On a winter beach

The north end of Miracle Beach, where it joins the outlet of Black Creek, is mostly flat, fine sand and small, rounded stones, held down by seashore salt-grass, suited to the changeable water, now fresh as the creek washes the area, now salt as the tide covers it all. At low tide, there are the tufts of salt-grass to walk on, with shallow puddles between them, and, near the high tide line, a layer of shredded seaweeds, fresh and bright, deposited by the recent storms.

A large kelp crab. Dead, not a molt, but still very fresh.

Sieve kelp, Agarum clathratum.

This is a subtidal brown alga that grows to over a metre tall, blade and stipe. By the time it ends up on the upper beach, it comes in bits and pieces. This large section included a bit of the central rib.

Turkish towel, Chondracanthus exasperatus. Very faded already.

Another large, subtidal seaweed that turns up on the beach in shreds. Feels like a towel, they say, but it is not a fabric-softened towel fresh out of your dryer; more like the dish scrubber I use on pots and pans. Those little pointed projections are tough.

Gull and salt-grass, Distichlis spicata.

And these weren't strictly on the beach, but just offshore, diving for food in the shallow water.

Buffleheads, Bucephala albeola, three males and one more subdued female.

Buffleheads eat aquatic invertebrates that they find in the intertidal zone, such as crabs and snails, so they swim close to shore, taking short dives; where you saw them go down, they'll come up again. (Not like the loon, offshore, going down here, coming up a long time later, and far away.)

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El extremo norte de Miracle Beach, donde se une al estuario de Black Creek, es una playa aplanada, de arenas finas y piedritas redondeadas, todo fijado en su lugar por las hierbas halófilas Distichlis spicata, adaptadas a la salinidad variable, ahora agua fresca cuando las cubre el rio, ahora en agua salada cuando sube la marea. A marea baja, se puede caminar allí, pisando los montoncitos de grama salada; alrededor, el agua llega a unos pocos centímetros de profundidad. En la zona más alta, hay una capa de algas marinas deshechas, arrancadas de sus sitios en el fondo y depositadas aquí por las tempestades de invierno.

Fotos:

1. Cangrejo de algas del norte, Pugettia producta. Muerto pero recientemente, totalmente entero.
2. Quelpo coladera, Agarum clathratum. Este es un alga que crece en la zona submareal. Llega a alcanzar más de un metro, contando el estipe y las frondas. Ya cuando llega a la playa, está desbaratada. Este pedazo grande llevaba algo de la espina central.
3. Toalla turca, Chondracanthus exasperatus, ya perdiendo su color rojo fuerte. Esta es otra alga submareal que llega a la playa hecha pedazos. Se siente como una toalla, dicen, pero no es una toalla suave, recién salida de tu secadora de ropa; más bien es como el estropajo con que limpio los sartenes. Esos puntitos son fuertes.
4. Una gaviota y la grama salada.
5. Y estos últimos no estaban exactamente en la playa, pero cerca. Los patos porrones coronados (aquí tres machos, y una hembra) comen animales invertebrados que viven en la zona intermareal, como por ejemplo, los cangrejos y los caracoles marinos. Nadan cerca de la playa, haciendo buceos cortos; donde los viste desaparecer, allí subirán a la superficie y muy pronto. (No como lo hacen los colimbos, que se sumergen lejos de la playa, y luego aparecen mucho más tarde y bien lejos, donde menos los esperas.)

Bearing the world on his back

 In the bottom few metres of the intertidal zone, I found chitons. Many chitons, tiny to "giant", of at least 4 different species.

This one resists being identified. Is this burden he carries from a sense of responsibility for the world, camouflage, or just because of his attractive personality?

Hardly identifiable as a chiton at all.

Except from the underside. Mouth on the left.

He could possibly be a mossy chiton. Mopalia mucosa: they grow dark, bristle-like hairs around the outer edges. But the algae he wears make it hard to be sure.

He's carrying 5 barnacles of the larger local species, which with time could immobilize him under their weight. But he's not fazed; there's room for more.

I labelled the photo of his back.

4 species of algae, 2 of barnacles, mussels and limpets and a tiny hermit crab. There's probably more, hiding under the sea lettuce.

Tomorrow: the rest of the chitons.

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Entre los últimos metros de la zona baja intramareal, encontré muchos quitones, de varias especies, desde las más pequeñas hasta los que llamamos "gigantes".

Este quitón resiste la identificación. Lleva el mundo en su dorso; ¿será por su gran sentido de responsibilidad hacia su comunidad, para servir de camuflaje, o simplemente porque tiene una personalidad tan atrayente?

Desde arriba, casi no se puede identificar como quitón, pero boca arriba, se ve la forma. Puede ser un quitón "cubierto de musgo", Mopalia mucosa, ya que estos llevan pelos oscuros, tiesos, alrededor de las placas dorsales. Pero por la algas que lleva, es difícil distinguir la especie por cierto.

Lleva 5 bálanos de la especie local grande, los cuales con el tiempo pueden llegar a pesar tanto que se le haga imposible moverse. Pero no se da por vencido; hay lugar para más.

Marqué la foto con algunas identificaciones. Hay 4 especies de alga marina, 2 especies de bálanos, mejillones y lapas y un cangrejo ermitaño miniaturo. Probablemente habrá más, escondido bajo la lechuga marina.

Para mañana, dejo los demás de los quitones.

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.

Red, white, green, and kelp coloured

A few seaweeds, large and small, wet and dry.

Coming in with the tide; a floating salad of torn sea lettuce, nori, Turkish washcloth, snippets of rockweed, and this glorious red branched seaweed.

In the summer, I see a lot of sun-bleached seaweeds well up on the shore. Most are white; newer ones are pale pink or cream. I don't remember seeing one where the bottom half was pure white, while the top still retains its full red colouring.

Laid out to dry in the sun. Fresh bull kelp.

Kelp is edible, and the floats and long stipes make good pickles, "they" say. Kelp is also very tough; I've tried cutting out a segment, using sharp, broken clamshells; almost impossible. Even the thin end of the stipes are too srong to break until they're half rotted. I must bring a knife to the beach to harvest a piece of the next fresh kelp I find. I'd like to try out that kelp pickle recipe.

In a snowy underwater jungle

Every few days I pull up a stool and aim the camera at the community in my little aquarium. Yesterday, I took over 100 shots; two were usable, with a possible third to be processed. Par for the course.

I love it when one hermit goes for a walk on a blade of eelgrass, above the jungle below.

Small hermit, running, on waving eelgrass, halfway across the tank, but near the light. And the water is nearly clear up here. Auto lighting, auto noise filter. Piece of cake!

Most of the crab and hermit crab activity, however, goes on down on the floor, amid scraps of seaweeds, worms, copepods, amphipods, snails, waving antennae, limpet poop, dancing sand grains, rolling stones, broken shells, waving anemone and barnacle tentacles.

And algae. Algae covers everything, including the glass I'm shooting through. No matter how I scrub it, there's always some there, caught in the scratches on the glass. The hermits and crabs are responsible for these scratches; they're always banging about with the sharp edges of their shells, or piling up sand against the glass, and then scraping it away, or trying to climb the unclimbable.

And the water is full of blowing "snow", the crumbs of food tossed out by the crabs, (messy eaters), copepods and air bubbles, bits of torn seaweed, shreds of discarded hermit molts, more limpet poop, oyster spits, more fragments of algae. The crabs and hermits are happy in clear water, but the anemones (orange-striped green, burrowing, pink-tipped green, and plumose in this tank) love this nutritious snow soup.

The camera doesn't. I can train my eye not to see it, but the camera notices every little copepod antenna and every rotting spot on the seaweed.

So here's a hermit (and a bit of a second hermit) in her usual habitat, just the way she likes it, the way I would find their community on the shore (except there, if I get down to their level, they all up and leave):

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus, with a shell she's rolling around. It's too small for a new outfit, so maybe she's just playing. She has lost most of one red antenna; probably in an argument over a scrap of food.

I had to clean up the background, delete quite a bit of glass algae and a blurry anemone, and adjust the light just to make the hermit visible in the mess. Imagine algae spots and swimming tinies all over.

Down in the left corner is a swarm of copepods. The snail shell at the right is vacant; soon one of the growing hermits will claim it. Some of the limpet poop is visible to the right of that blue stone.

The seaweeds are green sea lettuce, well used, a dark red blade algae, some holey kelp blades; the hermits have been chomping on this all week. The yellow edges are where the red algae is dead and flaking off. I could remove this, for the look of it, but the hermits love to eat it, so it stays. Both the hermit's shell and the empty snail shell are coated with thick green algae. The yellow stuff in back is the kelp that came with its holdfast last week. I just checked; there are four hermits working on this at the moment.

One of my crabs is very pregnant. I've been trying to get a photo: she's not cooperating. One of these days; now that the days outside are so short, I'll have more time to wait for her.

Blobby bryozoans

Early winter storms tear and uproot the summer's crop of seaweeds. The mound along the high tide line, that in summer is mainly eelgrass with a sprinkling of sea lettuce and rockweed, in November becomes a full salad bar, multi-coloured, multi-textured.

In a short walk, I collected a bag of treats for my hermit crabs, with only one sample of each species, I ended up with a full grocery bag. Sea lettuce, of course. Two kinds of rockweed. Turkish washcloth, and a black, leathery, pimpled towel seaweed, four or five kinds of kelp, the invasive sargassum, several tiny blackish curly weeds, Pacific rose algae, red blades, rubbery threads, ... I didn't bother with eelgrass; the aquarium is planted with a fair crop from my last collecting trip.

I collected three pieces of a red algae that was coated with bryozoans. None of the algae were entire; they were stalked, and opened out into red blades, badly torn, rotting along the edges; I couldn't determine their shape or full size. But the bryozoans intrigued me.

At home, in a bowl. The stalks are encrusted with these hard blobs. The pink stub at the right seems to be a growing tip of the algae; there were several of these.

One of the blobs. Each little hole was the home of one zooid. If you look really closely (click for full size) you can see tiny pink pores on the body of each case.

Where the stalks met the blades, the structure changed; here they lie flat, one critter deep. Membranipora sp., maybe?

I don't think any were alive; they'd been lying out on the shore for a while. I looked while they were underwater, but saw no hint of movement.

I've been searching for an ID in my books and on the web, but can't find any that take these two forms on red algae. Blobs on rocks, yes. Single layers encrusting kelp, yes. Both together, no.

Membranipora membranacea is common on bull kelp on our shores; it makes circular, flat colonies on the blades. I could find no photos or record of it making these blobs.

And the crabs, hermit and "true" are happy, busy climbing and feasting.

Infinitely complex

I was inspired by a scientist on Twitter a few days ago. Allison studies species interactions, and her experience has been in the intertidal zone. As she says, she has had"my face down in the seaweeds for 5 years" looking at communities composed of hundreds of species.

To illustrate her Twitter series, she has been searching through her old intertidal photos looking for examples of interactions between species. "What a good idea!" I thought, and dug out my oldest photos, looking for the extras, the critters that weren't the feature of the photo, but were living alongside them. What have I missed?

Worms, barnacles, mussels, miniature sea urchins, sponges, anemones, tiny fish, more worms, more worms, eggs. Seaweeds of all kinds and colours. Most of these are in the unfocused areas of the photos, but they're there.

Purple starfish. With barnacles, stubby isopods, sponge, a worm, and a half-dozen hairy hermit crabs, walking on the star, or nestled between two of its arms.

Another starfish, with at least 5 species of seaweeds. Blowing the photo up, I discovered many tiny snails, one large blue-shelled snail, a crab, a limpet and, of course, barnacles. No telling how many beasties are sheltering under the seaweeds.

I still have oodles of photos to examine. I wonder what else I'll find.

Wandering weed patch

Not a mystery critter, but it's trying to be:

Mossy chiton, Mopalia muscosa, half camouflaged under assorted seaweeds, a limpet, a barnacle, and no telling what else, hidden in the undergrowth. 

What it would look like scrubbed up.

In a more exposed area, say on a bare patch of rock, exposed to more movement of water and sand, the plates of the shell can be worn down and bleached. The chiton still has its own hairy girdle, even when the shell is polished.

Bubbles and bladders

Winter is almost over, and the occasional blade of eelgrass is turning up on the beaches again. I found a few plants with roots and brought them home. The hermit crabs are happy about that; they love to sit up high on a green blade and watch the world go by.

View of the tank with winter seaweeds; red algae and brown wireweed. And 3 eelgrass plants.

The tall, brown seaweed bearing little round float bladders is a Sargassum, possibly Sargassum muticum, an invasive from Japan. For most of the winter, the hermits and snails ignored it, not interested in searching it for food. In the last few weeks, perhaps tired of having nothing to climb, a few have been found swinging on the upper branches, but now that there's a bit of eelgrass, they've abandoned the Sargassum again.

Few organisms have been found living on Sargassum muticum in British Columbia, though a number have been reported in Washington, Oregon and California. A study in southern California estimated that a 5 m tall plant hosts an average of 3,000 animals, including foraminifers, hydroids, flatworms, polychaete worms, leeches, snails, ostracods, cumaceans, isopods, gammarid and caprellid amphipods, opossum shrimp, euphausid shrimp, crabs and bryozoans ... (Nicholson et al. 1981) (The Exotics Guide)

Why BC critters are pickier than the ones in the U.S, I have no idea.

"Bubbles", hanging out on the eelgrass.