Grey day

It's been a typical Vancouver Island summer; a few hot days, and the rest are cloudy or rainy. Yesterday was about normal: rain in the morning, a ray or two of sunlight around noon, then the warm light vanished, and everything turned a soft grey. Grey skies, grey water, greyish green trees.

Before the rain started up again, I walked around Oyster Bay. When everything is grey, the different colours of grey stand out. The grey rocks had more colour than the grey seas.

Rocks along the breakwater, looking south. There's a hint of blue sky thataway.

The breakwater, looking north. Logs and rocks and the edge of the inner bay.

A couple of multicoloured rocks.

And on one of those rocks, a sea slater, Ligia pallasii. A creature of the night, not often seen in daylight.

I tracked the sea slater for a while, trying to get a head shot. He wasn't interested. I hadn't even seen the little fly until I looked at the photo. These flies were all over the shore,looking mostly like hopping sand grains.

Gotcha!

Walking among the tidepools, I see trembling in the water a few metres ahead; small critters, fish and crabs sensing my presence and racing for cover. By the time I reach the pool, it's apparently empty. Seaweeds stand unmoving, a few shells lie abandoned here and there (when I pick them up and wait a while, they sprout legs; they weren't so abandoned after all.) There are no crabs, no fish.

No matter how long I wait, standing beside a tidepool, the fish don't show up; they see my shadow.

My camera usually wears the 40mm lens, good for getting within an inch of a tiny critter, or the old kit lens, which zooms, but is not good at detail. This time, I used the 85mm lens; it does not zoom, does not permit me to take photos at distances less than a metre or so, (so no rock-flipping - snap photo before everything scrambles for cover photos) and has a shallow depth of field. But it does let me take a fairly decent shot of a small critter from a distance.

So I sat a couple of metres away from a few tidepools until the residents decided I must have gone home or turned into a rock, and ventured out again. Still too close; moving to aim the camera was enough to send everyone back into hiding. But I got one photo of a tiny fish.

Baleful glare: In about an inch of water. The fish is an inch or so long. There is also a baby hermit crab near the edge of the photo.

Two grainy hand hermits, cautiously emerging from the shells. I moved too close, and they hid again.

I see many of these shells empty on the beach. I brought some home, but my hermits refused to use them. They like shells with a rounder opening. Now I think I know why; most of my hermits are Hairies, Pagurus hirsutiusculus, and these two are Grainy Hands, P. granosimanus. I'll bring home a few of the larger ones (my grainies are big guys) and see if they get used.

On the underside of a stone. Lay the stone down, step back a metre, aim; everything fast is gone. the big Wosnesenski's isopods are leaving as fast as they can go. Only the little stubby isopods have stayed put, pretending to be pebbles.

I see these sea slaters (aka beach cockroach) often just above the tide line. They are very shy, extremely fast, and are hidden long before I'm in range. I got these from about three metres away.

Just rocks and the dropping tide.

Fourteen leggers, all

The Christmas season seems to have started. Laurie's making Christmas cards; I'm making lists.  Food, gifts to make, buy and/or wrap, seating and eating arrangements, cleaning to do, guests ... my family will be here Christmas Eve, some 25 or more of them. We probably won't be getting out much for the next two weeks.

I'll be getting my critter fix from my files; good thing there are so many!

These sea slaters were on the rocks at Oyster Bay, on Vancouver Island this summer.

The antennae look like old lead pipes.

Ligia pallasi

These isopods live just above the high tide line, hiding in the cracks of the rocks in the daytime, coming out at night to scavenge for dead plants and animals or growing algae. They can be quite large, up to about 1 1/2 inches long. Most are uniformly grey; the ones we saw at Oyster Bay had a cream-coloured dotted line down the center of the armored plates.

They are in the same sub-order as our common woodbugs or pillbugs, and look very much like one, only larger and faster-moving.

Compare:

Armadillidium vulgare, our common pillbug

And here are some intertidal isopods, also for comparison:

Intertidal isopods, next beach up. About 1/3 the size of the sea slaters.

Local eelgrass isopod. About 1/2 inch long.