sobre la foto de un aliso rojo.

Me sorprendió verlo, pero después de pensarlo, me di cuenta que lo que pasó es que como la computadora corría una secuencia de fotos, habré teclado el PrintScreen justo cuando cambiaba de una foto a la siguiente.

Me gusta la foto.

Debería perder el tiempo con más frecuencia.

Never would have guessed.

This I had never seen before.

Kelp crabs are inconspicuous, dressed in dull brownish-green, without a visible pattern. The colour of old brown algae, of dried kelp, usually hidden under seaweeds. Even newly-molted, they're a yellowish brown, but soon darken.

Kelp crab, away from his hiding place. June, 2022.

At low tide yesterday afternoon, I found a discarded kelp crab carapace on the sand. With the inner side up. Look!

Such a beautiful baby blue inside!

Sea and sky blue, with a pattern of sea foam. Amazing.

Another first: and this is a horrible photo, but it's the best I could do in a few seconds.

Very small, very speedy hermit crab, underwater and racing for cover.

A hermit crab, wearing a barnacle shell. He saw my shadow before I saw him; it was his hurry to hide under a rock that attracted my attention. I've never seen one wear a barnacle shell before.

A plain sandy beach is never without its surprises.

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Esto no lo había visto nunca.

Un cangrejo "kelp", cangrejo de algas, Pugettia producta, se esconde bajo las algas, y se viste de los colores de algas cafés como el quelpo, sin diseño; nada que llame la atención. Un color café verdusco, o recién mudado, café algo amarillento, pero que pronto se vuelve oscuro.

Foto #1: Un cangrejo de algas, sobre algas mojadas. Junio de este año.

Caminando en la arena ayer, con la marea baja, encontré la muda de un cangrejo de algas, con el interior expuesto a la vista.

Foto #2: Y adentro, es de un color azul claro. El azul de mar y cielo, con un diseño de espuma de mar. ¡Qué sorpresa!

Otra cosa que vi por primera vez, y con una foto de lo más horrible, pero es todo lo que pude lograr en unos cuantos segundos.

Foto #3: Un cangrejo ermitaño muy chico, muy correlón, bajo el agua y apurándose a esconder.

Lleva como protección una concha de bálano. Nunca he visto esto antes. Por suerte, (el suyo) vió mi sombra antes de que yo le notara. Fue su prisa en esconderse bajo una roca que me llamó la atención.

Una playa, por más "vacía" nunca deja de tener con que sorprendernos.

Something on his mind

It's almost as if he has something he wants to tell me.

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus

These hermit crabs are as curious as kittens. They often come to the glass to watch me. Or maybe it's that big black eye I'm holding in front of my face. Or do they see it as a mirror? Do they imagine there's another hermit facing them, just beyond that solid water? Do they associate the sight of me with the yummy shrimp pellets raining down from above? Are they wondering when lunch is served?

Hard to know what a species so alien, and yet so like us in many ways, is thinking.

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Casi parece que tiene algo que quiere decirme.

Es un cangrejo ermitaño, Pagurus granosimanus. Estos ermitaños demuestran tanta curiosidad como lo hacen los gatitos. Muchas veces se acercan a la pared de vidrio para mirarme. O tal vez lo que les atrae es ese gran ojo negro que llevo, que a su vez los mira. ¿O es que lo ven como espejo? ¿Se imaginan que hay otro ermitaño al otro lado de esa barrera de agua sólida? ¿Acaso asocian mis visitas con esa lluvia de bocaditos de camarón que caen del cielo? ¿Se estarán preguntando cuándo se va a servir la cena?

¡Tan difícil saber lo que piensa un ser tan diferente a nosotros, pero al mismo tiempo tan similar en muchos sentidos!

Still tidepooling

Life on a bald rock; here there is no seaweed to hide the community. Most of the mobile animals have gone into hiding to wait out the exposure at low tide, but the sessile critters brazen it out.

Bryozoans and sponges, mainly

The white patches with a grid are the remains of an encrusting bryozoan. As far as I can tell without a microscopic examination, the dark orange patches are living; looking closely, you can see a regular pattern of tiny darker spots, the "mouths" of each individual animal.

The yellowish jelly is a sponge. Again, looking closely, you can see circles marked out where dust on the surface has caught the light; these would mark the outline of

 the intake holes of the sponge.

The smooth, round, whitish balls are probably eggs, probably of one of the dovesnails, Alia sp. There are two of these in the photo. I have only seen them once before on these shores.

See this photo on iNaturalist, snail and eggs, found just south of here.

Also present: one slowpoke hermit crab: of the tiny ones with yellowish legs, wearing a periwinkle shell; several periwinkles (or hermit crabs with borrowed shells); and many tiny spiral tubeworms.

I am surprised to find no barnacles.

Zooming in

I cropped and inset the photo to show those two snails, and the mouths of the sponge. The inset shows the grid of the bryozoans, living, dead but still solid, and the empty walls of individual boxes.

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Sigo examinando lo que encuentro en las pozas intramareales. Esta comunidad vive en una piedra sin la protección de algas marinas, expuesta al sol cuando la marea baja. Los animalitos que pudieron se fueron a esconder en las sombras hasta que regrese el agua, pero los que viven fijos en su sitio tienen que aguantar la luz y la sequía.

Las manchas blancas en forma de red son los esqueletos de briozoos encrustantes. Hasta donde puedo determinar sin acceso a un microscopio, la gelatina anaranjada consiste en los animales vivos; se puede ver, acercándonos, los puntos organizados en forma regular; las "bocas" de cada animal. 

La gelatina amarillenta es una esponja; aquí, acercándonos, podemos ver unos círculos de puntitos luminosos donde el polvo capturó la luz. Estos círculos marcan el borde de cada boca de la esponja.

Las pelotitas blancas, lisas probablemente son los huevos de un caracol marino. Creo que pueden pertenecer a los dos caracolitos en la foto, de una especie que solamente he visto una vez anteriormente. Pueden ser, creo, un caracol paloma, una de las Alia. Encontré una foto del caracol, con huevos, en un sitio un poco al sur de aquí; aparece en iNaturalist.

Me sorprende no encontrar bálanos.

Aumenté la foto y la corté para ver mejor esos dos caracoles, y las bocas de la esponja. El recuadro muestra la red de los briozoos, vivos, muertos, y reducidos a las paredes de cada cajita.

How they do grow!

Last month, a couple of crabs the size of sand grains came to live and dig in my aquarium. I see them occasionally, digging their little caves under a rock, under the moon snail shell, under an old limpet shell. Each time, they seem to be bigger.

One decided to dig right next to the glass wall, and I was able to get a photo. He's about 3 millimetres across the carapace now.

Definitely bigger than a sand grain.

He's very orange, and his patterns are different than those of the other crabs. Maybe the colour will change as he grows.

One of the tiniest hermits, huge beside the mini-crab, hung upside-down on the tip of an old eelgrass blade, showing me his blue knees and the teeth on his pincers.

The eelgrass blade, near the tip, is about 7 mm. wide.

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Hace un mes dos cangrejitos, el tamaño de un grano de arena, vinieron a vivir en mi acuario. Los veo de vez en cuando, haciendo sus cuevitas debajo de una roca, de la concha de caracol luna, de una concha de lapa. Cada vez, están más grandes. Crecen rapidamente.

Uno empezó una cueva justo enfrente del vidrio, así que pude sacar una foto. Ahora mide aproximadamente 3 mm. a lo ancho del caparazón. Es de un color muy anaranjado, y sus diseños son diferentes que los de los otros cangrejos. Tal vez el color cambie mientras crece.

Uno de los ermitaños más pequeños, pero todavía enorme al lado del cangrejito, se colgó de la punta de una hoja de hierba "Zostera", que mide a esa altura unos 7 mm. de ancho, y me mostró sus rodillas azules y los dientes en su quelípodo.

Hi, Hermie!

 Hermit crab through an algae-smeared glass wall...

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus.

... and his blue knees.

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Un cangrejo ermitaño visto por medio de una pared de vidrio cubierta de algae. Tiene rodillas azules.

Busy scene

(Text in Spanish at the bottom: el texto en español sigue al pie de la página.)

The little periwinkle snails are hard workers. They scrape away the algae from the walls, from the oyster shells, from the eelgrass, and the filter intake. Here's one cleaning up the shell of a young hermit crab.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, still very small. They lose their orange colour as they grow. 

Most of my crabs are quite small, but there's one huge one (huge by shore crab standards anyhow). His pincers are wide and powerful. The snail shell above, on the right shows what he can do; he breaks the shell of a live snail to get at the meat. He is otherwise not aggressive; everybody else gets out of his way; nobody challenges him.

But  nothing goes to waste. An orange-striped green anemone has set up shop in the abandoned snail shell.

Plumose anemone, Metridium senile, surrounded by seaweeds (Pacific rose, Turkish towel, eelgrass, a fragment of sea lettuce) and broken shells. 

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Los caracolillos trabajan constantemente. Raspan el algae de la pared, de las conchas en el piso, de las algas marinas, y hasta de la tubería del filtro. Aquí en la primera foto, uno se ocupa limpiando la concha usada por un cangrejito ermitaño.

El beneficiario es un ermitaño peludo, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, todavía muy joven. Al crecer, pierden el color anaranjado.

La mayoría de mis cangrejos son pequeños, pero uno es grande, enorme según el tamaño normal de su especie, Hemigrapsus oregonensis. Sus pinzas son grandes y fuertes. En la foto del cangrejo ermitaño, la conchita rota al lado derecho sirve como muestra de su actividad. Con las pinzas, aprieta la concha de mar hasta romperla, para comerse la carne.

Aparte de eso, no molesta a los demás habitantes del aquario; nadie le hace frente.

En el agua, nada se desperdicia. Una anémona (Diadumene lineata) se ha instalado en la concha rota donde está protegida pero expuesta a la corriente que le trae sus alimentos.

En la segunda foto aparece la anémona emplumada (Metridium senile) rodeada de algas marítimas: rosa pacífica, toalla turka, lechuga marina, y una hoja de Zostera marina.

Forgotten beasties

From the "hold" folder, a few beach critters:

Wosnesenski's isopod. I think I held this photo because I wanted to id the tentacly bit near the isopod's rear. I still don't know what it is.

Three snails. Shell road beach, September, 2018. Half the snails I see turn out to be hermit crabs; I think the one on the left may have a hermit in residence; see the tips of her toes.

Three crabs; red rock, green shore, and a hermit. I like the pie-crust look of the red rock crab's carapace. April, 2018

Unidentified polychaete, stretching out of its tube.

A thin slab of wood, riddled with teredo clam burrows. The white bits are remains of the clam's burrow lining.

Here's looking at you

Sometimes, out of the swirling mists, a pair of bright eyes* appears, startling in their intensity.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus

*And antennae. Can't forget those antennae!

Hermit in a new coat

Through the glass, darkly ...

A photo taken in passing, without scrubbing the glass wall of the aquarium first.

One of the smaller hermits, in a brand new shell. And an orange-striped green anemone in an old shell. And a heart.

I occasionally find a batch of small shells in a thrift or dollar store, bring them home, boil them in case of disease, dry them, boil them again, and donate them to my hermits. Sometimes they get used; only the hermits know which ones are acceptable and which ones aren't. It makes a change from the old, algae-coated, often broken (see the shell this hermit is climbing over), everyday batillaria shells that most of them are wearing.

In a snowy underwater jungle

Every few days I pull up a stool and aim the camera at the community in my little aquarium. Yesterday, I took over 100 shots; two were usable, with a possible third to be processed. Par for the course.

I love it when one hermit goes for a walk on a blade of eelgrass, above the jungle below.

Small hermit, running, on waving eelgrass, halfway across the tank, but near the light. And the water is nearly clear up here. Auto lighting, auto noise filter. Piece of cake!

Most of the crab and hermit crab activity, however, goes on down on the floor, amid scraps of seaweeds, worms, copepods, amphipods, snails, waving antennae, limpet poop, dancing sand grains, rolling stones, broken shells, waving anemone and barnacle tentacles.

And algae. Algae covers everything, including the glass I'm shooting through. No matter how I scrub it, there's always some there, caught in the scratches on the glass. The hermits and crabs are responsible for these scratches; they're always banging about with the sharp edges of their shells, or piling up sand against the glass, and then scraping it away, or trying to climb the unclimbable.

And the water is full of blowing "snow", the crumbs of food tossed out by the crabs, (messy eaters), copepods and air bubbles, bits of torn seaweed, shreds of discarded hermit molts, more limpet poop, oyster spits, more fragments of algae. The crabs and hermits are happy in clear water, but the anemones (orange-striped green, burrowing, pink-tipped green, and plumose in this tank) love this nutritious snow soup.

The camera doesn't. I can train my eye not to see it, but the camera notices every little copepod antenna and every rotting spot on the seaweed.

So here's a hermit (and a bit of a second hermit) in her usual habitat, just the way she likes it, the way I would find their community on the shore (except there, if I get down to their level, they all up and leave):

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus, with a shell she's rolling around. It's too small for a new outfit, so maybe she's just playing. She has lost most of one red antenna; probably in an argument over a scrap of food.

I had to clean up the background, delete quite a bit of glass algae and a blurry anemone, and adjust the light just to make the hermit visible in the mess. Imagine algae spots and swimming tinies all over.

Down in the left corner is a swarm of copepods. The snail shell at the right is vacant; soon one of the growing hermits will claim it. Some of the limpet poop is visible to the right of that blue stone.

The seaweeds are green sea lettuce, well used, a dark red blade algae, some holey kelp blades; the hermits have been chomping on this all week. The yellow edges are where the red algae is dead and flaking off. I could remove this, for the look of it, but the hermits love to eat it, so it stays. Both the hermit's shell and the empty snail shell are coated with thick green algae. The yellow stuff in back is the kelp that came with its holdfast last week. I just checked; there are four hermits working on this at the moment.

One of my crabs is very pregnant. I've been trying to get a photo: she's not cooperating. One of these days; now that the days outside are so short, I'll have more time to wait for her.

Small fry

Young hermit crabs doing what hermits do ...

Small hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, very happy with a brand-new shrimp pellet.

Climbing the eelgrass. He's freshly molted; his carapace is clean and bright. It doesn't take long for algae and gunk (sometimes even baby barnacles) to begin to settle there, turning him to a dungy grey-green.

Small and smaller. Compare the size of the sand grains. The larger of the three is checking out a new shell, but soon decided it wasn't good enough. Wrong shape, wrong weight, wrong taste? Who knows what appeals to a hermit crab?

Miniature orange hermit

I bring home a handful of seaweed; sea lettuce, rockweed, maybe some Turkish washcloth, a blade or two of eelgrass; food and gym equipment for my hermit crabs. Before I add it to the tank, I wash it off in seawater, to remove any beach trash. And a sprinkling of apparent sand grains fall off, sprout legs, and race around the washbasin.

These tiniest of hermits grow to fill an approximately 1/4 inch long shell, never more. I thought at first that they might have been immature hairy hermits that would darken as they grew, but I never see them move on to larger shells.

They have orange legs with white bands. Sometimes they are big enough for me to see the antennae with the naked eye; it is green, with white bands. The legs and body are very slightly hairy.

I've struggled, over the years, to find a clear identification of these hermits. At first, I was calling them greenmark hermits, Pagurus caurinus. A sort of match, at least for the orange colour and the size. And maybe some were greenmarks. But not all.

One of the larger ones, still tiny, on an oyster shell. Not a greenmark.

The greenmark hermit sometimes has the orange legs, and are tiny, but their antennae are red and unbanded. These have green, banded antennae and white pincer tips.

I saw one out of his shell, freshly molted, and out looking for a larger (grain of rice sized) one.

Pink striped body, purplish rear end, green banded antennae. Not a greenmark. Another in the background. Their legs are always clean, the colours sharp.

I've searched everywhere I could think of; I can't find the match to this. There's another tiny orange hermit in this area, growing to 0.6 cm as an adult, the Brilliant, Parapagurodes hartae, but he is a brilliant orange all over, with little white banding. And I think, from the photos, that the antennae are orange, too.

Another. The one in the background from the previous photo.

The last crop of rockweed and a shell-full of sand brought a fresh batch to my tank. There must be at least a dozen, all racing around, climbing on and over everything. Cute little critters!

*UPDATE 7 years later! Found it! They're Pagurus holmi. Just discovered in 2009, few records available. More on this later. (2025)

All new colours

Sparkling clean! This grainy hand hermit is freshly molted, and hasn't accumulated any of the usual dust, algae, and random critters that he usually carries.

Pagurus granosimanus

Bright orange,deep red, and yellowy-greens, pale blue spots on his legs.

The shell, of course, is still covered in algae. He discarded the old one, and picked up one a size larger, but not one of the fresh, white ones I brought last week. Sometimes the old jeans are just more comfortable.

Gaze

Hermit crab, watching me watching her.

The "flames" in front of her are the remains of a kelp holdfast she's grazing on.

As the tide comes in

I returned to the new stretch of beach I'd found. The tide was coming in, and on this flat beach, it was in a hurry. I watched as the water reached pinkish blobs, which immediately opened up to become anemones.  Tiny sleeping snails turned out to be mainly scurrying hermit crab youngsters.

Random shot of the base rock, with stones and "snails".

... which became hermit crabs. Here's one, under the first inch of water.

Mini-hermie. With palm ridges for size comparison.

Much of the shoreline here is covered with a short, hard, almost black seaweed. Black, that is, while it is dry. I stood on a stone to watch what happened when the first waves reached it.

Turkish washcloth, dry and stiff. There's a slight purplish tinge to it in direct sunlight.

The water rolled in. In a moment, the colour had changed from black to purple to a deep red wine colour.

Third wave on a tiny scrap of washcloth.

Second wave. The top parts of the seaweed have only been underwater for seconds.

I hadn't been paying attention; the water had reached my shoes, supposedly planted on a higher stone, and was threatening to pour into the tops. I hopped, skipped, splashed back to dry beach, and went to examine the upper tide level instead.

Sparkly eyes

The hermit crabs disguise themselves with algae and gunk on old shells, in their hair, on their backs. But they can't disguise the lights in their eyes.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus

Ol' Hairy, with red and green algae, an anemone, and a tubeworm waving two tentacles from the rear of OH's shell. And those glowing eyes.

Limpet, snails, etc.

A few August aquarium critter shots: the residents who wander close to the glass, where bubbles and amphipods and bits of seaweed don't get in the way.

LImpet. The yellowish bits are limpet poop.

Limpets are built like snails; because they have retreated into a shell that opens only on one side or one end (snails), their anatomy has to be twisted away from the "normal" head to tail shape of other animals. For example, they have two kidneys, as do we. But the left one is tiny, because it just wouldn't fit otherwise. On the exposed bottom of a limpet, we see the mouth, two tentacles, with their eyes, the big foot, with the gills laid alongside. (Not visible in this photo.) And the anus is up near the head. Which could be a problem.

The anus of most molluscs and indeed many animals is located far from the head. In limpets and most gastropods, however, the evolutionary torsion which took place and allowed the gastropods to have a shell into which they could completely withdraw has caused the anus to be located near the head. Used food would quickly foul the nuchal cavity unless it was firmly compacted prior to being excreted. (Wikipedia) (My emphasis. "Nuchal" means near the neck.)

One of the tinier hermit crabs. The eelgrass is about 1/4 inch wide; half its width is visible here. So the hermit, shell and all, is about 3/8 of an inch long.

Channelled dogwinkle, Nucella canaliculata. It eats barnacles, prefers mussels. I don't bring many mussels home for them, though; they (the mussels) trap and kill my hermits.

Channelled dogwinkle finishing off a stonefull of barnacles. There is one still alive, still cheerfully trolling for supper, at the bottom right. Sometimes I feel sorry for them.

Bejewelled (or at least, be-sanded) Japanese nassa, Nasarius fraterculus. The fine sand must be stuck to the algae growing on the shell. Average sand grains beneath it: these are not stones.

Knobbly column of a pink-tipped green anemone. The neighbours are a limpet, a couple of Asian mud snails (invasive Batillaria), a hermit, and another pink and green anemone. There are 11 of these in the tank now; they keep cloning themselves.

And the chiton is still on his moon snail shell.