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.

Good place to hide?

Along the edge of the rising tide at Boundary Bay, hundreds of tiny fish darted from hiding place to hiding place. Even in the open, they were difficult to see; once they'd settled in the shadow of a scrap of seaweed, we couldn't find them at all, until they dashed away.

This one thought the sand beside my red wading shoe made a good hiding place; he stayed there for a long time, until I got tired of not moving.

Zoomed in, with contrast slightly increased. The red serves as a handy distraction.

Each of these sculpins is slightly different from his neighbour, so I can't generalize, but I found it interesting that the eyes are so inconspicuous. Instead, the round, dark spots surrounded by a lighter circle at the root of his side fins look like eyes, which gives the impression of a much larger fish.

Perfect!

Facebook changes everything.

I had a birthday today. A rather scary one; the 70th. Normally, when a milestone like that comes up, I hide in a corner until I've somehow dealt with the implications of it. Not now. Not in the age of Facebook. The first birthday greeting came in shortly before midnight Wednesday, and before breakfast today, I'd heard from friends, family, Facebook friends, relatives I've never met in person, other bloggers, past neighbours that I haven't seen in years ...

Privacy is a thing of the past. And I wouldn't have believed it a while back, but I'm loving it. My world is expanding, and it's full of wonderful people. And my world is shrinking, so that distances are almost irrelevant. (My first b'day greeting came from Australia, the next from Mexico.)

If you sent a message, thank you! You made the day great!

Now, on to the beach ...

The tide has been hitting low lows this week, and we went out early to catch one of the lowest at White Rock. We found parking near the centre of the promenade, and walked towards the pier and the eel-grass beds.

A beautiful summer day, a quiet beach, blue water. Perfect!

They set up the chairs and supplies (the adults, that is), added landscaping and boundary markers (children, I assume), and then left it all behind to get their feet wet.

Tubeworms, a couple of inches high, barely underwater.

This big stranded crab was lethargic, but responded when I poured water over him. I tried to pick him up to move him to the water, but he grabbed at me with those sharp legs, and I eventually dug a hole for him, shoved him in, and covered him with wet eelgrass.

A bunch of kids were wading through the eelgrass, looking for crabs. One of the younger boys, possibly around 8 or so, showed me how he had no trouble picking up a big crab. "Just grab it by a back leg; he can't get you that way." He demonstrated, then replaced the crab in his bucket and stroked the carapace. "They lie still when you pet their heads like this."

Sliding down a wave

Weird reflection!

Near the pier and the drop-off into deep water around the wharf, I found this sculpin, belly up but alive, possibly dropped there by a gull who found him too big to handle.

A golden belly, decorated with rows of pearly beads. (Worth a click to see it full size.) 

Flipped over.

He seems to have some bruising on the skin, but he was definitely alert. I grabbed him with a plastic bag to shield my hands; those spines are sharp! Even through several layers of bag. When I released him in the water, he righted himself and swam off, a bit lopsidedly.

Boats at the breakwater, just a few metres from where we stood on the beach.

Laurie watching a school of sculpins.

Wonderful colours under the pier.

Kids fishing off the small dock.

Dangling seaweeds, exposed by the low tide.

Detail of a piling. Mostly mussels, a few barnacles.

Amazing how far a gull can open his beak. He flew away like that, beak wide open carrying the heavy clam.

Heading back, Laurie discovered a tidepool full of tiny swimmers, with barely-visible legs and antennae:

Shrimp! This one is about 4 cm. long, not counting those body-length antennae.

Beach pea, back at the shore.

And I brought home a few inches of eelgrass with hydroid "fur" to examine. It turned out to be loaded with microscopic snails, a tiny red mite-like creature, and a few polychaetes, also almost microscopic.

The perfect birthday! Now, if the number were only a bit smaller ...

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.

Invisibility fail!

Playing at "You can't see me if I don't move." Laurie won that round.

Young sculpin, Crescent Beach.

Black and white

On the beach at Boundary Bay:

Pretty cockle, about 1 inch across.

Baby sculpin, about 1/2 inch long, trying to be invisible. At full size (click) you can see the rays of the tail fin, and the fanning pectoral fins.

And a male bufflehead, on Centennial Beach duck pond:

The black head is iridescent; here it glows purplish.

Orange eyes, a flying crab, and eggs on stalks.

Although the wind was strong, last Thursday, the sun was bright and the tide was low. Beach-combing time! And spring has finally worked its magic; every rock, every pool on the White Rock beach was bursting with life. The flatworms were out in force. So were hordes of hairy hermit crabs, and scrambling masses of shore crabs, red and green and white. There were gunnels and sculpins, whelks and periwinkles, assorted long worms, and the crows and gulls searching for them among the stones. Kelp flies buzzed, beach hoppers hopped, and eagles squealed somewhere in the treetops. And the red mussels sat glowing among the blues and blacks. We could have stayed for hours, but the tide doesn't take time off; it was racing up the beach before we got to Kwomais Point.

We took too many photos and I'll be sorting for quite a while, but here are a few of my favourites.

Alternating stripes of light and dark; looking into the sun, over wind-ruffled water.

A two-inch, brown starfish. We found two like this.

And the usual purple starfish. About 6 inches.

I like the way the water breaks up the light. Eelgrass in ankle-deep water.

I turned over a large slab of rock, and found an entire community underneath. This sculpin was not too pleased, so after we took his photo, I upended a large clamshell over him for a hiding place. That scared the crab off his head, too.

Same photo, cropped so you can see the colour of the eyes. I don't remember seeing an orange-brown sculpin before, nor eyes like this.

Fuzzy photo of a tiny, tiny, tiny red crab. I could barely see it; just a red speck running down the rock. I put a finger below him, and he ran onto the tip and stopped there. I was holding my hand up for Laurie to take a photo, and the wind caught him and blew him away. 

A group of whelks laying their eggs. The little black shell holds a hermit crab.

Side view of whelk eggs, showing the stalks.

Another ascidian colony. Interesting pattern.

And back at the shore, dandelions in the semi-shade of newly-budded blackberry canes.