Mostly tentacled tinies

Still rescuing forgotten photos: these are from the aquarium. The tinies.

A barnacle, fishing.

I've long since forgotten what seaweed this came from. Just a snippet, zoomed as close as I could get.

Hydroids growing on a blade of old eelgrass. With one of the orange-clawed hermits, and a snail. Good eating on old eelgrass! The hermits usually clean all the hydroids and other growing things off overnight.

Orange-striped green anemone. In an empty barnacle shell.

Another orange-striper.

Down in the sand at the bottom, a tiny worm stretches up to the surface and unrolls it single tentacle.

When a snail shell is too old and broken to be useful to a hermit crab, the worms move in. I think these are the two-tentacled worms, and there are at least 6 living inside the shell.

Most of these were taken with the old Nikon and the 40 mm. lens, all but one (the snail) using flash with a now-defunct slave flash to even out the light. The slave no longer works, and the tank is now too scratched to permit a close-up. So all my recent photos have been deleted.

I need to buy a new tank and transfer everything there. Not an easy job, with a large colony of pink-tipped anemones attached to the glass of the present tank. A project for the grey and rainy months ahead.

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.

Empty shore?

It looks bare, but it's full of life.

Gulls, rocks, worms, rockweed. And mist.

But the sand is full of worms, and their hopeful feeding tubes.

Walking over this "bare" sand, every few steps, I get sprayed by an invisible resident just under the surface, reacting to the vibration of my steps and retreating quickly to a deeper level.

The stony end of the beach, colour-coded.

The bright green areas are sandstone with maybe half an inch of green algae on top. Brown areas have about an inch of another seaweed; brownish green is rockweed, maybe two inches deep. And the tan areas are sandstone, the only safe place to put down a foot.

The green algae are as slippery as wet ice; the brown algae is worse; it's like wet ice with a coating of slush on top. Rocks roll; they're just loosely scattered on the sandstone. Stepping a bit more confidently on a patch of rockweed - silly me! - I slipped and ended up sitting in a hollow in the rock, which luckily halted my fall before I twisted anything major.

It's not a human-friendly location. But there are tiny fish in every pool, crabs under the rocks, barnacles and limpets and tiny snails everywhere.

Limpet and barnacle community on the sheltered side of a rock.

The underside of the rocks are bursting with life. Here, a large striped whelk, with a little periwinkle on its tip, a dead clam wearing a pair of limpets, assorted seaweeds, barnacles, and everywhere you look closely, more periwinkles. If you look inside that empty clamshell, you may find a surprising assortment of critters; hermits, crabs, worms, amphipods, limpets, you name it. On the deep underside of the rocks, a few starfish cling, and plumose anemones dangle loosely, waiting for the water to return.

Around the drier rocks, a swarm of tiny flies flitted and danced, almost never stopping. (How do they eat, if they never stand still?) Whenever I stopped to look at anything, the flies moved over to circle my head, tickling a bit, but never landing.

I tried to find one stopped to get a better look, but finally gave up and shot several dozen photos of a spot where they were congregating. I caught two of them:

Long legs and it seems that the wings are striped, or spotted.

And maybe a striped abdomen as well.

I don't know what they are. Nor where they go when the tide comes in. Do they sleep on the bare rocks of the breakwater until the water leaves again?

Little Brother worm

When I changed the water and cleaned the aquarium yesterday, I separated out the empty snail shells, to look them over later. Maybe they weren't as empty as they looked, I thought.

Most of them turned out to be temporary hideouts for amphipods. One held a baby anemone, so small I needed the microscope to identify it. A few had been colonized by the rose seaweed. And one is home to a curious polychaete.

Side view, showing his fleshy palps and many tentacles. The shell is about 1 cm across. The worm has made himself a tube for protection.

Curious critter; if I jostled the shell, or even the tray, he instantly retreated into the shell, but less than a minute later, there he was again, reaching out, casting about, looking this way and that. Curious, or hungry.

Top view, showing his bristly paddle feet, one pair per body segment. He has four eyes, but in this photo, only two are visible.

Earlier, sifting the sand, I had carefully removed another worm, maybe the same species, but this one is now 6 inches long. They're fragile, out of their protective coverings, so I make sure they're safe before I wash the sand. And then, they're the first critters to be replaced once the tank is clean; within seconds they bury themselves in the sand, not to be seen again until next cleanup.

Little Brother's shell went back into the tank, gently buried under a fingertip's depth of sand. I found two more in the tray; tiny red hairs, identifiable as bristle worms only under the microscope.

Mountain peaks on the flats

More oldies dug out of the hard drive. Just because.

Worm poop mountain, Boundary Bay beach.

And barnacle peak, White Rock beach.

Miniature water garden

No matter how often I scrub the inside walls of my aquarium, it usually has a haze of green and red algae growing back. And a school of copepods browsing among the plants.

I usually scrub it all off, just before I take photos. This time, I left things as they were.

Yellow-green and red algae start off with circular spots, becoming splotches. Green-green algae start off as blobs, become bigger blobs. Sand grains (regular fine beach sand) show the comparative sizes.

The copepods have one eye each. The ones carrying a round trailer are females; look closely at the one on the left: you can see the egg cases.

In the sand below, miniature polychaete worms scoot up and down their tunnels, waving twin tentacles to capture today's lunch, bits of detritus, scraps of the algae.

Here, the tentacles extend up into the water column. Food particles travel down a groove to the hungry mouth below.

My flash disturbed the worm and he shrunk back into his tunnel. But he soon forgot about it, and pushed back up to the surface to keep on fishing.

Today, I also saw a two-inch long green ribbon worm, out looking for prey. He's an active predator who likes barnacles. He hid in the sand before I collected the camera.

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.

A wormy post

Marine biologists count some 67,290 species of sea worms. (I checked each wormy page on this site and added them up.) And with millions - trillions - of individuals of the more prolific species, no wonder I find worms everywhere I look!

These were waiting out the low tide in the shelter of loose rocks on the Tyee Spit shore.

Shiny, multicoloured polychaete

I find these in the sand underneath the rocks, rarely on a rock or stone. They are shy and quick; mostly, if I look first at the rock, then at the sand, all I see is the last few segments of the worm squirming down underground. The only way to get a photo is to hold the camera ready and aimed, then lift the rock.

Their mouths vary depending on their diet, since the group includes predators, herbivores, filter feeders, scavengers, and parasites. Most have a pair of jaws and a pharynx that can be quickly turned inside out, allowing the worm to grab food and pull it into the mouth. (MESA)

There are 12,000 species of polychaetes. My encyclopedia lists 44 more or less free-living polychaetes in the Pacific Northwest.

A Mud nemertean, Paranemertes peregrina, and something green in a long tube.

Paranemertes, aka the Wandering ribbon worm, or the Restless worm, is easy to identify. It's a long ribbon, up to 25 cm. long, with a purple back and a creamy belly, usually found wandering alone, searching for its dinner: other worms, even worms much larger than itself.

On contact with nereid prey, P. peregrina pulls its head back and everts its light-colored proboscis, which wraps around the prey.  The prey is soon paralyzed, ...  P. peregrina then swallows the nereid.  After feeding it follows its own slime trail back to its burrow.  It eats about one prey worm per day ... (WallaWalla.edu)

I can't identify the green worm in the long tube, other than to guess that it's another ribbon worm.

A typical squirm of green ribbon worms, Emplectonema gracile. And a lone, brown flatworm.

The green ribbon worms are gregarious; where you find one, there are probably several more entwined with it. It eats barnacles, mostly the small acorn barnacles, slithering into cracks or the open mouth of the barnacle, using a poisonous needle-like stylet* to paralyze its prey. (That isn't going anywhere, anyways, but you never know.)

The flatworm also eats barnacles, and is so thin and flexible that it seems sometimes to be simply a brownish coating on the barnacle it's attacking.

In this photo, I've been puzzling over a perfect circle in the bottom of an empty barnacle shell. (Just above the flatworm.) It looks like the edge of one of those finger cots that I use instead of bandaids. A short worm, maybe? A mini Ouroboros?

*Photo of the stylet, here, at the bottom of the page, Row 1, on the right.

Shoulda, coulda, didn't

It's a mistake to be too easily satisfied, too quickly beguiled by the obvious. Flipping rocks at low tide, there's a tendency to say, "Look, a clingfish! Look, a pretty anemone, an angry crab!", to take a few photos and go on to the next rock without stopping to really pay attention.

And so doing, I miss out.

At least in some of my photos, taken with a wide enough view, and with a minimum of hand shake, zooming in back at home, I can discover many of the beauties I should have seen in situ.

This was supposed to be a photo of the rose anemone.

Busy scene.

Once I zoomed in, look at what I found:

You may want to click on this and enlarge it.

There's a juvenile wolf eel in there. And I had never seen one before; I wish I had noticed it while I was on the beach.

Another one; this was supposed to be a photo of the clingfish. But there's a complete brittle star, out in the open; I missed it live.

Two starfish, orange and purple, two large snails, several tiny ones, a kelp crab, two grainy hand hermits, pieces of gorgonian, pink and purple encrusting stuff, a long calcareous tubeworm, baby sea urchins, an adult sea urchin, spiral tubeworms, assorted polychaete worms, and the brittle star. Oh, and the clingfish.

About those baby sea urchins; really tiny sea urchins, barely visible in this photo, even at full zoom.

There are at least 5 sea urchin babies here, besides the medium-sized juvenile. I've saturated the red stuff, so as to highlight the pale pinhead urchins.

A purple sea urchin may live up to 70 years. The green sea urchin, a bit smaller than the purple, and more short-lived, grows about 1/2 inch per year. I found both of these, green and purple urchins, on this visit to the beach. A scuba diver told me he's seen thelarger red sea urchins here in the subtidal zone; they grow to about a foot across, counting the spines, and may live up to 200 years. I don't know what species the babies are, but they must be only a few months old.

One more photo; worms that I didn't notice, in a photo of an unco-operative gunnel.

A purple ribbon worm, three different polychaetes (one is striped, upper left), and a spaghetti worm (upper left, orange and yellow). And a four-armed green starfish, a hermit, two purple crabs, an urchin, and a brittle star.

Next visit to the lower intertidal zone, I think I'll sit me down in one spot and look at everything. Easier on my back, too.

Spaghetti and cucumber, with ribbons. Under rocks.

What's purple and white and has an orange head? A worm, of course!

Purple ribbon worm, Micrura verrilli. The belly is all white.

Under rocks near the bottom of the intertidal zone, wherever the rock rests on mud or sand, there are worms. Many of them are these purple predators, hunting for other species of worms, which they catch like a frog catching flies, with a sticky proboscis. (Or a tongue, if it's a frog.)

The orange blob next to the worm is a sea cucumber, possibly a juvenile burrowing sea cucumber, Leptosynapta clarki. The dark lump at its head end is the mouth, with all its feeding tentacles retracted. These are detritus feeders, and grow up to about 6 inches long. This one was about 2 inches.

Another sea cucumber, under the next rock, and with a purple ribbon worm next to it. The worm is no danger to the cucumber, I think; it's 'way too big to swallow.

Spaghetti worm, with purple ribbon worm. And more worms; at the lower right, a polychaete lies in the mud; towards the centre right, there's a scale worm; below the spaghetti worm, there's a calcareous tubeworm. And in the clam shell, some sort of orange worm is encased in his sandy tube.

Next: the latest fashion in crab wear.

Just plain lucky

If I hadn't been looking at tidepool sculpins. If I hadn't gotten down on my elbows and knees to see the big plumose anemone under the rock in the sculpins' pool. If the sun hadn't angled in at just that moment; I would have passed these by without noticing.

Feather duster worms, on the underside of a huge rock, at the top of the tide pool.

These are big worms, well over an inch wide at the crown. There are hints of others farther back, where the sun hasn't reached; they look almost purplish-black.

Two tubes at the far end, with a few more deeper down, in the shade.

 I touched one tube; the worm in it disappeared instantly and didn't reappear while I waited.

About half of the visible worms were striped; the rest were dark red.

Forgotten worms

I was tidying up my files, and found this batch of photos, stashed in the wrong folder since last year. I had been changing the water in the tank, with the assorted residents waiting in bowls and trays of water. A few worms hiding in empty barnacle shells got a whiff of the treats I'd put out for the hermits, and came out to see if they could snag a bite.

Head of polychaete

A different one, reaching.

Mouth, with jaws showing.

The polychaete worm has two black, chitinous jaws. Usually, they're hidden inside the mouth, which is retracted behind the palps and tentacles, but to feed, they reverse the order, pushing the jaws out in front.

Polychaete head with jaws everted. From U. of Cal, SC.