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.

Snail on a yellow leaf

After dark this evening, in the dim light of a parking lot, a magnolia's leaves glowed so brightly yellow that I had to collect a few to bring home. A tiny snail was riding on one.

"Spot"

It was about 1/8 of an inch across, curled up in the shell, where it didn't stay long. This was a very active snail, or at least a snail in a hurry to get out of the light, constantly on the move, even seconds after I had been handling it, always waving its head from one side to the other.

I have never seen a land snail with this spotted mantle, that flows out and over the edge of the shell, like a moon snail's does, in the ocean, nor one that never extends its eyestalks and lower tentacles more than these rounded bumps. I couldn't find any snails like it on the web.

Almost a curled-up cat pose.

I subjected him to lights and house warmth for a few minutes, then took him out to the garden and the rain.

Snail at midnight

I've been out in the cool of the night with the camera and a flashlight. This snail was eating the leaves on a hanging flower pot. (How did he get up there?)

Who wants to eat in the daytime when it's so hot? Not this guy.

More later. I just went out again and discovered a ten-striped June beetle floundering in a bucket of water. And, of course, there are slugs. There always are.

192 photos

This week, the tides have been extremely low in the afternoons. I arrived at the beach early enough this afternoon to walk to the far edge, to where there was nothing but a narrow channel of water between me and the border marker in the middle of the bay.

I came back with the camera loaded, critters to settle and photograph at home, beasties to identify; I'll be busy for a bit.

For now, here's a hitchhiker that came home on some eelgrass: a pinhead snail. A small pinhead, that is.

White body, round shell. Unidentifiable at this age.

There were two of these; I was surprised at how fast they can move. Between the time I focussed on this little guy with the camera, and reached for the shutter button, he repeatedly moved out of range. I finally just aimed at the general area until he happened to wander into focus.

A bagful of bugs

Over the winter, I wrap a few of my more sensitive potted plants in several layers of recycled brown paper bags. In the spring yard cleanup, the bags get their second (or third) recycling, this time shredded into the compost. After I remove the critters that have used it for their winter quarters, of course.

In the bags around my sausage vine, besides a humongous slug, I found a nice assortment of tiny creepy-crawlies.

A striped springtail, Orchesella cincta. Most of these were impossible to catch, and went into the compost with the bag. This guy was lucky.

A quick red mite.

There were quite a few of these long snails, about the size of a short grain of rice. (Update: Columella edentula)

Spiderling with a yellow belly.

As I demolished the bags, I brushed off all the little ones I could into a pill bottle. Before I took them outside and set them free, on a whim, I pointed the camera straight down into the bottle. I liked the result:

8 or 9 snails, several different springtails, a couple of spiders, and a handful of sowbugs. The mite is in there somewhere, too.

And then they all went out into the warm spring night to find a new home.

Brand new!

The year, of course; 2015. How time flies!

So do snails. Case in point: this newly-hatched leafy hornmouth snail, getting ready to leap from his sheltering holdfast.

Moving right along.

A moment later, he had dropped down on a thread of slime and ballooned off in the current. I caught up with him on the far end of the tank, now on the sand and burrowing fast, soon out of sight.

Good luck, little snail! And a Happy New Year to all!

Snails

Just snails.

On dying bergenia leaf

On mildewed painted wood.

That's all.

Snails don't talk.

So this is wordless.*

*Almost.

Bi-coloured snail

Sometime last summer, a snail I hadn't seen before came home from Boundary Bay with me, hiding in a bag of greens for my hermits. He* was small and dark, slate grey and brown, sort of whelk-shaped, nondescript. Nothing to write home about.

I added him to the tank with some trepidation; the whelks and their ilk are usually predators, and sometimes very hungry. I kept an eye on him, and on the possible food sources in the tank; there are a couple of clams, some mussels, always a few barnacles. When I do a thorough cleaning, I comb through the sand. The clams are still there. The mussels are bigger than they were. But the barnacles I've added just a bit ago are now empty shells.

The snail eats barnacles. Nothing else, it seems.

Barnacles are easy to come by, in quantity. He can stay.

Last August, heading up out of the sand.

He spends much of his time like this, half-buried in the sand, barely moving. Then for a day or three, he surfaces and goes looking for another barnacle, glues himself to the unfortunate choice, and leaves it gaping open and empty. Back to the sand to sleep it off.

About a month ago, on one of his food runs, I noticed how much he had grown. But the new shell seemed almost to belong to another snail entirely. It was almost white, in sharp contrast to the old slate-grey shell.

The white is dirty, now, algae-encrusted. But the divide is still there.

And the new shell is more ridged than the old section, possibly because the snail isn't being rolled around by fast currents.

He's a Corded trophon, Trophonopsis orpheus, aka Boreotrophon orpheus, a subtidal resident, rarely seen above the low tide line. I have only seen one before, an infant, newly hatched from the egg case.

Baby trophon, April, 2012. A few millimetres long. New, sharp sculpturing.

It looks like the dark grey colouring came from the shore where the snail was living, or from his diet. (Black barnacles?)

These snails are distinctive for their long siphonal canal, the tube that protects the siphon through which the snail "breathes" and finds prey. A good idea; the siphon is the most vulnerable part of this type of snail, sticking out well in front, soft and inviting.

Little Nassa, leading the way with her small, unprotected siphon. 

Trophon bottom, showing the siphonal canal. The opening and exit are just visible.

Flipping back the operculum (that reddish lid) to extend the foot.

Spotted orange and white skin of the foot. The siphon canal extends to the right, the direction of travel.

Muricid (whelks and their ilk - rock snails) shells are variably shaped, generally with a raised spire and strong sculpture with spiral ridges and often axial varices  . . .
Many muricids have episodic growth, which means their shells grow in spurts, remaining the same size for a while (during which time the varix develops) before rapidly growing to the next size stage. The result is the series of above mentioned varices on each whorl. (From Wikipedia)

The ridges, in the photo above, go top to bottom; the varices (sing. varix) go left to right. The shell building continues; it has turned the corner and started on the next lap, which will be bigger than the one just added. The raised lip where the shell turns is a varix.

The snail had been sitting on the pump for a couple of days, so I brought him out for a photoshoot. He didn't seem to mind sitting on plastic foam, and started to roam. I waited, hoping for him to extend the siphon, but there was no sign of it, probably because he was out of water. He's back in the tank now, and has buried himself again, without eating the last two barnacles I've brought him. Sulking, probably.

*Most snails are hermaphrodites, but these ones have separate sexes. I don't like calling a conscious critter an "it", so I've opted for calling this guy a male.

Just starting out

3 mm. snail, looking for adventure.

2014, here we come!

Tiny, tinier

Springtail on mini-snail:

The snail is the size of a pinhead. I didn't even see the springtail.

Skunk cabbage snail

We found several of these little snails on a skunk cabbage in Burns Bog. I haven't seen any like them before.

This one was on a blade of grass. It's about 1 cm. long.

Isn't it a cutie?

I haven't been able to identify this snail; I hardly know where to start.

Help!

UPDATE:

I wrote Robert Forsyth of mollus.ca, and he identified it as one of the ambersnails. He writes,

This is one of a group of snail that pretty much look all alike. They are the Ambersnails, family Succineidae, and are characterized by a very thin yellowish (usually; hence the name) shell having few (about 3) turns or whorls. The opening is large and while the animal can fully retract, there isn’t a lot of protection afforded by the shell. The main differences between the several genera are anatomical, especially the reproductive system. Genera (and so species) are nearly impossible to identify with shells alone. Our species — the number is uncertain — are further complicated by most being nearly unknown anatomically. Genetics may be the answer to sort out this difficult group. In our area, most succineid snails are inhabitants of somewhat characteristically wet areas, like marshes and edges of waterways, although there are dryland ambersnails (there’s one that lives in the xeric hills around Kamloops for example, in areas with prickly pear cactus even). I should also add that some freshwater snails come very close to looking like ambersnails, further complicating identification at times.

Thanks again, Robert!

2012 critter sampler

December 31st! Already? I'm still doing end-of-summer catch-up!

Alex Wild is curating "Best of 2012" science and nature shots on Scientific American. I was reminded, again, by BugGeek, who posted her collection. Beautiful shots; I've seen them all before, and will review them again tomorrow. Not tonight, because it's hard to blog when you're green with envy.

I looked over my photos, picking out the favourites, not to submit, but just as a year-end summary. And there were too many! I cut them down to just critters; still too many, and I kept remembering more. But I've finally trimmed the list down to a dozen favourite critters, not without difficulty.

Here's the collection: Critters only:

Ant nest uncovered, with the adults rushing to drag the larvae down the holes, out of sight.

Aphid in a moss forest

Caterpillar in morning sunlight

Garden snail, feeding on glass.

Grainy hand hermit, in human hand

Harvestman volunteer

I had trouble choosing my favourite of all the spiders. I have to smile at this fat mama, who does NOT like lime and pepper chips.

Life's an adventure. Hermit crab in aquarium.

Lazy moth in jar lid and morning sunshine.

Spider #2 Long-jawed orb weaver, on hosta leaf.

This was an exciting find; a molting ghost shrimp.

Ok, I give up; I can't choose just one or two spiders! Spider # 3, Ozyptila, the spider-eater's spider eater.

Spider #4, Mother toting her eggs.

Would have been #12, if I hadn't snuck a couple of extra spiders in there. Plume moth on outside wall.

And tomorrow is 2013! I never thought we'd get here. May it be a good year, the best year so far, for all of us!

About my speed

Snail in a hurry ...

Inside a glass case, looking for goodies.

Found something! Munch, munch, munch!

S/he's more energetic than I am, at the moment; I've been digging stumps out of the garden, and spreading sand. Oh, my aching everything!

Just because

There's no rhyme or reason to this post. I'm suffering from brain overload.

These are photos from this past week, in no particular order.

Pair of flies on a hawkweed flower.

A tiny bird's nest left over from last year. It is about 2 to 3 inches across. Beach Grove.

From my back yard, a blue snail. I've never seen one this colour before. The camera sometimes lies, but this is what my eyes told me, too.

Cat on a cement wall, Beach Grove.

The wall and cat were far across the dunes. Something down the crack had his attention, and I stood on the beach shouting like an idiot, "Kitty, kitty! Look over here, kitty!" He finally deigned to give us a quick glance.

A huge forsythia grew in front of an old farmhouse down the street. Untrimmed, it hung over the sidewalk, causing pedestrians to duck under it or step into the road. Every year around this time, Laurie brings me an armload of its branches, loaded with buds. Not this year. They're building a new retail/housing complex there, and have torn out every scrap of vegetation.

I cut a few twigs from the bottom of a shrub in Crescent Beach. At home, they burst into happy bloom.

Lbb, Beach Grove

Moss sporophyte, spore case.

A few days ago, we walked down Crescent Beach in the teeth of a vicious wind. The birds, gulls and eagles mostly, were out in force, playing in the currents. A flock of young eagles would fly out of the trees, then rest on the air, letting the wind blow them sideways back into the forest. Or they would fly far up until they were just dots in the sky, then drop to tree-top levels.

And somewhere in the evergreens on the cliff, a couple of eagles were announcing their romance to the world. He screeched, loudly, over and over. Then she would join in with the bubbly, warbling mating-readiness cry. Hard to describe; a lower tone, liquid, softer than the usual rusty-hinge scream; almost an amplified version of the voice a mother cat uses to greet her kittens. But amplified; very. We could hear her from a good kilometer down the beach.

They would sing their duet for a few minutes, then lapse into silence. Not for long. Again and again they broke into triumphant song.

We kept scanning the trees, looking for a sign of them; we couldn't find them, not even by the shaking of branches, since the wind was tossing everything about. We got photos of playing eagles; dots in the sky against the light. No photos of the mating pair.

More colours of spring - Purple

Beach Grove is a delight at this time of year.

Crocuses pop up everywhere, providing spring vitamins for slugs and ants. 

Dead leaves, fresh crocuses

A miniature iris with purple and white tips.

Purple pansies

Deep, rich colours in full sun.

Royal purple

Humble periwinkles at the base of a wall. With bonus brown spider.

A grove snail basks in the sun on the purple wall.

Here in North Delta, we're about two weeks behind Beach Grove. But one of my hellebores is blooming already; spring's a-coming!