Just one hermit

Today the tide was really low. I went out early and followed the water out before the day heated up. Met this guy:

Grainy-Hand hermit, near the bottom of the intertidal zone.

... and many more hermits, some starfish, kelp crabs, etc.; processing photos tomorrow.

This one goes to join the #DailyHermit series on BlueSky.

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Hoy era dia de una marea muy baja. Salí temprano y seguí el agua mientras se retiraba, antes de que el dia se calentara demasiado. Encontré este cangrejito ermitaño:

Foto: un ermitaño Pagurus granosimanus, en la parte más baja de la zona intermareal.

Y hubo muchos otros, y estrellas de mar, y cangrejos, etcetera; mañana me dedico a procesar las fotos.

 Y este, lo voy a subir a la serie de fotos #DailyHermit en BlueSky.

Algae and not

Tide-pooling in the lower intertidal zone; the seaweeds, and seaweed look-alikes:

Masses of sea lettuce, Ulva spp., and faded kelp fronds.

In the upper intertidal zone, I find both of these, the sea lettuce and the kelp, but in pieces, washed up by the waves. Here, the sea lettuce is firmly attached to the rocks. It looks fragile, but pulling on a few blades, I find that not only do they not come loose, they don't break, either.

More sea lettuce, a red bladed alga, some brownish, feathery seaweeds, and I think those are pink branching hydrocorals.

The sea lettuce in the first photo had thin, long blades. This species has wide blades.

There are coralline look-alikes; coral leaf seaweeds, which are algae; the hydrocorals are animals. These have pink branches and whitish tips to each branch.

More of the same. With a purplish green sea urchin.

And another feathery brown algae. With sea lettuce, rockweed, bladed red algae. And a hermit crab.

At the very bottom of the exposed intertidal zone, assorted encrusting species.

It's hard to tell what these are. The pink and yellow bands are probably encrusting sponges. And then again, some could be encrusting bryozoans. The deep red could be more sponges, but Turkish washcloth, a seaweed, also has an encrusting phase. To be sure, you'd have to take a sample and examine it microscopically.

Identification is fun, but it's also a delight just to enjoy the patterns and colours, exposed here, oh, so briefly.

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Explorando en la zona intramareal más baja; algunas algas y cosas que se les parecen.

Foto #1: Grandes cantidades de lechuga marina, Ulva spp., y hojas de kelp, ya blanqueadas por el sol. En la zona intramareal alta, encuentro estos dos, pero en trozos, arrancados y aventados a la playa por las olas. Aquí, la lechuga de mar está bien fija en la roca. Parecen tan frágiles, pero si trato de quitar un manojo de la roca, no solo me resiste, pero ni se rompen las hojas.

Foto #2: Más lechuga de mar, pero de una especie diferente, una alga roja de hojas anchas, algas como pequeños arbustos, y hydrocorales color de rosa (también se conocen como corales falsos). La lechuga de mar en la primera foto tenía hojas largas y delgadas; la de esta foto tiene hojas anchas.

Hay algas que se parecen a estos hydrocorales. Pero los hydrocorales son animales. Tienen las ramas de varios colores y las puntas de las ramas son blancas.

Foto #3: Más de lo mismo. Con un erizo de mar verde, color violeta.

Foto #4: Otra alga en forma de arbusto. Con lechuga de mar, Fucus spp., otra alga roja de hojas anchas, y un cangrejito ermitaño.

Foto #5: En la parte más baja de la zona intramareal expuesta ese dia, una variedad de especies encrustantes.

Es difícil acertar a que especie estos pertenecen. Las manchas color de rosa y amarillas puede ser que sean esponjas encrustantes. Pero es posible que algunas sean briozoos. Las areas color de rojo fuerte también pueden ser esponjas. Pero hay un alga roja, la toallita turca, que tiene una fase encrustante. Para identificar alguno de estos con confianza, habría que tomar una muestra y examinarla bajo una lente fuerte o incluso un microscopio.

Es divertido tratar de indentificar estas cosas, pero también es un placer solamente mirar los diseños y los colores, que fueron expuestos aquí a la luz, por tan poco tiempo.

Lemon of the tidepools

Exploring a shallow tidepool, less than 2 inches deep, I came across this lemon-coloured beauty.

Monterey sea lemon, Doris montereyensis.

He's about the size of a lemon. The front is toward the right of the photo: that lump is one of his two rhinopores, his taste and scent receptors. He was crawling on the rock, half in and half out of the water. When I picked up his rock, he dropped off and started to curl up.

Sea lemon underside.

I took a few photos and moved him carefully to the water in the shade of a stone, right side up.

Walking around the tidepool, I found another, almost hidden under seaweed between two rocks. On my next circuit of the pool, I couldn't see it at all until I stood on the exact same stone, crouched in the same position as before. The first was also invisible except from the right angle. It made me wonder how many other things I am missing.

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Buscando entre las pozas intramareales, en una poza de menos de 4 cm. de hondo, encontré esta belleza.

Es un nudibranquio, el "limón marino de monterey", Doris montereyensis. Es más o menos el tamaño de un limón mediano. Su cabeza apunta hacia la derecha en la foto; la pequeña extensión es uno de sus dos rinóforos, órganos que detectan sabores y olores.

Se deslizaba sobre la piedra, la mitad fuera del agua. Cuando levanté su piedra, se soltó y, volteado barriga al aire, empezó a encerrarse. Saqué unas fotos y luego lo regresé al agua en la sombra de una piedra.

Siguiendo la vuelta a la poza, vi otro limón marino medio escondido bajo algas, entre dos piedritas. Y dando una segunda vuelta, no lo podía ver hasta que me paré en la misma piedrita, y me agaché en la misma postura de antes. El primer limón también resultó ser invisible si no fuera desde el ángulo preciso. Me hizo pensar cuantas otras cosas se me pasan.

#InverteFest

Thousands of eggs

 Sunny day. Low tide. Rocky shore, with tide pools.

I found whelk eggs!

Hundreds of egg cases. Thousands of eggs. And a few proud parents.

Down on my knees to get a better look.

Some are yellow, others are pink. I think these are frilled dogwinkles, Nucella lamellosa.

Work done, a whelk plows her way home.

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Un dia asoleado. Marea baja. Piedras expuestas a la luz del dia. Y pozas intramareales.

¡Y encontré huevos de bocinas (Nucella lamellosa)!

Fotos: 1 a 3: concentración de huevos en la zona baja. Cientos de sacos de huevos, miles de huevos.

Foto 4: una bocina, trabajo concluido, forma un surco en la arena.

#Invertefest

Where the living is green

In the intertidal zone, worms and snails live happily in sand. Crabs and fish live under rocks; limpets live on top. Crabs and  isopods like a seaweed blanket. But under a layer cake of sand, rocks, weed, it's party time; everybody mingles.

Lower intertidal zone, Simms Creek area. 

Calcareous tubeworms, spiral tubeworms, orange-legged hermit, bryozoans, limpet, assorted seaweeds, two pecies of snails, encrusting sponge.

More bryozoans, snail, hermit.

Encrusting sponge, with snails.

Grainy-hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus.

Green mottled star, spiral tubeworms, bryozoans and sea urchin

Leather star and bryozoan. With hermit, snails, tubeworms.

Hermit (hiding), limpet, sea urchin, two kinds of snails.

Clingfish.

Also present ...

And ... the rest of the animals I found on that one trip to Stories Beach, in no particular order:

A Black prickleback, Xiphister artopurpureus. Look for the thin white lines radiating back from the eye; his pal, the rock prickleback has wide pale lines in a black field instead.

Red rock crab, running for cover.

Bright yellow or greenish yellow eggs, possibly belonging to a clingfish.

A couple of tiny hermits, dwarfed by the dogwinkles and isopods around them.

Rockweed isopods come in a variety of colours, from green to warm browns, to purplish blacks. I hadn't seen one before with that distinctive dark and light green pattern. Could it be a different species? 

Unidentified sculpin.

"Coloration is often virtually useless as a tool for identification. Extreme variation is the norm." (Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, VB62)

Purple sea star. I saw several dozen, all healthy. Good to see, after the onslaught of Sea Star Wasting Disease that wiped out so many.

Where the worms are.

According to Kozloff, these are probably the tubes of bamboo worms, hiding 6 inches or more below the surface of the sand. Some day I'll manage to dig one out, to be sure.

Just worms. Beautiful worms.

They hide their bright, flowery faces in the deep shadows underneath rocks. When the tide abandons them, they flee. When the water comes back, it pays to kneel in seaweed and peer into their hideaways, cautiously; the slightest disturbance will cause them to retreat into their tubes and slam the doors.

Red trumpet calcareous tubeworms, Serpula columbiana. Taken with flash: it's dark down there.

The worms live in white tubes attached to the rock, curved outward at the head to spread their feeding tentacles. The central circle is a funnel-shaped door, or operculum. It seals the tube when the tide goes out, hiding the brilliant head.

Zooming in. I like the rayed funnel on the one on the right.

The spaghetti worms cannot retract their tentacles, as most tentacled worms do. And they really do look like wet spaghetti dumped in the sand, with a sculpted carrot for a body.

Spaghetti worm, Terrebelid sp.

The white "spaghetti" are feeding tentacles. Just beneath them, some of the red gills are visible here. The worms build themselves a soft mud tube, but are not always protected by it. In this photo, only the tail of the worm remains in the tube.

The polychaete worm is not as spectacular as its cousins, but viewed closely, has lovely, shimmery colours, blue, green, pink, and sometimes red.

Zooming in to display the iridescence.

Little boxes all the same

In the lower intertidal zone, there's a new treasure to be found under every rock. This one holds a community of bryozoans, sponges, and pink spiral tubeworms.

Orange encrusting bryozoan, Schizoporella unicornis

These bryozoan colonies grow outward from the center. The inner ones die off, leaving the calcified framework behind, hexagonal boxes towards the center, switching to rectangles farther out. Along the edges, live zooids are orange; the boxy structure is less obvious, but looking closely, tiny dots show where the feeding lophophores emerge.

The orange encrusting bryozoan is an invader from Japan, and has found our waters much to its liking. My encyclopedia says it is,

"now the dominant encrusting bryozoan in much of the Pacific Northwest. ... Long term effects? An unfolding mystery."

An example of bryozoan "boxes". This one was from a bryozoan I found on kelp, examined under a microscope I had in 2012.

View of S. unicornis remains, showing the openings for the lophophores. Photo: Yale Peabody Museum. YPM IZ 049667 

Zooming in on the rock face, I found what looks like a new colony, circular and dotted with feeding zooids.

The blobs on the lower centre left show the same basic structure, but they're piled on top of each other. The little grey doughnut is the egg ring of an unknown snail.

And on to the next rock ...

(Title taken from a line of the song, "Little Boxes". The photo on Wikipedia is reminiscent of bryozoan crusts.)

Wandering weed patch

Not a mystery critter, but it's trying to be:

Mossy chiton, Mopalia muscosa, half camouflaged under assorted seaweeds, a limpet, a barnacle, and no telling what else, hidden in the undergrowth. 

What it would look like scrubbed up.

In a more exposed area, say on a bare patch of rock, exposed to more movement of water and sand, the plates of the shell can be worn down and bleached. The chiton still has its own hairy girdle, even when the shell is polished.

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.

Under-rock assortment

You can't flip just one. It's hard to stop at one hundred; I don't know if I could, if it weren't for the tide coming in.

Flipping rocks at low tide. Each one hides another treasure. And I stand up, holding my back and groaning, and tell myself it's time to quit. But there's a likely-looking rock in front of me. And another over there; and another ...

So here I am, a week later, still sorting photos of the one session on the beach. And the low tides in mid-afternoon are still beckoning.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the remaining photos of under-rock critters.

Black prickleback, black blenny, Xiphister atropurpureus. The black bands with white edging behind the eyes identify it. The Rock prickleback has the same bands, but the edging is dark, the centres light.

A tiny northern clingfish, caught in a clamshell. Gobiesox maendricus.

Nudibranch egg ribbon. I'm not sure which nudibranch laid them.

Baby grainy hand hermit, in a broken baby moon snail shell.

Another grainy hand. The legs are a clear yellow when they're small.

Pink-tipped green anemone. And I think that's a nudibranch near the centre top, under the seaweed.

Unidentified chiton. This was one of a group almost hidden in the mud in a tidepool full of floating seaweed fragments. The largest was a bit over an inch long.

Another unidentified nudibranch, half-hidden under a rock and not seen until I examined my photos.

Seaweeds floating in the tide.

More goodies tomorrow. And then, a day trip to Mitlenatch Island. And a video or two. I'll never catch up!