Blue-eyed beach critter

Nebalia pugettensis, aka "Sea flea" or "Mud flat hooded shrimp". (But neither a shrimp nor a flea.) A Leptostracan.

He's mostly transparent; the shadow is somehow more substantial than he is.

I found some of these, dead, at Boundary Bay four years ago. This is the first live one I've seen. It was in a shallow tide pool where I was unsuccessfully trying to catch a sculpin. This little critter waltzed right into my collecting jar, and came home with me.

I wrote about these long ago, here (Part II of Muddy Buddies) and here (Part III).

Nebalia as I saw it and drew it, having no camera in those days.

It was a little harder to see this one, as I had to manipulate it very carefully, and it kept hiding in the sand. I couldn't get a microscope on it without hurting it, or breaking those almost invisible legs and tail.

If you look very closely, you can almost see the pointed tail of the carapace.

The whole carapace is transparent. This includes a separate, pointed rostrum over the head, and the long spine at the back. All the colour comes from the body of the animal underneath.

And a strange thing; all my dead samples had ruby red eyes; this guy's eyes are blue.

Nebalia (Muddy Buddies, Part III)

This is Part II of a three-part series, reproduced from my old blog. (Here) Part I, Part II. (On this blog)

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Continued from Muddy Buddies, Part I and Part II , in which I told of the finding of this tiny crustacean.

To go on with the nature of the beast:-

This particular nebalia (pugettensis) has no fixed English name. Some call it a "sea flea", although what it has in common with fleas, I fail to see. Some Canadian sources call it the Mud Flat Hooded Shrimp, and this at least points us in the general direction. But it is not a shrimp, nor exclusive to mud flats, nor is that "rostrum" a hood; it's more like a rhino's horn.

One thing, though; nebalia loves mud. It lives around the world in muddy bottoms, from tidal flats to "abyssal" depths, "abyssal" referring to 2000 to 5000 metres underwater. The pressure down there, at the 5000 metre level, is 500 atmospheres, or 750 lbs per square inch. Amazing versatility!

We found them in Boundary Bay, because the sand is half mud; the other end of the beach is all sticky, impassible, stinking mud, and just across the water is Mud Bay. I've half a mind to go over there and dig for live nebalia. Nebalia loves mud, shallow or deep.

Eugene Kozloff , in Seashore Life, says, "The situations where it is plentiful generally show signs of being quite foul when they are stirred up." (p.241) That would describe the area perfectly.

And down there in the muck, they stir up the water, streaming it through the carapace, filtering out edible bits of organic matter, plant or animal. They are scavengers, too; they have been caught in traps baited with dead crabs, several days old. Part of the clean-up crew, all those billions of tiny unsung heroes filtering our water, carting away our leavings.

And yet, they are so beautiful! So clean looking; that glistening, glassy carapace, that polished horn. So delicate; the flowing, feathery tail. And those ruby-red eyes!

What are they seeing, down there, deep, deep down in the mud and slime, with those brilliant eyes of theirs?

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So: thanks to Bev, again, for her lessons in photography. Which I can benefit from, even though my camera is the beginners' model. Maybe some day ...

Nebalia (Muddy Buddies, Part II)

This is Part II of a three-part series, reproduced from my old blog. (Here) Part I, Part III.

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Continued from Muddy Buddies, Part I , in which I recounted the discovery of some unknown (to me) sea creatures.

At home, I dug out my supplies: water to wash the sand off my finds, a good magnifying glass, my hand microscope (up to a power of 40x), a small paintbrush for manipulating delicate tentacled objects, a bright lamp. And a stack of books.

First; a birds-eye view. Length; about 1/4 inch, counting the tail structure. Two very prominent red eyes; the most arresting feature. Colour: once cleaned, almost transparent, with a creamy tinge and darker central section. Legs to the sides, two hooked tentacles, grippers or something in front. And a prominent tail, about half the length of the entire creature, curving downwards.

With the magnifying lens, the tail seemed to be segmented, and the front had some sort of a pointy beak; there was a similar pointy structure at the end of what looked like a shell, above the tail. A shell means a crustacean. I turned to my books.

The creature as I saw it and drew it, having no camera.

In Seashore Life of Puget Sound, (etc.) , I found it. Page 241, three whole paragraphs and a photo. My beastie now has a name; Nebalia pugettensis, belonging to an order called the Leptostraca. (Lepto=thin, straca=shell.) No English name. The shell is called a carapace, like the shell of a turtle. That little beak thingy is called a rostrum. (Hey, I thought that was a stand for the speaker at a convention! The dictionary tells me it can also be an elongated beak. Well, ok, if you say so.)

A photo from the web, but a different species, nebalia bipes.
A website mentioned feathery feet. Time to open up the microscope. The nice thing about the hand microscope is that I can look at things in situ. I'm glad I did, this time. On the piece of paper towel where my nebalia were drying, I could see, at full power (40x) long, ostrich-feather plumes at the end of the tail, almost transparent. But so delicate! When I moved the nebalia to a better viewing base (a white plastic lid), using the tip of the paintbrush at the thick of the thorax as a lift, and looked again, the delicate fronds were broken off, leaving ragged stumps.

Now I could see that the carapace and rostrum, and a long point over the tail, are transparent. The colour comes from the pale legs and thorax underneath. 4 legs on either side, with another thing that could be a leg or an antenna; my samples were dead and curled up, making it hard to distinguish them. Two more pointy things at the front. The tail was definitely segmented, looking like a telescoping leg of a camera stand. Two little vanes at the end of the tail, and the sad remains of feathers.

And the eyes! Big, round, and deep, deep red. And segmented, beautifully regular honeycombed sections, each one an individual eye, no doubt . Enlarged and somehow hardened, they would make nice jewels for a ring or necklace.

Next: what were these guys doing on that beach? I'll leave that for the next post.

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Next post: Muddy Buddies, Part III

Experimenting with lenses, and nebalia

Yesterday, reading Bev's blog entry on camera techniques (loved that spider portrait how-to!), I remembered a trick I had read about while I was still wishing for a digital. Something that just might possibly work with my economy model, with its 7-in limit on close-ups.

I dropped everything and dug out my fixings...

I have a good lens that I bought at Value Village for a buck. It seems that it is a part of a (missing) older slide projector. Solid, unscratched, and well-ground. I placed it in front of the lens on my camera (set for close-ups) and took a few trial shots. It seemed to work. So I dug out my four dried nebalia pugettensis from last June, and photographed them. Uploaded the photos to the computer, and looked at them. WoW! Better than I had ever hoped!

Here are the 4:


And here's one on his own:

OK: time to back-track to the story. I discovered these on the beach ...

No, not that way; I'll just post the three parts of the story as I wrote it on my old blog.

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Part I: "Muddy Buddies"

"This world is so full of a number of things, I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings."

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote that, long ago. In my books, he has a point. But I doubt that he was referring to nebalia, which made me happy this weekend.

It was a bright, sunny day, and we were in Boundary Bay Park . So was half the population of Surrey, with their kites and kids, umbrellas and sunscreen. The tide was out; it looked like we could almost walk to Mud Bay, just beyond. And 'way out at the edge of the water there was a white line that, on examining it through the binoculars, looked like a seagull convention. We decided to walk out.

Mount Baker was ahead, seemingly floating on a haze of grey cloud; MN (Laurie) had to keep stopping to take photos. I was watching where I stepped. The sand was covered completely, carpeted so that it looked almost black, with small needle snails*. Looking closely, I could distinguish 4 different types; 3 smaller ones, up to about 1/2 inch long, one dark brown and two with spiralling bands of white and brown. And a larger snail, paler brown and over an inch long. I wished I could float, like Mount Baker, over the sand; I could hear the shells crunching under my sandals. Couldn't be helped.

It was a long walk. I picked up a crab shell or two, and discarded them when I found them broken. Other than that, there were just the snails for a while, then empty sand with an occasional open clam shell, seagull dinner. We reached the water's edge just in time for the seagulls to rise with a great clamour and move back, behind us. They knew something we didn't.

We turned back. I confess it was a bit of a letdown; there was nothing more to see at water's edge than there had been half-way back down the beach. MN found a seagull to photograph. I waited, walking slowly, looking at the sand.

Then I saw them. First, it was the dead crabs. Small crabs. Smaller than any I had seen, almost paper-thin and transparent. I bent and picked one up on a fingertip. And saw another, and another.

How do you collect delicate shells when you forgot to bring a container? MN was back from his photoshoot; he found me a medium-sized clamshell half full of sand. Perfect! I stored the crabs safely, went to look for another. And found something I had never seen before: a half-dozen or so of tiny golden animacules, half the size of the crabs, with a little tail the length of the body. Four of them went into the clamshell before we realized why the seagulls had left.

The tide was coming in. And the beach is so flat, it ran like a river. So did we.

Next: What are these beasties?

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*The snails were probably some variety of bittium.

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Part II in next post.