View from the dry side of the glass

I promised more aquarium photos "tomorrow" and then I took the weekend off. "Mañana" works better; it's more flexible. So here's a stack of underwater critters.

Orang sea pens, Ptilosarcus gurneyi. And a shrimp.

The lighting on this tank in the aquarium was strongly pink. To highlight the sea pens? I'll have to ask why next time.

Tunicates, just a living bag of water with an intake and outlet.

Plumose anemone, Metridium senile.

A green starfish with white bands around the centre.

And a very long-armed, spiky starfish.

Crescent gunnel, Pholis laeta.

And the same painted greenling I posted earlier. Oxylebius pictus.

And here he is, standing on his tail to get a better view of those strange noisy creatures just beyond the glass.

For some of the critters spending the summer in the aquarium, we are the spectacle; something to tell the folks back home about this fall.

Next, a pair of hermits, the ever-curious hermits.

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Prometí subir más fotos de los animales en el acuario "mañana", y luego flojeé todo el fin de semana. Pues, aquí están, por fin.

Fotos:

1. Las plumas de mar anaranjadas, Ptilosarcus gurneyi. La luz en el acuario, en este tanque por lo menos, tiene un tinte color de rosa. Hay un camarón que probablemente no tiene ese color bajo luz natural.
2. Tunicados. Apenas una bolsa de agua viviente, con una entrada y otra salida para mantener la corriente.
3. Una anémona plumosa, Metridium senile.
4. Una estrella de mar verde con círculos blancos alrededor del centro.
5. Otra estrella de mar, esta con brazos largísimos.
6. La borda creciente, o blenio, Pholis laeta.
7. Y el mismo greenling pintado que subí anteriormente, Oxylebius pictus.
8. Y aquí se para sobre la cola, para ver mejor a esas criaturas extrañas y ruidosas al otro lado del vidrio.

Para algunos de los animales que pasarán este verano en el acuario, el espectáculo somos nosotros. Tendrán aventuras para contar a sus amigos cuando regresen a casa en el otoño.

Siguiente: un par de ermitaños, que nos miran con mucha curiosidad siempre.

Lion's Mane Jellyfish

In a quiet corner of the marina at Powell River, we found this Lion's Mane jellyfish.

We see these often on the beaches from Campbell River to White Rock; usually by the time we get to them, they're little more than a mass of red goop, about the size of a flat soup bowl. This one was probably dead, too. It wasn't moving, except as the gentle current moved the tangle of seaweed beside it.


I think it is floating upside-down. The bits of torn rope in the centre are probably all that remains of the mane; possibly those delicate white threads around it are some of the fine tentacles. I didn't dare try to fish it out; dead or alive, these critters sting.

"The stinging cells ( nematocysts ) in the tentacles can actually live for months after they are detached from the Jellyfish." (Emerald Sea Photography)

The Lion's Mane is a cold-water jellyfish; it is "seldom found farther south than 42°N latitude," more or less on the Oregon/California border. (Wikipedia) The colder the water, the larger they grow. They live for one year; towards the end of the summer, they gravitate towards the shore, where we find them cast up, melting.

Emerald Sea Photography has beautiful photos of the live jellyfish.

North Island Explorer has a photo showing those translucent lobes curled up around the rim of the red centre at the top.

And here's one with the white bell stretched out, swimming. This one, found south of Seattle, was 14 inches across, a bit bigger than "ours". The tentacles reached 8 feet down.

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Underwater menu

I found a dead mussel in my dishpan aquarium yesterday morning. Dead, empty, cleaned out; not a morsel of mussel flesh left. One of the whelks is probably still digesting it.

The assorted other animals in the water get along nicely with each other. The isopods, limpets and periwinkles graze on the algae; the barnacles, anenomes and clams strain plankton out of the water; the crabs clean up the trash. But the whelks eat mussels and barnacles.

So white, so angelic, so bloodthirsty.

Whelk, showing white flesh and orange operculum.

I've been watching them; they settle on a mussel or a clump of barnacles and stay put, boring through the shell. The largest mussels are most at risk; a couple of little ones wander through the tops of the seaweed, where the snails can't reach them. The barnacles, stuck on the rocks, aren't so fortunate. A couple of days ago, three snails were working together on the largest barnacle, which now stays closed up, whether dead, anethesized, or trying to protect itself, I don't know.

A Nature Coast Marine Group (Australia) page gives a general timetable:

When feeding the whelk crawls onto the barnacle, tubeworm or shellfish and drills a hole in the calcium carbonate covering of its prey. In the case of barnacles, whelks usually attack the doors that open to allow the animal to feed. The whelk releases an acid from a gland in the front part of its foot. This softens the calcium carbonate which is then licked away by the rasp-like tongue (radula) of the whelk. When a hole has been made in the prey the whelk inserts its tube-like mouthpart into the victim and, with its radula, tears off and eats the soft tissues.

... It takes 30-40 minutes for each application of the acid then about a minute of rasping before the process is repeated. The whelk takes about 8 hours to penetrate a shell 2mm thick and can take up to 4 days to get into a larger barnacle.

My poor barnacles!

These miniature snails don't bother even the tiny barnacles: they are algae eaters.

Sitka periwinkles.

This one may have been a young Amphissa. It's just over 4mm. long. It would have been eating dead algae and other detritus.

I saw this next snail first crawling upside down on the undersurface of the water, suctioned on just as a larger snail would attach itself to a rock. It crossed the whole dishpan this way. Here it has moved to a leaf of sea lettuce.

Another algae eater.

These are a couple more residents of the mini-ecosystem: I'm not sure what they are, but I would guess some type of sponge. Alive or dead, I don't know, but they seem to provide housing for some of the smaller shrimpy things.

A yellowish, branched spongy substance, with random tunnels.

And a more rounded, purply sponge, with one hole in each "branch".

This long worm was travelling through the eelgrass and seaweed. It's a polychaete, with bristles on each foot, and a carnivore, like the whelks. It's probably eating the tiny, hair-like red worms that live in the sand.

Click on the photo to see the head structure.

And, since I don't have any starfish (nor gulls), nothing eats the clams.

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Watching where we step

On a mile-wide, featureless, sandy beach, what is there to see, besides sand and sky? Plenty. But it's mostly in hiding. I've been having fun blowing up our photos of Sunday's walk to full size, to see what we missed.

Sea lettuce and a mudflat snail, Batillaria attramentaria. No telling what's underneath.


Brown seaweed, probably a dulse. Eelgrass and roots.

So far, so good. Eelgrass and seaweed are easy to see. But look again! See those little yellowish dots on the eelgrass? They're egg cases, possibly of the Black Dog Whelk, Illyanasa obsoleta*.

Here are some more, doing their best to blend in with the bubbles.

Brown tuft, navel-lint algae. With eelgrass and snail eggs.

The snails are even better at hiding; they burrow right under the wet sand. I dug a few out; mostly Black Turbans, and a whelk or two. One on the upper left, below, looks like a mudflat snail, going by the shape.


In a photo of seaweeds and eelgrass, I found this tiny collection:

White tube discarded by a worm. And what looks like whelk eggs. (Nucella sp.)

If I had seen this at the time, I would have taken a close-up. But they were so small, I missed them even on the first two examinations of the photo.

This tangle of weeds and -- something -- is intriguing:

What is that red, segmented, tentacled thing? Worm or weed?


A close-up of the end, with "tentacles". Some kind of spaghetti worm? **

This is a worm, at least. We found it writhing in an inch of water. It's about 6 inches long.

Red-banded Bamboo worm, Axiothella rubrocincta. The red rings are bristled. (Barely visible.)


Clear view of the tail end. The head is already back under the sand, and digging fast.

Their tubes were scattered here and there around this area of the beach, mostly poking just an inch or so above ground. The worms stay in these tubes; I wonder why this one was on the surface.

On the opposite side of the bay, at Boundary Bay Beach (and this is all Boundary Bay, but this side is Crescent Beach), the sand is dotted with the fecal castings of lugworms. On the Crescent Beach side, the coils of worm poop are less frequent, smaller, and finer. Look for them around these geoducks:

Pacific geoduck, Panopea abrupta. Up to 9 inches across the shell, and 20 lbs. Lifespan: 168 years!

When I touched this geoduck (pronounced gooey duck) with a toe, it retracted itself back under the sand, squirting at me as it went.

A horse clam, covered with algae and seaweed, and accompanied by grey mounds of worm poop.

(Update: I had identified this as a geoduck. I was wrong. Looking more closely at the siphon mouth, I realized that the edge of the mantle is tentacled; this identifies it as the gaper, or horse clam, Tresus nutalli. (The tentacles are green, which distinguish it from T. capax, where they are gold. I still think, though I could be wrong, that the first one is a geoduck. Neither it, nor one other similar one that we photographed show any sign of tentacles, and the other one has the characteristic one siphon, two openings of the geoduck.)

Look in front of the clam siphon; that brown coil is not lugworm poop; it looks more like a ribbon worm of some kind.

Mouth of the gaper clam.

One last critter. There were quite a few of these. But we never saw them unless we were about to step on them; then they shot out of the sand, sped a few feet away, and -- disappeared, even though we were looking right at them. One moment they were swimming, the next, there was not a trace of them.

Can you see the tidepool sculpin here? I have increased the contrast to make him stand out.

Tidepool sculpin, Oligocottus maculosus. Supremely camouflaged.

So many new things! So much to learn! What fun!

* Photo in Marine Life of the Pacific Northwest, MC198, p.228. Also, see my last year's post, No boots, no bags, some goodies anyhow, for macro photos.

** It's really an eelgrass root, with its rootlet "tentacles".

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He followed me home ...

... Can I keep him?

Smiley the crab

At Boundary Bay beach, I scooped up a couple of clamshells full of sand, hoping I had caught at least one of the worms that were in it. I dumped them in my little bottle, tipped out an adventurous crab, and filled it with water from the next wave.

At home, I spread the sand out in a bowl. Smiley, here, had come along for the ride. So had this black turban snail.

Black turban snail, 7 mm tall. Smiley in the background.

Unfortunately, we will not be going back to the beach for several days. I'm trying to keep them alive with homemade artificial seawater (sea salt with de-chlorinated water, at about 3 parts per 100), but Smiley's not doing too well. He stopped moving, and stuck his legs out at weird angles until I added lots of plain, unsalted water. The water on his beach, especially at the upper levels, must be heavily watered down with creek and rainwater.

Not that it matters; it's just a crab and a snail, out of billions. But that appealing smile!

Anyhow, the worms:

Three turned up in the bottle of sand. Two of them were joined together at the head, and not happy about it; they were thrashing around, as if one were trying to shake free.

Unidentified polychaete worms

I wasn't sure what was happening; some kind of mating dance? Or predation? After a while, I managed to see enough to know they were different species. The segments were different shapes; so were the tails. So, predation it was.

Both were somewhere between red and green, depending on the light. The legs were green.

I couldn't see them clearly while they fought. With a needle and a paintbrush, I tried to separate them. It was difficult, and I finally managed only by injuring the long one. It bled, red blood.

Looking at them separately, now they were quiet, didn't reveal too much more information. The shorter, greener one has thicker, shorter legs (parapodia), and some kind of tentacles around the mouth end. I think I saw pale spines along its back.

I can't possibly identify either of them beyond the class level: the Polychaetes, or bristle worms. The Marine Life encyclopedia has photos of 79 different species, many very similar to these.

The other worm was thinner, and of variable length; while I watched, it stretched out from about 1 inch long to almost 3. It has a thicker head end, then a long body in a rainbow of colours; first blue, then red, then blue-black, then red, then pale blue, fading out to green at the tail.

Another Polychaete.

According to the Encyclopedia, at least 836 species of polychaete worms had been discovered in the Pacific Northwest, 20 years ago. And more are being found all the time. It seems strange that these are the first I have actually seen. (Poop doesn't count. I've seen plenty of that.)

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What a difference a shoe makes!

A great expanse of knee-deep water.

I can't wear those floppy thong slippers that everybody else seems to use all summer. Never have been able to. They hurt my toes, flop all over the place and trip me up. And I can't wear the clunky-looking rubber clogs that every store has a rack of these days; the heel slopes back, and I end up with a backache. So I've been wearing cloth shoes for the beach and trying to stay out of the water as much as possible.

Laurie, in boots, looking over someone else's thong flip-flops.

Laurie always wears good, sturdy, sensible boots, with wool socks. Hiking boots of suede or leather, not rubber boots. He's very careful with them. So he stays out of water, too.

That has changed. Recently, as a result of a fall on the rocks at White Rock, he ended up with scraped and sprained ankles. His feet were swollen, and he could no longer tolerate the boots. He tried on those clogs and -- waddya know! -- loved them.

And last month I found, at Mark's Work Wearhouse, a pair of ordinary-looking summer shoes, with the heel that I like, but made of rubber. And they fit, and are comfortable. I've been wearing them ever since, for street and beach.

All that to say that the other day, when we found the tide high at Boundary Bay, we waded right in, and joined in with all the other revellers. Nice!

The building supervisors wear white.

The beach looks different underwater.

Seaweeds, no longer lying in an untidy mass.

Shallow water, with patterns of light. And lugworm egg case.

The sandy areas were dotted with these lugworm egg cases, swaying back and forth in the waves. We saw these here last year, about the same time. I checked, and it was sometime in the last week of July; I wrote about them on August 1st and 2nd. Hugh has another photograph, from this year.

I found one in inch-deep water that looked torn and ragged, so I didn't feel guilty about damaging it. I tried to dig its jelly "root" out from the sand, but it tore off. Digging deeper, I just came up with handfuls of sand, nothing more. I'm wondering just what is holding them down, and how deep it goes. (And where it goes to when I dig.)

They're beautiful, in their own way; the egg cases lying in the shallowest water were coated with sandy grains that glinted gold in the sunlight.

Abarenicola pacifica egg case, with lugworm poop, and snail trails.

As the waves rolled in around our knees, bits of eelgrass floated by; I grabbed at one with a blob of yellow stuff on it. Luckily, I had remembered to bring containers; I broke off the piece of eelgrass and shoved it in a pill bottle full of seawater.

At home, I poured it out into a bowl. Here it is, greatly enlarged (the eelgrass is really about 1/2 cm. wide):


It's a band of clear jelly, striped with yellow dots, firmly glued to the eelgrass, curled, but not joined in a ring. The jelly is quite firm; I could pull at it with a hook to spread the strip out, without it tearing. I think it's an egg strip, probably belonging to one of the snails, or a sea slug. (And yes, I do feel guilty about spoiling the batch. Unless it's one of the invasive Batillaria, in which case: good!)

Here are the "eggs" blown up even more:


Anyone know what these are?
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Weekly beastie fix

Plate 66, Ernst Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur
Wikipedia commons

Looks like this week's linkfest will be all creepy-crawlies. And I am glad; for the last week, I've had no tiny visitors. It's been cold enough to send even the spiders into hiding. There is not a web in sight out my back door.

It's the birds' turn. The juncos are back, in force. A tiny brown wren came right up to my door, looking for crumbs. A pair of flickers skirts the edges of the row of evergreens. And the chickadees are as bold and busy as they have ever been.

Still, ... the tiny ones. I miss them.

So, here are the creatures I've picked up on the web this week. Enjoy!

From DailyKos, an essay about a marine worm. And what a worm! Named Aphrodite; for reasons that will be obvious when you click on the link. By the way, did you know there is a species of worm called Bobbit because of the female's habit of feeding the male's penis to her young? (HT to Mark.)

From Deep Sea News: a marine snail covered with scales. Iron sulfide (fool's gold) scales. Talk about armour! "The coolest invertebrate ever", says a commenter.

One more underwater find: the oldest living animal on record. A quahog clam. Unfortunately deceased shortly after the find.

"Researchers from the University of Bangor recently discovered the oldest known animal on record, a 405 year-old clam, while dredging at the bottom of the North Atlantic above Iceland. Then they killed it."
Zoologix

Benny writes tongue-in-cheek. More accurate info at Milk River Blog. But Benny has the better photo.

And on to land ...

"This is so cool. A one-millimeter long spider (Cenotextricella simoni) encased in amber gets "digitally dissected" using Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography."
From John Lynch at Stranger Fruit. Excellent photos here.

And a good write-up on the same spider, at Richard Dawkins. No photo; good thing John had them!

That was then. And now, we have a Hallowe'en Battle, spider vs. centipede. From Niches.

And "Follow the Leader": spiderlings on a tight-rope. From jciv's Flickr album.

And, in case you haven't had enough, here's Circus of the Spineless # 26. Lots of photos, more great articles!

And I'm going back to browse that Flickr album. See you tomorrow!

Rocky shore, with loons

... Following along in our attempted peregrination around the Lower Mainland shoreline ...

A week ago, before the bad weather hit us, we went looking for the "1000 steps" that Cicero had told me about. Starting at the Ocean Park mall, we explored the streets to the west and south. Most end in a few blocks at big houses built right on the bluff, occasionally at wild bush hiding muddy cliff faces, unclimbable except on all fours.

But at the end of 15A Avenue, there it was; a place that looked like a parking area, with prominent No Parking signs, a trail head, and a notice; "1001 STEPS". We found parking a block up the hill, and walked back.


It was a steep climb, but didn't live up to their advertising; there were only 236 steps in all. Enough, though.


(The lighting was strange; bright, dazzling sunlight, shining straight in and reflected off the water, but deep shade under the brow of the hill. My camera couldn't handle it very well, and Laurie's seems a little off. Even my old eyes protested.)

On the slope, the trees, a mixed bag, respond to the lop-sided exposure by twisting and angling themselves into the light and out of the wind.





Almost at the bottom. Below us, just the railroad track, a short scramble over tumbled rocks, and the shore. Not a beach.


Difficult walking. But quiet, so very quiet. Just the rustling of falling leaves, and the lapping of a retreating tide.

There were only two other people on this segment of coast, a man and a small boy. They walked ahead of us, almost to Kwomais Point (marked by a heron silhouetted against the water), then crossed the track into the bush.


After they had gone, we moved away from water's edge, and tried to work our way up to the heron and a bit beyond, to be able to get a clear photograph. He sat, unmoving, until we were almost there, then squawked once and left. Oh, well.



Laurie, at the Point, wishing for a heron.

As for other live things, this shore bears a different mix than the sandy areas to the north, and around the Point into the White Rock beach. The rocks were bare, well-scrubbed. There were few crabs, no dead crab shells, no sign of seagull feeding. A few white clamshells, sun-bleached. Barnacles, small ones, at the water line. No mussels. And none of those invasive batillaria mud snails. (Yay!) The few snails among the barnacles were smooth and dark, fatter and shorter than the batillaria.


At the high tide line, dead kelp wound itself around the bigger rocks. I don't remember seeing eelgrass, and there was no sea lettuce, which shows up on every other stretch of beach in the area. But in the cracks between some of the bigger rocks at the water's edge, I found a few small clumps of these, that I had never seen before.


Deep purple seaweed. Growing only in the deep shade in cracks between the rocks. I had to put the camera right into the crack and rely on the flash to show it up; to my sun-dazed eyes, this looked almost black. When the flash was too close, edges of the weed flared orange.

Back over the rocks, we climbed to the railroad track, under a fence, and through a bit of bush, making a shortcut to the steps. Up, all 236 of them, up the hill to the car -- my legs were aching -- and back to the mall for a bite at the deli. Where the proprietess told us of another set of steps, a shorter one, that would take us to the south side of the Point.

More on how we tried to find them yesterday, in the next post.

Oh, and the loons? Here they are, doing what loons do; diving as soon as you get anywhere near, coming up 'way over in the distance.