Busy scene

(Text in Spanish at the bottom: el texto en español sigue al pie de la página.)

The little periwinkle snails are hard workers. They scrape away the algae from the walls, from the oyster shells, from the eelgrass, and the filter intake. Here's one cleaning up the shell of a young hermit crab.

Hairy hermit, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, still very small. They lose their orange colour as they grow. 

Most of my crabs are quite small, but there's one huge one (huge by shore crab standards anyhow). His pincers are wide and powerful. The snail shell above, on the right shows what he can do; he breaks the shell of a live snail to get at the meat. He is otherwise not aggressive; everybody else gets out of his way; nobody challenges him.

But  nothing goes to waste. An orange-striped green anemone has set up shop in the abandoned snail shell.

Plumose anemone, Metridium senile, surrounded by seaweeds (Pacific rose, Turkish towel, eelgrass, a fragment of sea lettuce) and broken shells. 

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Los caracolillos trabajan constantemente. Raspan el algae de la pared, de las conchas en el piso, de las algas marinas, y hasta de la tubería del filtro. Aquí en la primera foto, uno se ocupa limpiando la concha usada por un cangrejito ermitaño.

El beneficiario es un ermitaño peludo, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, todavía muy joven. Al crecer, pierden el color anaranjado.

La mayoría de mis cangrejos son pequeños, pero uno es grande, enorme según el tamaño normal de su especie, Hemigrapsus oregonensis. Sus pinzas son grandes y fuertes. En la foto del cangrejo ermitaño, la conchita rota al lado derecho sirve como muestra de su actividad. Con las pinzas, aprieta la concha de mar hasta romperla, para comerse la carne.

Aparte de eso, no molesta a los demás habitantes del aquario; nadie le hace frente.

En el agua, nada se desperdicia. Una anémona (Diadumene lineata) se ha instalado en la concha rota donde está protegida pero expuesta a la corriente que le trae sus alimentos.

En la segunda foto aparece la anémona emplumada (Metridium senile) rodeada de algas marítimas: rosa pacífica, toalla turka, lechuga marina, y una hoja de Zostera marina.

Snail on a messy wall

(Text in Spanish at the bottom: el texto en español sigue al pie de la página.)

A periwinkle snail climbed the wall of the aquarium, feasting on the algae that infests the glass.

Sitka periwinkle, Littorina sitkana. About 5 mm long.

Usually, I clean up the background, removing algae spots and the scratches on the glass. I left them as is, this time; the algae is an essential part of the scene; it's the snail's dinner. And the scratches belong there, too. The snails make them, dragging their hard shells over the surface of the glass. Algae take advantage of them to grab a toehold.

Un caracolillo, Littorina sitkana, que mide más o menos 5 milímetros de largo, se ocupó en comer el alga que crece en la pared del aquario.

Normalmente, limpio la fotografía, borrando las manchas del alga y las rayaduras del vidrio. Hoy las dejé porque son un elemento esencial de la situación; el alga es la comida del caracol. Y las rayaduras las hacen los mismos caracoles, arrastrando sus conchas sobre el vidrio. Y esas grietitas les sirven al alga para fijarse a la pared.

Peachy

Whelk and periwinkles.

In a shallow tidepool, upper intertidal zone.

Random shot

Beachside periwinkles and grass. With ant.

Just because.

Cave dwellers

The morning brought a faint hint of sunshine, a promise of more. I loaded the camera, grabbed my coat, and hit the road. By the time I'd run a couple of errands, it was raining, but not too hard. I drove down to the shore to look at the water from the shelter of the car.

The waves were high and pounding in; as soon as I parked, I could hear them roaring. Rain or no rain, I had to be on the beach.

Waves, and a duck, resting calmly in the trough..

The tide was out farther than I've seen it so far this fall and winter. I went down to the water's edge, turned over a few rocks: crabs, crabs, crabs, and tiny barnacles.

Barnacles on the bottom of a rock. One limpet, one mussel. The crabs all ran for cover.

Sandpiper, just out of reach of the waves.

It was raining a bit harder now, but off in the distance, I could see the strange sandstone formations we had explored in bygone summers. I sheltered the camera under my coat and went to look at them.

Round rocks, and a dark row of flat sandstone, on a dark, rainy day.

This part of the beach has a solid underpinning, not sand, but flattish sandstone, with occasional "tables" fringed with seaweeds, rimmed and topped with small round indentations, up to about an inch in diameter. In between the sandstone tables, smallish, round stones  cover most of the lower slab. Large rocks are scattered randomly across the whole area. An unusual mix.

Sample arrangement.

This one got tipped on an angle. How, I don't know; it's heavy.

Holes around the rim of two tables. They remind me of cave dwellings I have seen on a Mexican mountainside.

When we investigated rocks like these a few summers ago, most of the pits were occupied by small, green anemones. I couldn't see any now, in the winter; instead, small periwinkle snails are hiding there. Maybe the anemones are underneath them, waiting for warmer weather.

Barnacles out in the open, snails in the tubs.

Anemones in sandstone pits, summer of 2010.

The rain picked up, and my camera was getting wet. I clutched it under my coat and hurried back to shore. I'll be back, next sunny day at low tide.

Miraculous patterns

... Or at least, patterns on Miracle Beach.

Periwinkles on a rock

Driftwood face

Driftwood swirls and sand

Flowing water and seaweeds

Stoneface I

Stoneface II

Miracle Beach, Vancouver Island, August.

Busy beach

We've been far too busy recently. These days, it's a rare occasion when a sunny day, a low tide, and a free afternoon all happen at once. Last Monday was one of those.

We parked at the west end of the White Rock beach and walked quickly out towards Kwomais Point, at the mouth of Semiahmoo Bay. We were almost there, among the rocks, before the incoming tide forced us back.

As far as we got.

We had time to poke around a few of those rocks, looking for critters. And finding plenty. Yesterday's starfish, for example. And these ...

A baby grainyhand hermit, Pagurus granoismanus. One of the three common hermits on our beaches, recognizable by the bluish, fat, grainy, main pincer and the orange antennae (not visible here).

A reddish purple shore crab.

Patches of this breadcrumb sponge colonize the underside of many of the larger rocks. Below this one, you can see a few brown anemone, closed and hanging limply while the tide is out. 'Way down on the bottom right, there's a bit of a burrowing anemone showing.

A closer view of the sponge. It is a cream or yellow jelly-like coating on the rock, up to about a half-inch thick; these protrusions, each with an opening at the end, are out-current "chimneys". A few of the closed anemones are visible. I have not been able to identify the species. 

On the way back, we stopped to turn over some large stones. Crowds of miniature assorted critters were massed indiscriminately under each one: here's a sample:

A polychaete worm, two stubby isopods, several whelks, at least two species of hermit crabs, the red purple crab, barnacles, and Sitka periwinkles. Can you find them all?

Cropped portion of the above photo.

Look in this photo for the orange and yellow legs of the tiny greenmark hermits, Pagurus caurinus. The hairy hermits, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, are mostly larger, dark-coloured, with black and grey striped legs and striped antennae; they like to wear shells that seem far too small for them, barely enclosing their rear legs. One, at the bottom left, is in a striped mud snail shell. The greenmarks are using periwinkle shells, except for one that's in a broken white whelk shell. Some of the periwinkle shells and most of the whelk shells are still occupied by their original owners.


They look like they're all getting along nicely. Except that I wouldn't trust those beautiful whelks; they might get hungry.

Purple crabs, pink stones, and periwinkles

On Sliammon beach:

Shore crabs, probably purple, so dark the polka-dots barely show.

Most of the crabs we saw this trip, on several Sunshine Coast shores, were much darker than the shore crabs we find at home. The snails looked about the same.

And I'm still only halfway through Day Two, with more wharf photos, the rest of the Sliammon story and the evening sky to go.

"The latest trend in fine dining"**

The tide at Crescent Beach was almost at its maximum. We walked close to the incoming waves, where the water licked at our boots. Laurie flipped a rock to watch the crabs scuttle for new cover. Small snails coated the shaded part, on and around a mass of tapioca-pudding jelly. Snail eggs, probably.

So we turned more stones and rocks. Many of them held their smear of jelly, surrounded by snails.

Tapioca jelly and periwinkle snails. If you look closely, you can see the individual eggs in the jelly mass.

These snails live only in the upper levels of the beach. They have laid their eggs in shady spots, where they will remain moist, even at low tide, and where they will find just the right mix of algae to eat, once they hatch.

Most of the jellied rocks held more than parent snails, though:

Three or four different species of snail, and other party-goers.

The fat, round snails are periwinkles, probably Sitka periwinkles, Littorina sitkana. There are a few Asian mud snails, Batillaria attramentaria, and quite a few small, pointed snails that I think are probably Bittium. Several little Japanese Nassas have come to the feast, too. All but the parents are eating periwinkle eggs.

When I looked closer, at the beach, I found that most of the smaller snail shells held hermit crabs. And when we looked over the photos at home, we saw a pair of flatworms that somehow had escaped our notice, even as we focused the cameras on them.

Zooming in on the flatworms. Two different species, I think. And three hermits. lower left.

Arrows point at a flatworm, a mother periwinkle, and two tiny isopods.

Twenty seconds later, the flatworms were halfway across the jelly mass, and almost completely hidden. In the clear centre of the jelly, a pair of tiny worms, or maybe isopods are feeding, too.

I brought home two small stones, each with its blob of jelly. When I put them in the tank, the hermits and crabs leapt on them and started cramming big handfuls into their mouths. So much for baby snails, I thought, but this morning, about a quarter of the eggs were still in place, and now they're being ignored; snail caviar is good for a treat, but good old detritus is what sticks to a crab's or hermit's innards.

It seems a waste, really, for a snail to nurture all those thousands of eggs, just so that most of them can be eaten. It's the same with Ma Crab*; a bellyful of berries, which she carefully tends, only to serve as food for barnacles and anemones. But there are a pair of tiny, tiny crabs in the tank, eating and growing rapidly; the lottery winners. The strategy works.

*Turn about's fair play; Ma Crab eats snails' babies, anemones eat hers.
** Quote from snail-caviar.com.

Out to lunch

I caught this little periwinkle on his lunch break:

Checkered periwinkle, Littorina scutulata.

There are about a dozen of these in my aquarium, some barely a pinhead across, some full-sized, like this one. Most probably hitchhiked in on a handful of seaweed or eelgrass.

These snails live in the upper intertidal zone, more out of the water than in it. They can even drown if they stay underwater too long. But they are more versatile than most of the intertidal critters; they tolerate dry rocks, salt water, and even fresh water, for brief periods.

In my tank, they hang around the lip, just above the water level. Sometimes, one works his way out from under the lid, and rolls off the tank. I have found them several feet away, on the carpet, dry and sealed up tightly. One tiny, tiny snail was under a cushion on a chair; I have no idea how long it had been there. It was so dry, the shell was grey and rough-looking. I dropped it in the tank, and it woke up, stretched, and started the journey up to the lip again.

Every so often, they head down, like this one, looking for a meal of algae, which they scrape off the glass. In the photo, the big white circle is the base of the foot; the smaller circle, in front, is the mouth. Look closely, and you can see a hint of the radula, like a tongue with teeth on it.

Update: Click on through and read Christopher Taylor's comment. Astounding!