Gone fishing

And another mini-video, this time of one of the tubeworms, Spiochaetopterus sp., installed in the edge of a piece of bark, fishing for dinner.

These little guys dig in all over the tank; in the sand, in holes in the hermits' shells, in knots of larger worm coatings, in oyster and clam shells; anything more or less solid or mineral-based. I haven't seen any on seaweed or anemone stalks.

Here's a good photo of a typical "Spio", taken out of its tube.

Blowing his own trumpet

I had promised to try to get a photo of the tiny tubeworm's "trumpet", so this afternoon, I propped the camera an inch away from the worm, and got him to sit for his portrait.

Red trumpet calcareous tubeworm, Serpula columbiana, back view of the mouth.

The worm ("Red, for short) wasn't the least bit shy; I kept taking a few photos, picking him up and repositioning him, trying again, moving him again ... "Red" would hide in the tube while I moved things around (wouldn't you, too, if a monster the size of a skyscraper picked you up?) but by the time I'd got back to the camera, there he was, waving his tentacles around enthusiastically.

And I finally got a clear shot at that tiny "trumpet".

It still looks like a badminton birdie to me. On a stem.

This is the door of the tube. When Red goes back into his tube, he pulls the feeding tentacles in, then the "trumpet", which he spreads across the opening, locking it down.

I noticed, in my photos, many even tinier plants or critters, like those white pinheads to the left above, or little green shrubs, too small for my eyes alone to see. I wonder if I can zoom closer in, to get a good look at them, too. It's turtles, or at least critters, all the way down!

Multicoloured hermit

Grainy hand hermit crabs are shy critters. Hidden away in algae-encrusted shells, moving slowly in the dim light under the eelgrass, they often pass unnoticed. They like it that way; the next passer-by may be a hungry fish, or a shell-cracking gull.

Their curiosity, though, sometimes leads them to ignore the danger; that big world out there is so interesting! So in my tank, they come to the glass wall to see what I'm doing. When the light is right, they are exposed in all their brilliant colours.

"Hi, out there!"

This hermit molted a few days ago, and hasn't grown a protective coating of fuzzy hydroids and algae yet. He emerged from the old skin with orange patches on his knees. I've never seen that before.

A few steps away from the glass, the water dulls his colours, except for the orange antennae and flags.

He's got a passenger: look at the top of his shell, towards the back. The two little tentacles belong to one of those musical tubeworms, safely ensconced in a tiny hole in the shell.

Cleanup crew under the dock. And a few stars.

At the Discovery Harbour Marina* in Campbell River, we divided our time between looking at boats and reflections and peering into the depths of the murky water, looking for life. In spite of the bright sunlight, or maybe because of it, since it highlighted all the dust and floaters on the surface, it was almost impossible to see more than a few metres down, so most of what we saw was in the narrow gap between the first dock and the shore.

I cleaned most of the bright surface interference off these photos, and adjusted the contrast to make things more visible.

The largest sea cucumber I have ever seen. I estimated it at about a foot and a half long. An inoffensive scavenger, busy vaccuming the rocks.

In the corner between two docks at right angles, the chains were draped with huge seaweeds colonized by many different animals. I think those red sprays are feather duster tubeworms. The yellow mass is a sponge. I don't know what the white blobs are.

Leather star. This starfish eats sponges, anemones, and sea cucumbers. To the left, barely visible, is a good-sized kelp crab.

Two small sunflower stars.

A medium-sized sunflower star. We saw a much larger one, but it was too deep for a decent photo. I counted over 20 arms on the visible part of the star, about 3/4 of the whole. This one would have about 15.

The sunflower stars are major predators. A man who passed us as we were looking at the largest one, angrily called them oyster pirates. They eat any invertebrate they can find, including other starfish, although their favourite foods are sea urchins and bivalves (clams, etc.). We didn't see any sea urchins this trip, but plenty of sunflower stars.

*K Dock, just past Moxie's.

Day Two; a complete loss of dignity

The weather was perfect, again. The sky was clear, the water at the Powell River marina glassy smooth, in deep, deep blues, the boats sleek and dazzling white in the sunshine. Beautiful, but our attention was focused downwards, in the shadow of the planks of the wharf. There, the clean lines gave way to straggly algae, dead weeds and oily scum.

Brand-new planking, grungy attachments, some alive, some dead.

Something slimy and bubbly, long fibrous growths (possibly colonies of diatoms), dust, and oil sheen.

Some of this fringe would be alive, and probably host to many tiny animals. I might have pulled some up to look at it more closely, except that the surface was oily. Later, dunking my little underwater camera, I discovered that it was sticky, too; I had to rub hard at the screen in between shots to be able to see it, and my hands ended up all gunky, so that I gummed up the other camera, too.

Still, it would have been interesting to see what's living there. Next time, I'll be more prepared. Gloves and bags and more cleaning rags will be in my kit.

Our destination points were the wells where the pilings anchor the floating dock.

Four barnacled pilings: what is under there?

 This is a difficult spot for photography; the water is about two feet below us, there are spots of deep shadow and stripes of bright sunlight. The oily, dirty water surface reflects the flash, making it unusable. I was glad I had remembered the little underwater camera.

Around the pilings, feeding on the seaweeds, were many small fish; perch and rockfish and others, unidentifiable in the shadows. Most stayed down near the bottom, but there were always a few nibbling at the barnacles near the surface.

There's something big down there, but I can't see it clearly. Higher up, the lumps are purple starfish.

On the underside, and sometimes the sides, of the big supporting beams, the big anemones grow. Last year, they were all opened up, brown and pink and white tentacles waving. This year, most were closed down.

Mostly anemones, mostly sleeping. That white bit of fuzz may be a worm, or a small anemone. The red fan in the background is a worm. Laurie climbed on a pile of rope, and dangled himself down precariously into the well to get this shot.

I have discovered, watching the one large anemone (plumose anemone, like these above) in my aquarium, that it is extremely sensitive to temperature. One or two degrees extra is all that it takes to make it shut itself down to a tiny, flattish, brown lump. I add ice to the tank, and soon the stalk swells upwards and the mouth opens wide. (The smaller anemones, the striped green anemone (the tentacles are cream), are much more tolerant; they feed while their big cousin is sulking.) I wonder what the water temperature was, and what is normal for that dock area.

Large anemone, closed down almost completely, but with an open mouth.

We were disappointed, not finding the photogenic anemones from last year, but we persisted taking photos, almost at random, since we could barely see what we were doing. I held the underwater camera at arm's length, facing this way, then that; I couldn't see the screen from above, but I held the button down halfway for a few seconds, then clicked. The flash went off, I pulled up the camera and looked at the (oily) screen; it worked! I got a fish! So I tried again, and again. Most of the photos were duds. But a few held wonders.

Unhappy anemones, tiny stuff, and a pair of red calcareous tubeworms, one feeding.

The mouth of a tubeworm. Disturbed, it pulls back inside and slams its red trapdoor (operculum). The cauliflower-like structure at upper right is a half-contracted anemone. This species is lobed; each lobe makes a "floret" here.

Dwarf calcareous tubeworms, like tiny, white macaroni stuffed with orange feathers. I think I saw a flatworm somewhere in there, too.

I don't know what these are. They look rather like scallops covered with algae.

Barnacles on a piling. I have seen this before, but never managed a photo: if the light is right, the open mouths show a bright red interior, probably due to their hemoglobin. 

At the end of the float, under the ramps (new and old), Laurie and I sprawl on our bellies, peering down at anemones on a pipe.

What else we saw, I'll show you on Saturday. Meanwhile, on to another town's beach, tomorrow.

Behind the red door

On a sunny morning, at low tide, walk down a rocky beach picking up bits of seaweed, old clamshells and mussels, bits of rock. Chances are, you've picked up a few, or many, dwarf calcareous tubeworms, tiny white coils of calcium carbonate catching the sunlight. They're beautiful, so perfectly round, so sparkly, but that's about the limit of what you will see on that mussel in your hand. It lies inert, just a coiled hard pipe.

I tend to notice them, then turn my attention to something more intriguing.

Several tubeworms. But I was looking at the bryozoans and sponges. And is that a nudibranch?

The trouble is, to really see one, you have to find it alive, unafraid, and underwater. And you need a lens; they are too small to see more than a speck of red, even while they're feeding. And you need the light in the right place. So when I noticed one glued to the tip of a limpet cruising the eelgrass in my tank, and close to the glass, to boot, I ran for the camera and my home-made lens.

Dwarf tubeworm on limpet on eelgrass, about 1/2 inch wide (the eelgrass, that is).

There are several species of these calcareous tubeworms in BC waters*, virtually indistinguishable from each other without close study. Some prefer to settle on seaweeds, others choose rocks or shells; some form large communities.

The tube is white, sometimes thin enough to show the orange-red worm inside. Feeding, they extend a crown of red tentacles from the mouth of the tube. Startled (and your shadow will do the trick), they disappear inside, and the only sign of occupancy is the red trapdoor, or operculum, that they shut tight against predators.

The trapdoor has other uses. The worm has both male and female segments; once she/he has fertilized the eggs, the door becomes a brood chamber. Sometimes, depending on the species, the chamber is like a cup; sometimes it's more like a helmet.

Another species characteristic is the direction of the spiral. Going from the center outwards, this worm coils counter-clockwise. Others follow the clock.

A closer view. Trapdoor in front, crown of tentacles behind. The tube is old and stained, and has been banged about; it's broken in several places. The worm shows red through one hole, but can't be seen in the central coils.

Responding to my shadow. He's hidden inside, and the door is fast shut.

I found another limpet/worm combination on some sea lettuce. This one's quite a bit smaller.

A newer tube, cleaner and less chipped. Also counter-clockwise.

There are a few astoundingly gorgeous photos of similar worms from California, a much larger species, but with the same colours and structures, on Flickr, in John Albers-Mead's photostream. Look at this one!

*They can be found in many other locations, in a wide range of latitudes.

Travelling musician

Life, if you're a worm, is uncomplicated. The simple pleasures; eating, resting, housekeeping. The excitement of sex, in season. You live in the moment. Dangers and difficulties will be dealt with when they come. Qué será, será.

Of course, you protect yourself as your worm ancestors always did, burying yourself in the sand, building a strong tube for shelter. Then you go cheerfully up to find your next tasty mouthful of debris.

Sometimes, though, a worm discovers a strategy that makes things a lot more interesting. This little genius, for example. (I think he's planning to become a conductor of an orchestra.)

(As usual, YouTube embedding doesn't seem to handle the sound properly, at least for the first day.  Now I find that I have to click the "Full Screen" button to start it. I can come back to here immediately afterwards, and it's fine.

And get rid of the ad; it hides a couple of captions.)

It's a living: tubeworm video

Worms! I finally got the video together and uploaded.

I haven't been able to id these worms; the closest I can find are the three-section tubeworms, but they don't quite match. I'd appreciate any help!

(As before, the sound only works for me after I've switched the settings to 480p. I can't figure out why. And get rid of the ad asap; it's hiding a couple of captions. Viewing the worm full-screen gives you a better look at the features of the head and tentacles.)

One rock makes an entire habitat

I came home to a long note on my kitchen table, and my trusty encyclopedia full of purple sticky notes. My granddaughter had come over to water the plants, and had taken the time to mark all (or most, she says) of the "neat stuff" she saw scuba diving off Whytecliff (Horseshoe Bay) on the weekend.

"There are probably hundreds more, but ... lots of stuff is so small I probably didn't even know I was looking at it."

She's right, except that there are probably thousands more. Here's one rock I found on the beach near Stories Creek on Vancouver Island, for proof:

Looks like a painter's drop cloth.

That's too much to see, in one photo. I'll break it down a bit:

Green. red. white, orange ...

The red patches are some sort of encrusting sponge*. The green is a bryozoan. The white circles are possibly the same bryozoan, except that the green one is tinted with algae. On the right, the orange and cream stuff is a scramble of bryozoans. The curly red ribbon is the tube of a calcareous tubeworm, probably red trumpet, Serpula columbiana. The rock is sprinkled with tiny barnacles, and smeared underneath all with a deep wine-coloured encrustation, possibly encrusting coral.

Another section of the rock:

A scrambled mess.

Lots of stuff, but hard to see. The central yellowish stuff is a sponge; the large holes are exit holes (osculae) for the water it filters. The tiny pores are intake holes.

For the rest, let's break the photo up a bit:

A fan or leaf-shaped bryozoan, in bright orange.  Compare the regular pattern of holes (lophopores) to the randomized arrangement of the sponge next door.

A "feather duster" organism. I don't know what it is, yet.

And further along the rock:

Red/pink/green bryozoan, encrusting the rock, itself, and barnacles. The limpet has escaped. For now. The bright green stuff is sea lettuce, masked by red algae fronds.

This one's difficult.

Examining this photo carefully, I find a variety of bryozoan colonies, a few barnacles, a limpet with red encrustations on the shell, a couple of calcareous worms, at least half a dozen tiny coiled tubeworms, and a smear of yellow sponge. And I think that white thing towards the left bottom looks suspiciously like a white nudibranch. I wish I'd noticed it at the time I took the photo.

(I loaded these photos in the usual format, 1024 x 768), but you may want to check the full size ones over on Flickr.)

One more:

A few nice, neat bryozoan colonies, in a warm brown, on a substrate of assorted purple and bluish encrustations. With barnacles and pink "somethings".

And I wonder what I've missed here. I could have spent an entire afternoon on the beach with this rock and a portable microscope. (Which I forgot to pack; I won't next year. I promise.)

*The encyclopedia observes,

"Sponge classification and recognition is a most problematic and frustrating subject for a naturalist. Indeed, academic professionals who spend their careers studying the group are likewise challenged -- a fact that leads to much uncertainty in scientifically oriented sponge publications."

I'll just stick to "yellow sponge, red sponge, etc."

The latest in hat trims; coils, fans, and glass beads

Before I left the eelgrass (and big crab) bed, I grabbed a few handfuls of eelgrass, just to see what would be living on them, out here at the edge of the shallows.

Mostly limpets, I found when I got home. But these limpets seemed different:

The shells were decorated with a grainy icing, and this one seemed to have a crown.

Another encrusted shell, this one with hair.

And this one has tiny, calcified spirals.

On another, barely visible, even under the maginfying lens, I could see movement at the mouth of the spiral. I got out the microscope:

The tube end. 

This fan pulled in, then spread out rhytmically, but much slower that a barnacle would.  The lower orange oval seems to be the operculum, or trap door; it was closed on a couple of other tubes.

This is one of the dwarf calcareous tubeworms, Pileolaria sp. They are polychaetes, like my big 12-inch Nereis, but the tubes only grow to about 6 mm across. This one was probably about 1 mm. They build their tubes of calcium carbonate, like the shells of snails and clams; other tubeworms make soft tubes or encase themselves in mucus and sand. I have seen these tiny macaroni coils on rocks and shells many times, but this is the first live one I've observed.

An odd fact from the Marine Life Encyclopedia:

"... these worms breed their young in their trap doors! Once fertilization has occurred, the trap doors serve as brood chambers for the developing embryos. Depending on the species, these calicfied trap doors may be in the form of an open cup or helmet-shaped chamber that can be used for more than one brood."

The grainy crust over the top of the limpet seems to be a bryozoan, too small and indistinct to identify without disturbing the limpets.

Like a mound of smashed glass goblets. The blue patches are reflections of the microscope's lighting system.

There were other critters, too. More on these, later.

The eelgrass dwellers

The tide was coming in.

(I remember how, when I was growing up on Vancouver Island's west coast, how our stories always began with the tide. It was high tide, it was low tide, the tide was going out ... For weather, we had seasons; rain every day, or fire season. What defined the state of our surroundings at the moment was the eternal tide.)

Last week on Boundary Bay, off Centennial Park, the tide was coming in. It was still far enough out that we could barely see the water beyond a great expanse of empty sand, so we didn't know that. I hurried straight out to the edge, hoping to get to where the seaweeds and crabs start. Too late; knee-deep in the water, I could see ahead where the green showed through the waves. Behind me, I could see that the crab shell I had placed just above the water line as a marker was now floating away. Time to head back.

All that first half-mile of the beach is lugworm and sea snail territory; we don't see much else, beyond an occasional crab molt or shattered clam.

The invasive Batillaria snails, and snail trails.

In the shallow pools near the edge, we noticed some strange brown blobs, floating like furry balloons on six-inch strings.

This one has several blobs. The dark patches are the shadows of the bubbles floating on the surface.

They were soft and mushy to touch, but held together when I pulled at them. They didn't break away from the stem. I dug a few up; they were on a strand of tiny eelgrass, and the roots went deep into the sand. But what were the blobs? Eelgrass is a flowering plant, were they flower heads? I thought they were supposed to be inconspicuous.

Blob, bubbles, and a barely visible eelgrass stem.

I dropped a few into my plastic bag to investigate at home. While I was at it, I collected a tangle of eelgrass roots from the dry sand.

The snails feed around these. There's one of the blobs in this knot, too.

Back home, I looked over my harvest. The blobs, spread out in water, turned out to be made of fine, brown hairs, baby-hair soft.

I had imagined that they would be populated by small critters; amphipods or snails, maybe. But there was nothing but the hair to be seen.

There was nothing like this in the Encyclopedia; I finally found it in Kozloff. The eelgrass is dwarf eelgrass, Zostera japonica, a small, introduced eelgrass, growing to about 8 inches tall; the leaves are half the width of native eelgrass blades. And the blobs ... I'll quote from Kozloff:

In certain places, especially during the summer months, the leaves of eelgrass become colonized by a variety of essentially microscopic plant organisms. Most obvious among these are the diatoms, which, if present in large numbers, constitute a furry, olive brown coating. If some of the diatoms present are of the chain-forming type, a good deal of the coating will seem to consist of fine filaments. Bacteria will also be plentiful, and once the biological ball starts to roll, detritus tends to become incorporated into the film.

The diatoms, bacteria, and detritus, as well as the decaying tissue of eelgrass leaves themselves, feed the mouths of many protozoa, microscopic worms ... and small crustacea.

It is still early in the season; the colonies were still free of detritus. Any other organisms were microscopic.

I turned my attention to the eelgrass roots. This is the larger, native eelgrass; the leaves are long, up to the length of my arm and more. The leaves grow out of a thick, brown rhizome that anchors it in the sand; small roots grow from the rhizome.

This rhizome, at least as it deteriorates, provides hollow tubes where small organisms can hide. Once, while I was nursing a broken flatworm back to health in a little bowl, I provided it with an inch of eelgrass rhizome for shelter. After a few days, it disappeared. I looked for it several times a day for three days, then it crawled out of the rhizome. So I put the eelgrass, roots and all, in water, and watched carefully.

There were amphipods, of course; there are always amphipods. And a couple of tiny snails. And a whole collection of worms:

Polychaete, (pronounced "Polly Keet"), after I'd liberated it into a tub of water and sand.

A ribbon worm. This is the head. It was blood-red under the light.

The ribbon worm entertained us for quite a while; it slid up to the surface along the rim of the bowl and spent the evening going round and round, occasionally lifting its head about an inch above the water line. Round and round and round; it only stopped when I dumped it in the tub outside. It was about 4 inches long, very red, very smooth, and featureless, except for the little triangular head.

Tube worm.

There were a couple of these tubes; this smaller one was about a inch long. I wouldn't have noticed it, except that it twitched occasionally.

The tube is decorated with sand grains cemented on.

The larger worm, about 3 inches long, kept extending its head (or maybe proboscis) and waving it around, in a searching pattern.

I looked it up in the Encyclopedia and on the web, but couldn't identify it.

And there was one more, not exactly worm-like, but I think it's a polychaete, going by the tufted "feet" along the sides:

Tiny worm, under the microscope. About 5 mm. long.

There are four appendages visible on the head end; two pale antenna-like things, and these two with a black spot at the tip, like a snail's eyes. My first photos didn't turn out, and when I went back to try again, I couldn't find it. It's somewhere in the tub; maybe someday I'll find it again, grown up a bit.