New baby!

Some of the kelp from the visit to the wharf ended up in my aquarium, and I pulled up a stool to sit and watch. I discovered a few new residents:

  

Small hermit, orange striped green anemones, mating amphipods, and what's that?

I was pleased to see amphipods up close to the glass, and relatively still. It's a pair; the male grabs his female and carries her around until she's ready to mate, up to a week. They don't seem to eat and spend a lot of their time just sitting around. This pair is prettily striped.

On the rock above them there was another tiny critter. At first, I thought it was another amphipod, but on a closer look, I realized it has a different shape.

Amphipod pair and new critter.

Zooming in.

And I think I recognize this. A few weeks ago, on a batch of eelgrass and sea lettuce I brought home for the aquarium, several eelgrass isopods came along for the ride. They are largish isopods, up to an inch and a half long. They crawl about under rocks or ride the eelgrass.

Eelgrass isopod, in the tank.

Look at it: 6 plates along the back, a curved plate behind the head, a wide, flat tail covering, 14 legs. Compare it with the one above. It's a baby! Born in my tank!

And there will be baby amphipods. There always are.

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Había traído una rama de alga marina "kelp" a casa, y puse unas piezas en el acuario. Me arrimé un taburete y me senté a observar. Y descubrí que hay nuevos residentes en el tanque.

La primera foto es de un cangrejo ermitaño, unas anémonas, y una pareja de anfípodos cerca del vidrio y tranquilitos, lo que es raro cuando andan solos. Cuando la hembra está cerca de su muda, el macho la agarra y no la suelta hasta que puede impregnarla. Puede detener a la hembra hasta una semana. Mientras tanto, parece que no comen, y se pasan la mayor parte del tiempo descansando, esperando.

En la piedra  a la derecha, había otra criatura, que al principio pensé que era otro anfípodo hasta mirarla más de cerca. No lo es, pero creo que la puedo identificar.

Hace algunas semanas, en una bolsa de hierba marina (eelgrass) y algas, unos isópodos se aprovecharon del aventón y se sumaron a mi acuario. Estos son inverterbrados de hasta pulgada y media de largo. Se pasan el tiempo bajo las piedras o trepándose en el eelgrass.

Mira la foto de uno de estos: 6 placas a lo largo de la espalda, una más, en curva, atrás de la cabeza, y un gran disco cubriendo la cola; 14 patas. Compárala con la criaturita en la piedra. ¡Sí! ¡Es un isópodo bebito! ¡Nacido en mi tanque!

También habrá anfípodos bebitos. Siempre los hay.

Thirteen and a half legs.

A couple of weeks ago, in a bundle of tossed-up eelgrass from Boundary Bay, I brought home a pair of large, brown isopods. (About 1 1/2 cm. long, 2/3 of an inch.)

They cling strongly to the leaves, so firmly that I couldn't shake them off, nor brush them off without damaging them. When I put them in the tank, however, the male let go and started swimming. They're good swimmers, lying on their backs and paddling with little flaps under the belly. The legs stay off to the side, ready to grab whatever they touch.

Unfortunately, he came too close to the nose of Mr. C, the alpha crab. He was promptly caught and eaten by the entire community. His mate, more cautious, is still safe in the weeds.

Female isopod, possibly the surfgrass isopod.

These are fourteen-leggers, with 7 legs on either side. All the legs serve the same function, mostly crawling and grabbing. They are slow-moving; this female is content to stay all day on one leaf, barely even waving a tentacle. But of course, she's busy babysitting. After she is impregnated by the male, she holds her young under her belly until they are ready to start life as miniature isopods.

You can see these babies underneath her body, here ...

See the sharp hook on the first leg? And the others hooked under the leaf? No wonder they grab on so well! Note; one leg and one antenna are broken. More on that, later.

And now, I must go. It's snowing, and I have to drive downtown in the morning. Wish me luck!

Fourteen-footer. But green, very green.

Eelgrass isopod:

This green, 14-legged pod critter came home on the eelgrass I picked by the border marker. I had seen one swimming about, but by the time I turned the camera that way, it had completely disappeared. This guy can manage that, even in a small, lighted tank. He lies on the eelgrass, lengthwise along the blade; he just fits, and his colour matches exactly. His feet are little hooks that anchor him there securely, even in a strong current.

In the aquarium, I've run my fingers through the eelgrass, looking; no isopod. I worry; did he get eaten already? (And I blame the crabs and hermits; greedy beasts!) I look a bit later, and there he is, parked on a blade of eelgrass, just a hint of vibrating paddles (the uropods) at the tail revealing his presence.

He's an eelgrass isopod, Idotea resecata. The species is confirmed by the concave bite out of his tail; no other local isopod has that. And I think he's a male because of the green stripe down his back, visible in the top photo, above the dark line of the gut inside.

He will get to about 1.6 inches, not including the antennae; he's just over an inch now. I'll have to keep him supplied with fresh eelgrass, for resting and feeding. Maybe I can find him a female, too. It's springtime, after all.

T'was brillig in the tulgey wood

*Definitions

The Watershed Park in Delta is a mixed forest, evergreens and deciduous trees, crawling down a steep slope between upper Delta and the low, flat farm lands beneath. It is not over-managed; occasionally, someone cuts up trees that have fallen over the paths. Dozens of trees are dead, providing well-used woodpecker feeding and perching spots. Logs not on paths molder and rot; shelf fungus and turkey tail fungus colonize them end to end.

The space beneath the trees harbours both native and invasive plants. The natives: salal, evergreen ferns, salmonberry, red huckleberry, our trailing blackberry, an abundance of mosses and mushrooms. Along the sunny bottom path, stinging nettles, touch-me-nots, and bog plants such as Labrador tea make a dense green wall. The invaders include Himalayan blackberry and English ivy; this year, I noticed a large patch of spotted dead nettle, which is capable of over-running even the ferns.

Spring and fall, after a few rains, we go mushrooming there.

This time, we found few mushrooms; maybe we're too early. Or too late; the weather has been unseasonably warm. We weren't disappointed, though:

Rotting snag, with frass and slime mold

Perhaps because of the warm, wet weather this winter, we found that a surprising number of the trees and snags were losing great slabs of bark; it was cracked and rotted, separated from the tree itself.

Inner side of a flap of bark: frass and small grey slime molds

Some of the old stumps were so rotten that they fell apart, or even fell over, with a touch of a finger. And behind the crumbled bark, and inside the mushy remains of the stumps, small critters feed on the molds and wood. We explored a few of these stumps and snags.

Innards of a still more or less intact stump

Insect tunnels. Can you find the wood bug?

There were wood bugs everywhere; they fell off every piece of bark we moved, out of every crevice we opened. Climbing over a log, I grabbed a branch to steady myself; it crumbled in my hand. And from its stub, a stream of wood bugs poured, like water from a tipped glass. Most were gone by the time I'd crossed the log and clambered up close to the tree, but the hole was still pretty full:

Woodbug convention centre?

More wood bugs.

Then there were the millipedes:

Millipede on frass on inner side of bark.

A pair of  millipedes. The crumbs are the remains of millipede meals; dead wood.

I saw several woven white egg casings; I assumed they were made by spiders:

These were about 1/2 inch long. But what is that black thing underneath?

Hacklemesh Weaver spider. With egg case; or is it a shelter?

I saw one of these in a pile of sawdusty frass, but it scooted down a hole before I got a decent photo. I hadn't even seen this one; it was on the shady side of the tree, and the photo was too dark until I lightened it 'way up. I've never seen a spider like this before, with blue tints and pink - pink! - joints on the legs. And what seems like far too many legs.

I sent my few lousy photos (this was the best of the lot) to BugGuide. And overnight, Lynette Schimming managed to identify it for me, at least down to the family. Yay, BugGuide! And thanks, Lynette!

It's a Hacklemesh Weaver spider, of the family Amaurobiidae.

Most amaurobiids occur in cryptozoic habitats on the forest floor, in and under decomposing logs, in leaf litter, and under rocks. Some... are found in the bark cavities of standing trees and others have been recorded from rocky grasslands, buildings and caves. From BugGuide.

The "many legs" are really the regular 8, but the spider holds them tightly together over it's back (so did the first one I saw), so that they look as if they crossed over each other. (See this one, from Colorado.)

One other bug; another that we didn't see until we looked over the photos. On a shelf mushroom, one of a crowd on a rotting log, we found this cute globular springtail:

Quite large, for a springtail.

Oh, frabjous day!

*Definitions of title vocabulary, from Jabberwocky, here (Wikipedia).

Head of a pin, with eyes

White Rock in the sunshine! Shorebirds and dogs not getting along, sand and waves in a tug-of-war, the smell of drying seaweed and the shriek of gulls! And beasties, too!

Laurie left his new Lee Valley hiking stick in Tim Horton's on Saturday, so we ended up back in White Rock, and on the beach of course, Sunday afternoon, too. Again, we came home smiling, laden with photos and "stuff"; rocks and shells and additions to the aquarium.

Among them was this tiny isopod, the Oregon pillbug, I think.

These are fairly common; I've captured a few before. This one is just a baby, barely 1 mm across, rolled up like this. They grow to about 1 centimetre, just under half an inch long.  Here it is, full-length:

I'm pretty pleased with my little cheap microscope; I would never have gotten these with my camera. And with the microscope, I could even make a video:

I can see that it's going to take more than a couple of days to cover this outing; besides the birds and the rest of the "big" things, I've got a handful of critters, including another video to make. Life's too short!

Almost too tired to blog

I'm absolutely tuckered out. Falling asleep over my keyboard. The Edgewater rocks will have to wait until I get some sleep. At least they're not perishable.

Meanwhile, here's a curious isopod on a fat shell on those rocks. (A Lewis' moon snail, maybe?)

"I'm looking at you looking at me."

And then he disappeared down the back way, into the caves.

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The pod critters

(Another dishpan aquarium post.)

Clams are monopods. So are these, ...


... but I haven't seen any around here lately.

We and the birds are bipeds, the raccoon and the squirrels are tetrapods, the leafhopper in a jar on my desk is a hexapod. Octopuses and squids are cephalopods as well as octopods; that they have to hog the numbering word, and leave the equally eight-legged spiders orphaned is unfair.*

Next, we have the decapods, with ten legs. That covers the crabs, the shrimp and lobsters, and a bunch of other shrimpy things.

As their name implies, all decapods have ten legs; these are the last five of the eight pairs of thoracic appendages characteristic of crustaceans. The front three pairs function as mouthparts and are generally referred to as maxillipeds, the remainder being pereiopods. In many decapods, however, one pair of legs has enlarged pincers; the claws are called chelae, so those legs may be called chelipeds. Further appendages are found on the abdomen, with each segment capable of carrying a pair of biramous pleopods, the last of which form part of the tail fan (together with the telson) and are called uropods. Wikipedia

Simple and logical, isn't it?

The amphipods, (meaning they have feet on both - "amphi" - ends, as if they were unique in that respect) are decapods, with eight pairs of limbs, three of which are used for other purposes, eating and grasping, leaving five pairs for getting around on.

Orange-eyed amphipod from my dishpan.

Twelve legs? Who has twelve legs? That would work out to "dodecapod", but that's a geometric shape.**

After that, isopods are easy. "Iso" means "equal"; all fourteen feet are similar and used for the same functions; swimming, crawling, and grabbing. Some of them are good at the grabbing bit.

Idotea resecata, the eelgrass isopod.

Holding on tight.

This little guy was dead. He died holding onto an eelgrass root. I tried to shake him off, brush him off, wash him off; he held on as if he were part of the plant. I had to cut the root to get him out of the water.

Back to the monopods again? A clamshell and a snail both fit that description. But here are our fourteen-leggers; two small isopods trying to hide under the snail.

Gnorimosphaeroma oregonense, Oregon pillbugs, forgetting about contrast.

These look almost like the "normal" pillbugs that live under my flowerpots, and are about the same size. But they zip around in the water, swimming on their sides, their backs, their bellies indiscriminately. Then they hide in the seaweed or the eelgrass, not very effectively because of their colour. On the sandy bottom, they are almost impossible to see. When I touch them, they roll up in a little ball, just like some of their land cousins.

Shell of an Oregon pillbug, a bit dismantled, with eelgrass isopod and ruler (metric) for comparison.

And we'll leave the myriapods for another day.

* Update: Steve Daniels, blogging at Crete Nature, remarks that "... cephalopods are always putting their foot in their mouth."***

**Update 2: Barnacles have the twelve legs, so should qualify for the term "dodecapod".

*** Ditto for the barnacles. 

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Armadillidiidae. Pill bugs, for short

I like that word, Armadillidiidae. Step back and take a look at it. It kind of looks like a pillbug, on its back, with the legs waving in the air.

Digging through the mulch, checking to see if my perennials are starting up, I came across three shiny black balls. I collected them and brought them inside. On my desk, they immediately unrolled themselves and started running. Pillbugs.

Armadillidium vulgare

I have at least two different species of their relatives, the sow bugs or woodlice, in my garden, but I hadn't seen these here before. Nor had I seen any, anywhere, so big. The largest of the three was well over 1/2 an inch long. The woodlice that I collect for my spider are half that, at most.

Woodlice (Oniscidea sp.) and pill bugs (Armadillidiidae sp.) are isopods (meaning same or equal feet), and look almost alike, but only the Armadillidiidae roll up into a ball. And the A. vulgare makes a nice, tight, perfectly spherical ball; not all Armadillididae do. (Sorry. I just like that word.)

Unrolling.

These guys ran fast, and pushed aside even plastic lids meant to contain them. They're like little tanks. I photographed this one inside a jewelry tin that I have fixed up with a non-slip bottom.

Trying to escape.

It has two long antennae, and two short, stubby ones that you can see in this photo. The eyes are behind these and to the sides.


Seven thoracic segments, head and abdomen (the tail end). Seven pairs of legs. Nicely sculpted armor-plating.

On its back, legs waving.

I finally put them into the spider's bottle. She tried to tie them up, but they kept breaking her web; too sturdy, too well protected. Eventually, they died, probably because it's too dry in there. They need moisture to be able to breathe.

The next ones I find go back to the garden after a brief, damp photo session.

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Questions, questions, and a sowbug graveyard

I don't know enough about trees. With the leaves on, and a bit of help, I can usually recognize the more common ones. Without leaves, I'm struggling. It doesn't help that here in the lower mainland, the climate is so mild, and the gardeners so enthusiastic, that many of the trees around the homes and businesses are imported or hybridised. Even in the greenbelts, the newcomers are taking root. (See Huckleberry Days, for example.)

I take a photo of some bark, bring home a leaf or two, and compare them with my books. Sometimes, I find them right away, and there is no doubt about them. At others, well, is this bark like that, or like that? Or maybe like this one from China? Do the leaves match? Almost? Not at all?

This evening I got out all my tree books and leafed through them, looking for the latest find. No luck, at all.


What is this? It's a deciduous tree, not terribly big. There were no catkins nor budding leaves yet.


The other side of the same trunk. Elephant skin. Are these younger branches, coming up from below?


In a couple of spots where the bark has separated from the trunk, this red mass shows up. Is it the inner bark, or some fungus or slime?

Far too many questions.

Inside the trunk, we found a mini-habitat:

At several points around the trunk, where it seems that a branch must have broken off some time ago, there are deep holes.

The young branches have grown up around this one.

I blew my photos up to full size and took inventory. The wood at the top had a crumbly look to it; I could see worm tracks here and there. There may be a few woodpecker holes, but not many. (Compare it to Seabrooke's woodpecker tree.)

In the puddle at the bottom; dead leaves, a few twigs, some rectangular whitish things, and an earthworm (I think). Above that, in the damp; slimy green algae, looking uncannily like sea lettuce. Up at the top where it's dry; white slime (parchment, crust, dry rot?). And between the algae and the puddle; a few sowbug carcasses. They looked like spider frass; while we were at the tree, I looked for webs or spiders, but none were visible.

Another view of the same hole. See the sowbug graveyard?

Not the same hole. This one is dryer, and full of dead sowbugs. The edges of the plates are white, making the bugs look striped, possibly because of a fungal growth.

Those are the first sowbugs, dead or alive, I've seen around here since the cold weather started. Under the bark, though, no matter how it snows and blows, there is a modicum of warmth and moisture for assorted insect, worm and spider life.

On a tree a few feet away, moss and lichen grew. Different chemistry, different organisms. But there are probably sowbugs in the crevices there, too. And spiders. There are always spiders.

Leaf lichen and tiny moss.

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Life on the edge

... water's edge, that is. Where the living is precarious, the environment sometimes cold, sometimes hot, now wet, now dry, now saline, now fresh. The highest intertidal zone and the splash zone.

We've been combing the rocks around the Kwomais Point headland, but recently even the afternoon low tide has been high. (Today's tide levels at White Rock: 5:12 PM - 3.7 m, 8:49 PM - 3.4 m, 1:38 AM - 4.1 m. Only the morning tide is low: 9:53 AM - 0.4.) And we've found several things I'd never seen before.

Laurie has been looking at seaweeds. I never knew there were so many types!

Rockweed. The old, familiar rockweed.

I've been comparing our photos to the ones I found on a great ID site, WSU Beach Watchers EZ-ID Guides. I've been able to identify some, but not all of the seaweeds we found. I'm still searching for the most intriguing of them all, which I'll post about in a day or two.

Green algae on the lower edge of a wet rock. And a limpet to feed on them.

And I, being in a mood for rockclimbing (of sorts), have kept more to the splash zone. And lookee here!


A tidepool, just below the highest tide line. Nothing much in it but barnacles and mussels. But while I watched, something moved.

Zooming in. See that red beastie? He was moving fast; in a couple of seconds he had scuttled out of site.

He's a Neomulgus littoralis, a red velvet mite. BeachWatchers says,

This little arachnid is only about 3 mm in diameter or about the size of a period at the end of a line of newsprint. It is found on driftwood or rocks high in the intertidal where it looks like a tiny bright red dot and may be stationary or scurrying along the surface. These little mites feed by sucking the fluids out of kelp flies.

The three I found were scurrying.

I found a great photo of these on BugGuide. "Racing", the photographer says. Except for these two. A lucky shot.

And just a bit higher on the rocks, on a bare, dry boulder, I saw what looked like a giant pillbug. Except that it was running far faster than any pillbug I had seen. I jumped up to another rock, how I don't know (Laurie had to help me down later), to get a photo. Too late; he had disappeared down a crevice. I watched that crack for about ten minutes, barely moving, in case he reappeared. Nothing doing, although I did get another distant shot at a red velvet mite on a dry rock.

I found the isopod on BeachWatchers, though. He's a Ligia pallasii, the sea slater, or rock louse.

RaceRocks has a video of these creatures, including a shot of a cute one trying to escape the weighing station.

Both these sites are copyrighted, so I can't borrow a photo; you'll have to go see for yourself.

Next: the seaweeds.
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