Blooming meadows

A couple of days ago, I posted a photo of a tiny beastie I'd just discovered in my aquarium.

Here it is again. A couple or three millimetres long.

Yesterday, I took dozens of photos of the general area, mostly on two oyster shells and the sand around them. I found several of the same animals.

There are two here. The colour is lighter, but the characteristic stripes are the same. And the size. I think they're baby snails, born in the tank. The little green things may be copepods, taking a break from their constant racing about.

Zooming in close like that, ignoring the parade of hermits and crabs and focusing instead on the background, I noticed how alive this "bare" surface really is.

Fertile fields. Algaes and diatoms, protozoa, and who knows what else. Pinks and purples and greens and blue-blacks. Good grazing for a tiny snail.

The hermit's shell is populated, too. Look at the edge, where the light shows up the tiny pink and green growing things.

It's turtles flowers all the way down.

Pink-tipped hitchhikers

When I bring home barnacles for my snails, they often come with hitchhikers. Last July, a couple of baby pink-tipped anemones came along for the ride. I looked for them yesterday when I cleaned the tank, and found four; they're multiplying*.

One has settled on a broken snail shell. This leaves it subject to rolling, being walked on, being buried in the sand, but also increases its exposure to possible foods.

Anthopleura elegantissima. Still a baby; they grow up to 10 inches across.

This one's a bit larger. The base is green, the tentacles tipped with pink, with white markings. And this one has a pretty striped oral disc. With a spiky hermit crab foot on the side.

Two pink-tipped anemones and a hairy hermit, on an oyster shell. The one on the right has something in its mouth. In the next photo I took, a few minutes later, only a tip was showing. Anemones swallow slowly.

Processing that last photo, I noticed a tiny critter near the bottom, too small to be seen clearly.

Here it is, with a section of hermit antenna for size comparison.

I don't know what this is. It looks like a snail, but not like any snail that I've seen on the beach or in the tank. It is slightly larger than a copepod, maybe 2 or 3 mm. long. Another hitchhiker, or a tank newborn?

I'll search the tank, and see if I can find in again.

(Update: I took dozens of photos of the area, and found another three of these critters, none as clear as the one above. I think they're baby snails.)

*That makes 8** anemones in the tank. That I know about. 4 pink-tipped, 2 orange-striped greens, one plumose anemone, and one burrowing anemone. There may be more, hiding among the barnacles or the algae.

** 9. 3 orange-striped green anemones.

Piling critters

I noticed the smells first; salt, creosote, tar, old wood, engines, something mildly fishy. I was going down the ramp to the dock where the working boats, the fishing and tug boats, tie up, and the scents took me back to a time when I used to fish off a similar dock, catching supper. An old memory surfaced; old log pilings, tarred, at the end of a dock, and a big (well, maybe; I was little) octopus climbing up and peering out of the square opening.

I didn't expect octopuses here; starfish and anemones, probably. I walked down to the end of three long docks, squinting down every gap between dock and boat, every opening for pilings. There wasn't much to be seen; the boats are tied up, two deep, on each side of the dock. Very little light filters down underneath them. And many of the pilings are metal; fat, rusty pipes standing out of the water. Nothing seems to live on them.

But where I found tarred log pilings and a bit of reflected light, I found shrimp. And 'way down at the end of the last dock, where the sunlight penetrates to those log pilings, I found a starfish climbing out of the water. I got down on my knees, then lay flat, ending up lying for a long time with my head and camera down the hole between the pilings.

Because the pilings were alive with things crawling about.

The starfish, half out of water.

There were a fair number of purple starfish. Earlier, I had seen a few pale orange ones, deep down, one in not very good shape. But these were active, crawling about or hunched over something edible. They all looked healthy.

In the photo above, all that white stuff is styrofoam. Tiny, white balls of styrofoam. I found these all along the dock, along the water line of the boats, stuck to the tarry pilings. (Not the metal ones.) I had to keep brushing floating clumps aside to see the animals below.

There wasn't much in the way of seaweeds around the pilings or on the boats. I saw a few kelp streamers, loose in the current, and a few blades of red algae. There seems to be more underneath the dock, but I couldn't see more than bits of the edge.

Kelp crab, barnacle scars, and styrofoam.

The kelp crabs keep walking around and around the pilings; as one disappears on the far side, the first legs of the next show up. Round and round and round; I never saw any of them stop to eat anything, but they must be finding something worthwhile.

Older kelp crab, growing pale seaweeds on his back. He's deeper down; there's only a hint of styrofoam in the foreground. The little toe tips at the top belong to a pair of shrimp on the far side of the piling.

Much smaller crab, possibly the red rock crab, with barnacle scars and a few remnants of styrofoam.

Another coonstripe shrimp. With floating styrofoam. The yellow mound is some sort of sponge. And what's that down at the corner?

That mottled brown thing with the blue vanes showed up in quite a few photos; in each one, the vanes were in a different position. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed it while I was taking the photos, paying attention to the shrimp.

Mystery critter.

From the shape of this animal, and the waving vanes, I thought it might be a nudibranch, but I've looked at all those in my encyclopedia, and hundreds that Google found for me. Nothing looks right.

Comparing it with the shrimp, which was about 4 inches long, I would guess that it is probably about an inch long. There are brown, mottled nudibranchs the right size, the barnacle-eating nudibranch, Onchidoris bilamellata, for example, but the vanes would be gills, and they should be feathery, and maybe smaller. But they would explain the number of empty barnacle scars on these pilings.

Help!

Down payment

There are more things in heaven and earth under the wharf, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

With apologies to Wm. Shakespeare (Hamlet Act 1, scene 5)

I looked at one of the under-the-wharf photos, and was lost. Herring can wait! I've got critters to identify, or to wish I could identify. Here's the first of the lot, and the easiest to recognize.

Three plumose anenomes, a bit of sea lettuce, some purply, tentacled gift-wrap ribbon, other stuff, worms, maybe.

But what is that pink, five-armed, blobby thing in the middle? It doesn't look like a starfish. Or does it?

This was taken down the crack between two wharf segments, with the sunlight illuminating the water beneath, and glancing down at an angle from above. The blue at the bottom is wharf paint.

Now, back to work: I've got some strange beasties to identify.

Poppies, purple crawlers, and blue lips

My big anemone, Val, just ate a whole family, mother and kiddies all together! Val's looking fat and happy, if a bit blue around the lips.

I'll tell the whole story tomorrow, with photos of the family in happier days.

For now, here's the mystery ten-legged thing I posted the other day. (I shouldn't really have called it a critter in the title, should I? Not exactly fair.)

No, not a sunflower sea star.

And here's the photo, with background.

Poppy seed pod, half ripe.

And here are a few younger poppies, not gone to seed yet:

Saturated sunlight.

A flaming cradle for that ten-legged, purple "thingie" in the centre.

Poppy and a half. With buds and ferns.

So, tomorrow, then, the sad loss of an entire blue family.

Name this critter

I spent the afternoon wading thigh-deep in eelgrass beds, and I'm tired, sunburnt, and somewhat wound up. I'll have photos and a report as soon as I finish sorting.

Meanwhile, just a bit of silliness.

Can you identify this ten-legged thing I found? Or take a wild guess?

I've removed the background, because that would make it too easy, since I've already given you a hint.

And that's a second hint.

Third hint: it's about an inch across.

I'll give you a couple of days to come up with ideas, then post the whole photo.

The mystery deepens

To recap:  photographing small, native limpets in my aquarium, I found one with a long worm between the body and the shell. Ever since, I've been examining all the limpets daily, hoping for another view of it.

And I've found several worms*, on the larger (about 1/4 inch) limpets. But they're not like the one I'd seen before.

Limpet with passenger, just poking its head out from shelter.

The worms* are shy; they stretch out just this little bit, wave around for a second, then retreat back behind the body of the limpet.

Zooming in, showing the structure of the worm*. I darkened the background to make it more visible.

As far as I can tell, this is a polychaete worm, aka bristle worm. There are many species of these, some free-living, many living on or in other organisms. Since my limpets are growing and appear to be healthy, their relationship with the worms is probably commensal; each one provides some benefit to the other.

The limpet in this case provides transportation, protection, and maybe even some food, whether crumbs from the limpet's diet of algae or excreted fecal matter (poop). It may be that the worm's contribution is basic housekeeping, keeping the place clean, taking the garbage out, etc.

But they're not the worm that started me looking in the first place. Here's the previous photo, for comparison:

Long, thin worm. Not shy at all.

I'll keep on looking.

*UPDATE: Not a worm. See next post.

Bone specialist needed

On Stories Beach, in Campbell River, I picked up this bird skull. I have never seen one like it before.

Top view. Part of the beak is missing. Length of this bit, 8 cm, height about 3.5 cm., as found.

Luckily, the light was great, and the skull felt fragile, so I photographed it as soon as we got back to the car, on the engine hood.

Bird skulls are usually smooth. This one seems almost feathered, but all that structure is bone. I've been searching for a match; I found a great site, skullsite dot com, with over 1000 bird skulls to compare, and looked at all the bigger ones. There's nothing like this.

Long, hollow bones.

Front view.

Side view, upside down.

The underparts of the bones reflected the light too brightly. Unfortunately, this is the best shot I've got; I packed the skull carefully to bring it home, got it here in one piece, then dropped it and broke the bottom section off.

Bottom view, broken remains.

Side view.

Any guesses? Or outright IDs?

Update: in the comments, five people so far are telling me it's a fish. I'm off to look up fish heads.

The mystery critter, mystified even more.

Once again, a critter I thought I knew has first stumped me, then amazed me.

The mystery. What is this?

Under a stone on the upper intertidal zone at Boundary Bay, a hint of tentacles caught my eye. When I touched the sand, it disappeared, so I dug for it, couldn't see it, and brought home the whole handful of sand.

As first seen. My fingertip at top left. I've removed the colour from most of the photo to highlight both the one I saw and the other one that turned up later.

At home, in a bowl of seawater. There were two of them, about an inch and a half long.

Were they worms? Peanut worms could be shaped something like this, and have similar tentacles. Or were they anemones? But the body didn't look like an anemone stalk.

A hint; the tentacles have those heart-shaped marks.

I've looked and looked, and looked: the only tentacled beasties I find with the heart markings are Anthopleura artemisia, the burrowing anemone, like the one that came home with me from Campbell River.

But that long, worm-like body?

Placed in the aquarium, they lay on the sand, withdrawing then extending their tentacles.

Tentacles partly extended.

I have been Googling for days. I find oodles of conflicting information: the burrowing anemones are not "True" anemones; they are so; it's only the Burrowing Tube anemones that are not "True". The local burrowing anemone, Anthopleura artemisia, does not have a long, worm-like stalk; it is "capable of greatly elongating.". It has a base on the stalk that "glues" it to a solid object; it has a bulbous, muscular base that anchors itself in a burrow. (I think the tail of my critters is remarkably bulbous and muscular.) 

There is a smaller burrowing anemone, the ten-tentacled anemone, a true anemone with similar markings on ten tentacles. My critters have more than ten tentacles.

Of the local anemones, only the Burrowing Tube anemone, Pachycerianthus fimbriatus, in a separate Subclass altogether, makes a tube. (Pachy doesn't look at all like my long-bodied anemones.)

Oh, and they like stone and sand mixes. But they don't; they want fine sand only.

The more I read, the more confused I get. I give up; I'll just report what I see.

One of the little anemones, contorted as they do, feeding.

The critters lay on the stones, contracting and squirming occasionally. They had been found buried in sand, so I buried them in sand. They worked their way to the surface, and lay there practicing their Yoga positions, until the current swept them away to another inhospitable location. I gave them more sand; they abandoned it.

One eventually found an oyster shell with a half-teaspoon of sand in it; he settled in, buried the bottom segment of his body, and started to feed. For a day. Then he upped anchor and coasted around the aquarium, checking out several possible spots on the way. Now he's back in the shell, and looking as if he's planning to stay.

The other one found a place, buried himself completely out of sight for a couple of days, then sprouted tentacles. I thought he'd acclimatized, but this morning he moved out, floated around a bit, then parked beside his big Campbell River cousin. He's there now.

Wanderer # 2, waiting for a lift.

At the left, above, you can see the hint of tentacles, retracted into the body, and the cross-hatch muscles. Those constricting rings move up the body slowly, as if it were a balloon with an elastic band being pushed along.

Wanderer # 1, jammed between two shells at the edge of the oyster shell he likes. At least half of the body is buried, the tentacles retracted.

If, as it seems, these are the same species as my Campbell River Refugee, "Val", then I am more astounded by him than ever; when we found him he was just a round blob of tissue. There was no hint of a long body, no column. And he's regenerated himself from that remnant!

Val, today. Enthusiastically feeding, and almost completely healed.

Update: in the comments, Tim suggests another species, to be found on this West Coast: Flosmaris Grandis, the White Burrowing Anemone. At least the shape is right, but I see no hearts on the tentacles.

...slowly & inexorably consumed*

The days are too short. I'm still investigating that second critter, he of the fat tail:

... and only one person has dared to guess what it is.

I'll reveal as much as I have discovered tomorrow.

For now, you must go see this video; starfish on the hunt. And dispatching a prey mussel. Time-lapse photography via Chris Mah, passed on by Miriam Goldstein. And now by me.

Hasta mañana.

*Title snipped from Miriam's ditto.

Name this sand dweller

I found this animal under a rock, partly buried in the sand, When I dug down to get a better look at it, it disappeared, so I brought home the whole handful of sand. Dumped it in a bowl, added water from the bay, and two of them showed up.

Enough background; can you guess what this is?

Stripy tail.

The entire animal stretches to about an inch or an inch and a half, but as often as not, is contorted in weird lumps and twists, to make a half-inch knot of itself.

I'll post the id in a couple of days. And photos.

Beach assortment

We had a brief interlude of almost summer-like weather, a few hours only, so we hurried to the White Rock beach. Made in in time to see all these before the rain bucketed down again:

Eelgrass isopod and sea lettuce.

Greenmark hermit. Still no sign of a green mark.

Another three-spined stickleback, floating in the incoming tide.

A strongly marked sculpin, about an inch long.

There's at least one fish underneath this eelgrass. Can you find it?

Tidepool sculpin, almost invisible. The sand was full of them, but I never saw them until they scooted away.

Green canoe and paddlers

Gull and shady tidepool

Name this critter!

There's more; a good look at a bright pink starfish, tomorrow.