Where the sun shines

It was a good day for it; sunny and bright, not a cloud in the sky; perfect lighting for peering under docks to see what's living there now. Unfortunately, when I got to Brown's Bay, there was a brisk wind and the water was dancing and painting abstract patterns. And maintenance had scraped whole communities off the floats. (Necessary, and some critters can relocate, but I wish ...) There were still a few sheltered spots; I found them.

Giant plumose anemones on a pipe with an unusual pink tinge.

On the wooden base of a float; plumose anemone, green sea urchins and a jelly swimming by.

Most feather duster tube worms look purmplish in their shadowy underwater homes. This one caught an unusually bright ray of light. The yellow is probably a sponge.

Group of feather duster worms, Eudistylia vancouveri.One shows up red.

A winged kelp with a pronounced stipe, Alaria marginata. In the upper part of the photo, they're attached to the dock base; underneath, they float free. They grow up to 3 metres long.

Harbour seal, Phoca vitulina. There were three of them this day, just hanging around waiting for fisher folk to come back with their catch.

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Era un dia ideal para sacar fotos de criaturas debajo de los muelles; asoleado, brillante, el cielo azul, sin  nubes; se necesita buena luz para ver claro esas comunidades acuáticas. Lástima fue que cuando llegué a Brown's Bay, se había levantado una brisa fuerte, haciendo bailar las olas, pintando diseños abstractos. Además, los encargados del mantenimiento del sitio habían limpiado los flotadores. Algo necesario en una marina, y muchos de los organismos se pueden encontrar albergue en las rocas, pero una lástima de todas maneras.

Pero buscando, buscando, encontré unos pocos sitios protegidos.

1. Anémonas Metridium senile, en un tubo. El tinte color de rosa no lo he visto antes.
2. En la madera debajo de un muelle, vi otra anémona blanca y un par de erizos verdes de mar. Una pequeña medusa pasaba, nadando lentamente.
3. Los gusanos tubícolas normalmente parecen ser oscuros, en tonos de color púrpura, sobre todo en las oscuridades donde viven. Un rayo fuerte de luz solar iluminó este, mostrando su fuerte color rojo. Lo amarillo probablemente sea una esponja.
4. Un grupo de estos gusanos, Eudistylia vancouveri.
5. Algas marinas, quelpos de doble alas, Alaria marginata. En la parte superior de la foto, están adheridas a la base del muelle; abajo, flotan libremente. Estas algas llegan a unos 3 metros desde su base.
6. Una foca, Phoca vitulina. Había tres este dia, dando vueltas perezosamente, esperando que regresaran los pescadores con las cabezas y entrañas que desecharán al limpiar su pesca del dia en el sitio proveído en el muelle para esta tarea.

Did Terry Pratchett watch barnacles?

Searching for one thing, I stumble upon so many distractions! Like these tiny aquarium residents, seen while I looked for snail fur.

Miniature orange-striped green anemone, Diadumene lineata

This was taken under the microscope, hiding in a dimple in a small snail shell. One of many, almost invisible to the naked eye. And each one, as I watched, never stopped moving, swelling, shrinking, waving, closing and opening the tentacles.

Another barnacle.

Feeding barnacles have their own special form of camouflage. They spread out their cirri (those modified legs), sweep them through the water, pull them back, close, open, spread out the cirri again ....  Say you're a fish, wanting a mouthful of barnacle legs; just wait and catch them open. Or a watcher with a camera; should be easy, right?

But no: the barnacles have no rhythm. Just when you think they should be opening — now! — and press the shutter, they hold back a half-second. The next sweep is just a tad early. Then a toe sticks out, right on time, but the pesky critter aborts the sweep. The fish goes hungry. I am stubborn, but mostly, I give up, too.

Was this where Terry Pratchett got his idea for Vetinari's clock?

The clock in Lord Vetinari’s anteroom didn’t tick right. Sometimes the tick was just a fraction late, sometimes the tock was early. Occasionally, one or the other didn’t happen at all. This wasn’t really noticeable until you’d been in there for five minutes, by which time small but significant parts of the brain were going crazy. [Going Postal by Terry Pratchett]

Tiny, tiny, really tiny shrimp-like thing.

This little critter kept dashing across the shell under the microscope. The head on the right is of one of the isopods that I found a couple of weeks ago; they measure about 2 to 3 mm. long. That makes the little shrimp thing a bit under 1 mm. long.

The inner tube of the large moon snail shell, against the backdrop of the outer shell. (Camera)

Here you have to look closely; along the edge of that tube, the worms that are everywhere on this shell, stand up against the green background, each one spreading its two tentacles out into the water. On the far right, the tentacles belong to another of the orange-striped green anemones.

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Cuando ando buscando alguna cosa cualquiera, ¡se me presentan tantas distracciones! Como estos pequeñas criaturas que viven en mi acuario, que vi mientras buscaba pelo de caracol.

Primera foto: una anémona Diadumene lineata, la de las rayas anaranjadas. Esta la vi bajo el microscopio, escondida en un hoyuelo en una concha de caracol. Una de muchas, todas casi invisibles bajo el ojo sin ayudas. Y cada una, mientras observaba, nunca dejó de moverse, hinchándose, contrayéndose, agitando los tentáculos, abriendo y cerrándolos.

Segunda foto: otro bálano. Los bálanos que están buscando sus alimentos tienen su forma muy personal de camuflaje. Estiran sus cirros (esas patas modificadas), peinan el agua, vuelven a encerrar los cirros, cierran, abren, estiran los cirros ... y así siguen. Pon que eres un pescadito y se te antoja una mordida de esos cirros; solo hay que esperar a que estiran las patas y morder, ¿no? O que estás esperando con un cámara; fácil, ¿verdad?

Pero no. Los bálanos no siguen ningún ritmo. Justo cuando crees que se van a abrir —¡ahora! — e imprimes el botón de la cámara, se atrasan un medio segundo. La siguente apertura es un poquitito temprano. Luego se asoma el punto de un cirro, justo a tiempo, pero el animal infeliz se arrepiente y se vuelve a esconder. El pescadito se queda sin su antojo. Yo soy terca, pero casi siempre también me rindo.

¿Será aquí en donde el autor Terry Pratchett sacó la idea del reloj de Vetinari?

El reloj en la antesala del Señor Vetinari no hacía "tick" correctamente. A veces el "tick" ocurrió un segundo más tarde de lo debido, a veces el "tock" ocurría un poco temprano. de vez en cuando el uno o el otro ni siquiera salía. Esto no se hacía notar hasta que hubieras estado esperando por cinco minutos; ya para entonces partes pequeñas pero importantes de tu cerebro se estaban volviendo locos. —"Going Postal" por Terry Pratchett.

Tercera foto: un animalito estilo camarón pequeñísimo. Este bichito nadaba rapidamente de un lado a otro del campo bajo el microscopio. La cabeza a la izquierda es de uno de los isópodos que observé hace unas semanas; estos miden unos 2 o 3 mm. de largo. Comparando los tamaños, el camaroncito medirá menos de 1 mm.

Cuarta foto: hay que mirarla de cerca. Es el poste central del caracol "luna" visto en frente de la capa interior de la misma concha. Si ves de cerca, puedes descubrir los gusanos de tubo que viven en todas partes en esta concha. Cada uno extiende sus dos tentáculos al agua. El grupo de tentáculos a la izquierda es otra de esas anémonas de rayas anaranjadas.

Green ropes and clumsy grabbers

Nothing in the biosphere is ever simple. It's all complicated, intertwined, inter-dependent, busy. Nothing is just one thing. Not even me, or you. Well, in some sense, you're a separate person, but really, you're (and I'm) a community, a city with billions of inhabitants. You wouldn't survive without your critters; they wouldn't survive without you.

You have to start somewhere. I'll start in my tank, with hermits. Hermits are messy eaters. They grab food with their pincers; awkward things, without the useful fingers and thumbs we have. Food gets transported to the first set of mouth appendages, spilling crumbs as it goes. These mini-hands break it up (spilling more, of course), and pass it on to the smaller mouth parts. And so it goes.

In the tank, I feed the hermits and crabs, and some of the larger anemones. And a busy community thrives because the hermits are messy eaters.

I was taking photos of the barnacles, trying to catch one with it's legs stretched out at full length. (They catch their food with those legs, remember.) I wasn't having much luck, but I processed a few of the photos and looked them over.

Barnacles in community

And there again, there are layers upon layers. And each layer has its story. 

The barnacles arrived on an oyster. Every now and then, I find on the beach a pile of empty oyster shells, usually up high above the tide line, sometimes near the remains of a bonfire. The leftovers of a human party? Or were they raccoons? It's usually too late to see tracks. A couple of times, in the pile, I've found a live oyster, forgotten by the diners. This one, in my tank, was one of those. It came with a planting of barnacles and mussels.

The oyster is a filter feeder. It brings in water from its surroundings (carrying with it fragments of hermit food), then spits it out, clamping the shell shut, then opening up again. The barnacles comb the water with their legs, catching smaller critters and hermit leftovers. The mussels filter the water, like the oyster does.

Look at the photo. Two barnacles are still alive. In the mouth of the one on the left, its coiled legs look like a roll of green rope.

Two barnacles are empty. Whelk snails bore through their armoured plates and eat the animal inside. In the few weeks the oyster has been here, half the barnacles have been eaten, as well as all but one of the mussels. The blue patch on the far left is an empty mussel shell.

Look again. on the sides of the barnacles, there are tiny tentacles reaching out into the water. These are two-tentacled tube worms. They somehow burrow into shells (barnacle, oyster, hermit crab, clam: any shell will do.) and reach out into the water with those two tentacles, capturing floating bits of food stuffs. I see four worms here. (The tangled fibers on the right are probably eelgrass roots.)

In front, a bit blurry, there's an orange-striped green anemone, also catching bits of hermit leftovers, and anything the oyster spat out.

And then, there's the sand. Not visible here, but certainly under a lens, there are crowds of amphipods, copepods, and yesterday's isopods, all busy keeping the sand clean.

And behind the anemone, on the left, look closely: there's a leg of one of the tinier hermits, the source, with his larger cousins, of most of the food the rest of the community harvests. Because they're messy eaters.

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Nada, nunca, en la biósfera es sencillo. Todo es complicado, enredado, complejo. Nada existe como una sola cosa. Ni tú, ni yo. En algún sentido, eres una sola persona, pero en verdad, eres (y soy) una comunidad, una ciudad con billones de habitantes. Sin tus comensales, no sobrevivirías; sin ti, ellos tampoco vivirían.

Hay que empezar en alguna parte. Yo empezaré hoy en mi acuario, con los cangrejos ermitaños. Los ermitaños son desordenados, descuidados. Agarran su comida con las pinzas, "manos" torpes, sin los dedos tan útiles que tenemos nosotros. Con ellas, mueven la comida hacia las primeras apéndices de la boca, dejando caer migajas en camino. Estas agarraderas rompen los pedazos de comida (tirando aún más) y los transportan a la tercera nivel del aparato bucal. Y así sigue.

En el tanque, les doy de comer a los cangrejos y ermitaños y al algunas de las anémonas más grandes. Y a base de eso, una comunidad amplia y variada vive, porque los ermitaños son descuidados.

Estaba sacando fotos de los bálanos, tratando de agarrar uno con sus cirros (patas) al agua, estirados a lo máximo. (Capturan su comida con esas patas.) Es difícil, y no me ayudó la suerte esta vez, pero abrí unas de las fotos y las examiné.

La foto: bálanos y su comunidad.

Y ahí, como siempre, had capas y capas. Y cada individuo tiene su historia.

Los bálanos llegaron aquí en un ostión. De vez en cuando, encuentro en la playa, bien arriba del nivel de la marea alta, a veces cerca de una vieja fogata, un montón de conchas vacías de ostiones. ¿Serán lo que dejaron un grupo de gente comiendo en la playa? O si no, ¿una familia de mapaches? Siempre ha sido demasiado tarde para encontrar huellas.

En unos de esos montones, he encontrado ostiones vivos, y los he traído a casa. El que ahora vive en mi tanque fue uno de estos. Llegó con su propia carga de bálanos y mejillones.

El ostión come filtrando el agua, capturando cualquier fragmento de comida que trae, y luego escupiendo lo demás, cerrando y abriendo su concha. En su lado, los bálanos cuelan el agua con sus cirros para capturar animalitos más pequeños y los restos de la comida de los ermitaños. Los mejillones filtran el agua, al igual que el ostión.

Miira la foto. Dos de los bálanos todavía viven. En la boca de aquel a la izquierda, se le ven los cirros, como una rueda de cuerdas verdes. 

Dos de los bálanos están vacíos. Los buccinos (caracoles carnívoros) taladran la concha y se comen el animal escondido adentro. En las pocas semanas que ha estado en el tanque el ostión, los caracoles han comido la mitad de los bálanos, y dejaron solo un mejillón con vida. La mancha azul a la izquierda es la concha vacía de un mejillón.

Mira otra vez. En los lados de los bálanos se ven unos tentáculos muy pequeños. Estos son tentáculos de gusanitos que viven en tubos; estos tienen dos tentáculos cada uno. De alguna manera, hacen agujeros en las conchas (cualquier concha; ostión, almeja, bálano, caracol; les da lo mismo), y de allí extienden sus tentáculos al agua, agarrando pedacitos de materia comestible. Aqí veo cuatro de estos gusanitos. (Las fibras enredadas a la derecha son raices de hierba zostera.)

Un frente, un poco borrosa, se ve una anémona de rayas anaranjadas, también ocupada en buscar comida flotante en el agua; los deshechos de los ermitaños y cualquier cosa que haya escupido el ostión.

Y queda la arena. No se ven aquí, pero si con una lente, se encontrarán muchos anfípodos, copépodos e isópodos como el de ayer, todos activamente limpiando la arena.

Y atrás de la anémona, a la izquierda; mira con cuidado; verás una pata de uno de los más pequeños de los ermitaños, el responsable, con la ayuda de todos sus primos, de proveer la mayoría de la comida de que vive la comunidad. Porque son tan descuidados.

Underwater bouquet

Off the docks at Brown's Bay the other day, the wind was brisk and the water surface choppy, but in a few sheltered spots I could see the communities living on the underside of the floats.

Giant plumose anemone, Metridium farcimen.

The floats are blue plastic. And we're lookiing through the reflections of the structures overhead.

Anemones, seaweeds, worms, and jellies. Click to view full size.

And here's the same photo, annotated. The gunk may be sponges.  But I missed a limpet. Do you see it?

Kelp, anemones, mussels, limpets, and a glowing red worm. The greenish spikes are on sea urchins.

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En el muelle en Brown's Bay el otro dia, había viento haciendo olas, pero en algunos lugares se podía vislumbrar las comunidades que viven en la parte inferior de los flotadores. (Que son de un plástico azul.)

Primero: una anémona "emplumada gigante".

La segunda foto tiene toda una comunidad. En la siguiente, los habitantes tienen nombres. Hay anémonas, lombrices "plumero" (son rojos), otros lombrices en tubos, un par de medusas, varias especies de alga marina, y una masa que probablemente consiste en diátomos o si no, de esponjas. Y se me olvidó una lapa. ¿La ves?

En la última foto, aparte de todo lo anterior, hay un grupo de erizos de mar; son los que tienen las espinas verdes.

While the sun shines

The fall rains are here. It rains most days, but Wednesday, there was a break and the sun came out. I drove down to Brown's Bay again. The water was active this time, and I walked on the docks, peering underwater at all the white anemones dancing down there. The light was good, but what with the rising and falling waves, the rocking docks, and my swaying as I tried to keep my balance on those unfenced planks, I could barely see more than flashes of white and sometimes red.

Once, things calmed down for a few seconds.

A colony of plumose anemones, white and cream, some red tubeworms, a pair of limpets crowned with algae, mussels, and dreadfully mangled kelp of some sort.

More red tubeworms here. Most of the floats are bright blue plastic, but years of algae have coated and discoloured them, adding to the abstract designs of the water and reflections. (The white and turqoise waves are the reflection of a boat.)

More reflections, under the fish packing plant. From the extreme end of the docks.

Back to land. I drove up to the RV site, but couldn't enter. But there was a bear on the gate:

Old Mossy. Rather grumpy, too, it seems.

Swimming school

It was a quiet afternoon down at the wharf. Very few birds. No harbour seals. Even the usual kelp and assorted crabs and sponges on the pilings were in hiding. But there were fish. Tiny ones, from an inch or so to a couple of inches long, hundreds of them, and everywhere I looked.

Most were swimming just under the surface.

Where they broke the surface, nibbling at invisible (to me) goodies, they made rings. And the rings made the fish look stripy.

And just above the surface, a patient cross spider, catching mainly dust. Good thing the fish aren't jumping!

A couple of tubeworms on the underside of a wharf office.

Feathery cirri, spotted palps

A few weeks ago, I noticed that several of the hermit crabs in my tank had paired up, with bigger males hauling around their chosen girlfriends. So this week, I've been examining all the larger females, looking to see if they are carrying eggs. It seems to be too early to be sure; there are a couple of maybes.

Meanwhile, I took photos of several of the other tank residents. Here are two of the large thatched acorn barnacles, trolling for plankton.

The thatched acorn barnacle has black cirri.

This one houses several worms in its shell.

These tiny three-sectioned tubeworms show up in the sand, and in many of the assorted shells in the tank, including in those occupied by hermit crabs. In the sand, up against the glass wall, I can see the tiny worm; otherwise, all that I see are these two long palps. I don't know if the spots - I've never noticed them on other worms - are bits of material the worm is rejecting, or actual palp markings. I'll be watching for them in future.

Where the living is green

In the intertidal zone, worms and snails live happily in sand. Crabs and fish live under rocks; limpets live on top. Crabs and  isopods like a seaweed blanket. But under a layer cake of sand, rocks, weed, it's party time; everybody mingles.

Lower intertidal zone, Simms Creek area. 

Calcareous tubeworms, spiral tubeworms, orange-legged hermit, bryozoans, limpet, assorted seaweeds, two pecies of snails, encrusting sponge.

More bryozoans, snail, hermit.

Encrusting sponge, with snails.

Grainy-hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus.

Green mottled star, spiral tubeworms, bryozoans and sea urchin

Leather star and bryozoan. With hermit, snails, tubeworms.

Hermit (hiding), limpet, sea urchin, two kinds of snails.

Clingfish.

Under the wharf, it's spring.

The tide was low, the sun was shining, and there was no wind; the perfect time to visit the docks and peer underneath the floats again. The water was smooth and clear, exposing the communities clustered along pipes and logs.

This year, or maybe this time of year, the sea urchins were out in full force. I hadn't seen them here before.

Under a floating office. Green sea urchins, about a couple of inches across.

More urchins, several scallops encrusted with weeds and worms, barnacles and a feather-duster worm, on a plastic pipe under the ramp.

A rusty pipe and a rope underneath the ramp. Sea urchins again, purple and beige feather duster worms, a red sponge (on the whitish pipe on the left) and a larger, greyish sponge. On the far left, a mass of tubeworms. At the top right, a brilliant red feather duster.

There were several masses of jelly, probably egg masses. This one was on a piling partly exposed by the low tide. I touched it; it was soft, but firm, not sticky.

This was down on the bottom, underneath a float. It's about a hand's width across. An anemone, but not one I recognize.

I have visited the docks several times during the winter, peering down the gaps between pilings, squinting between logs. All I have seen in the water were fish, maybe because of the lack of light, or possibly some of the summer residents have retreated to more sheltered locations. I'm glad to see the crowds coming back.

Bullies, devourers, thieves, and pacifists.

Continuing with the July assortment, these are animals in my aquarium and on local shores.

The bullies first.

Crabby. All blue-eyed innocence, except for those menacing pincers.

Crabs are fun to watch; always busy, always on the move. I had three in the aquarium, and they were thriving, molting and growing, scrambling everywhere, re-arranging rocks three times their size, rolling snails and tearing the sea lettuce. All well and good, until they grew big and fast enough to attack their tank mates.

There were three big rockweed isopods, inoffensive seaweed grazers, bigger than the crabs. They'd come in with seaweed long ago. The crabs grabbed and ate two; I caught ol' blue-eyes in the act.

They ate one of the big hermits. And my old red shrimp. There was no need for that: I've always fed them well.

So I fished them out of the tank and hauled them down to the beach, where they strutted into the waves, waving pincers, ready for action. They didn't know about fish and gulls yet.

The remaining residents of my tank breathed a sigh of relief. Or would have, if they were breathers.

Signal crayfish, Pacifasticus leniusculus. Identified by the white markings at the wrists.

We found this crayfish, dead, floating in the shallows of the Campbell River mouth. Another aggressive predator: they will eat anything, from rotting vegetation to live fish and their own relatives. My son had one that got in among his goldfish, ate them all, and grew very big.

They're a freshwater crustacean, but tolerate brackish water, freshwater mingled with tidal surges.

A bright orange starfish. (Blood star, maybe?) Stories beach. A notorious predator.

The Monterey sea lemon. Trundles around slowly, eating sponges and other sessile animals (fixed in place, like barnacles.) On Stories beach, at the south end of Campbell River.

Pale pink and green anemone in my tank. It arrived as a mere speck on a shell, and now has grown to half an inch across. I rarely feed these; they thrive on copepods and other plankton. Including, possibly, all those baby hermits.

Orange-striped green anemone, Duodumene lineata.

This one was on Stories beach, but a few tinier ones came home with me on a stone full of barnacles for my Leafy Hornmouth snails. I counted seven tonight after I cleaned the tank.

The tiniest of the fishermen; a two-tentacled worm (a Spionid) in a hole in an old shell. They catch detritus, which slides down the tentacles into the mouth.

Another, with leftover sand grains around the mouth. The worm cleans off the edibles, and spits out the sand.

One of my hermits, a Hairy.

These guys eat leftovers, dead critters, seaweed, hydroids and diatoms when they can. Totally inoffensive. Except when they see one of their friends with something good; they're not averse to rolling him over and stealing his food. Especially if he is smaller than they are.

It's a dog eat dog world in there.

A bully, a devourer of barnacles (Leafy Hornmouth snail), and the pacifist limpet, who putters mildly about cleaning algae off the rocks and the glass.

Bouncing back

Sometimes the resilience of tiny critters bowls me over. I carefully remove every hermit and crab I can find from the sand in the aquarium, then churn the sand around, back and forth, changing the water and churning again several times, to get all the crud out. Then I pour in clean water and smooth everything out, and a pinhead-sized hermit bounces to the top, not in the least disturbed by the upheaval.

I scrub down a wall, then notice that I've dislodged an infant anemone and it's caught in my towel. No problem; I rinse out the cloth, and the anemone drifts away in the current. A bit later, I find it happily anchored on a fresh piece of seaweed.

Tonight, cleaning the tank again, I ran my fingers through the sand in one corner, looking for a tiny clam I'd seen there two days earlier. I didn't find it; it will show up eventually. But once everything was back in its place, I happened to look at that corner, and there was a miniature tubeworm, standing tall, as if there had been no major earthquake in that spot just half an hour earlier.

Feather duster worm, about 1/4 inch tall.

My hermits get in a fight. One ends up maimed, with both pincers gone. She struggles along, avoiding confrontation, holding her food with her spare mouthparts, hanging around the roots of eelgrass, unable to climb it. And then she molts, and stretches out her new pincers, still baby-sized, but serviceable. Next molt, she'll be back to normal.

"See my new hands!"