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.

Under the dock

Hurrying from the sailboat to the inn for supper, I paused, just a moment, to look down. Everything under that dock is covered with critters.

Plumose anemones, Metridium senile, and a bright red tubeworm.

Hanging on a chain, swaying in the current, a mass of mussels, a starfish eating them, and what looks like legs of at least one crab on the far side.

At the Campbell River docks, in the last few years they have been replacing the old log pilings with metal ones. I used to find many animals down along the logs; anemones, shrimp, crabs, mussels, nudibranchs, sponges, tubeworms, scallops, barnacles, unidentified blobs. And seaweeds, green algae, kelp, red algae, yellow fuzz. On the metal ones, nothing grows. I have peered down the cracks around most of them; they're a bit fatter, and leave less space around them in the dock opening. Nothing moves, nothing attaches itself. They're clean.

On old metal found on the beach, even metal not so old, barnacles and mussels find a home. On the chain above, all metal, only the part that is usually out of the water is clean. I'm wondering: are those new metal pilings coated with some wildlife-deterrent chemical agent?

Bit of old ship, Oyster Bay, in a high current area. Seaweeds, barnacles.

The pilings at the Heriot Bay wharf are logs. And they're home to thriving communities. I hope they don't decide to "improve" them.

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.

Fishing boat dock, revisited.

Last November, I explored the docks where the fishing boats tie up, peering down into the water between the dock and boat sides, and between the old creosoted pilings. The winter has come and gone; the sun shines down the cracks and into the dark crevices again. I retraced my steps yesterday.

There was a stiff breeze, strong enough to blow my jacket over my head when I bent over; the open water was white-capped. The docks danced on the waves, bouncing against the pilings, making squeaking, creaking noises; cables under stress whined, old wood groaned. I had to be cautious, poking my head down gaps over dark water, careful not to let a swaying dock pin my hand against a piling.

Last winter, I found shrimp, kelp, red rock, and black-clawed crabs, purple starfish, yellow sponges, anemones, and a nudibranch. And styrofoam. Too much styrofoam.

This spring, the population mix has changed.

There were still kelp crabs, most quite large.

A large kelp crab on a piling, half underwater. From the way she holds her abdominal plate, half open, I think she's in berry, carrying a mass of eggs. What looks like a lump on her right shoulder (our right) is probably an effect of the water; when she moved about, it disappeared. The blobs on the lower left are styrofoam-coated gunk.

Mussels, along the bottom of a boat. With pieces and dust of stryrofoam.

Around almost every piling, the edges of the dock were covered with brownish, matted weed and these pink and yelllow lumps. I think they may be peach ball sponge, or something similar.

Some of the sponges were a vivid orange. I don't know if these are colour morphs of one species, or three different sponge species.

A circle of twisty, lumpy chains. I saw only one, and couldn't get closer. The circle is about 2 inches across. Eggs, but of what species?

On one of those rubbery boat fender balls, large barnacles have lived and died, leaving empty shells.

These, rescued from an old rope, are pinkish.

I saw no shrimp, though I looked carefully. There were many tiny, darting fish, several orange starfish, down deep; one looked like a leather star or cookie star, with short, wide arms. I couldn't find any purple stars.

Above the water line, there's this:

Old wood, rust, cracked paint, and an opportunistic weed, going to seed.

And there's still too much styrofoam.

White on blue

All that remains of a calcareous tubeworm colony on a plastic float, left high and dry on a wharf:

Spirals, curves, angles

These are the tubes made by three species of tubeworms, The tiny spirals, about 1/8 of an inch across, protected the dwarf calcareous tubeworms, Spirorbis spp. The curvy, fat tubes are probably by a relative, Serpula vermicularis, and the rough, oddly-shaped, thinner ones belonged to a different Serpulid. Alive, they would each house a worm with a brilliant, feathery top,

Keeping up with modern life

Black clawed crab on a piling:

Half out of the water, about 1 inch across.

Black clawed crab in hand, pretending to be a clump of dirty styrofoam:

And holding a piece of the styrofoam as a sample.

I had gone back to the dock to see if I could find another of those mystery critters, and get a better look at it, but didn't see any. But these little crabs were foraging at the water line on most of the pilings.

The one I caught rolled himself into this tight little ball. Every time I turned him over, he immediately flipped over and closed down again. In his environment; dirty barnacles on tarry wood, and all encrusted with styrofoam bits; he blends right in. I took several photos of clumps of styrofoam, thinking they were crabs. And I probably saw crabs that I thought were styrofoam, too.

It makes me wonder; what, in unpolluted waters, do these crabs imitate? Or is this a behaviour they have picked up in response to the stresses of life under the docks?

Piling critters

I noticed the smells first; salt, creosote, tar, old wood, engines, something mildly fishy. I was going down the ramp to the dock where the working boats, the fishing and tug boats, tie up, and the scents took me back to a time when I used to fish off a similar dock, catching supper. An old memory surfaced; old log pilings, tarred, at the end of a dock, and a big (well, maybe; I was little) octopus climbing up and peering out of the square opening.

I didn't expect octopuses here; starfish and anemones, probably. I walked down to the end of three long docks, squinting down every gap between dock and boat, every opening for pilings. There wasn't much to be seen; the boats are tied up, two deep, on each side of the dock. Very little light filters down underneath them. And many of the pilings are metal; fat, rusty pipes standing out of the water. Nothing seems to live on them.

But where I found tarred log pilings and a bit of reflected light, I found shrimp. And 'way down at the end of the last dock, where the sunlight penetrates to those log pilings, I found a starfish climbing out of the water. I got down on my knees, then lay flat, ending up lying for a long time with my head and camera down the hole between the pilings.

Because the pilings were alive with things crawling about.

The starfish, half out of water.

There were a fair number of purple starfish. Earlier, I had seen a few pale orange ones, deep down, one in not very good shape. But these were active, crawling about or hunched over something edible. They all looked healthy.

In the photo above, all that white stuff is styrofoam. Tiny, white balls of styrofoam. I found these all along the dock, along the water line of the boats, stuck to the tarry pilings. (Not the metal ones.) I had to keep brushing floating clumps aside to see the animals below.

There wasn't much in the way of seaweeds around the pilings or on the boats. I saw a few kelp streamers, loose in the current, and a few blades of red algae. There seems to be more underneath the dock, but I couldn't see more than bits of the edge.

Kelp crab, barnacle scars, and styrofoam.

The kelp crabs keep walking around and around the pilings; as one disappears on the far side, the first legs of the next show up. Round and round and round; I never saw any of them stop to eat anything, but they must be finding something worthwhile.

Older kelp crab, growing pale seaweeds on his back. He's deeper down; there's only a hint of styrofoam in the foreground. The little toe tips at the top belong to a pair of shrimp on the far side of the piling.

Much smaller crab, possibly the red rock crab, with barnacle scars and a few remnants of styrofoam.

Another coonstripe shrimp. With floating styrofoam. The yellow mound is some sort of sponge. And what's that down at the corner?

That mottled brown thing with the blue vanes showed up in quite a few photos; in each one, the vanes were in a different position. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed it while I was taking the photos, paying attention to the shrimp.

Mystery critter.

From the shape of this animal, and the waving vanes, I thought it might be a nudibranch, but I've looked at all those in my encyclopedia, and hundreds that Google found for me. Nothing looks right.

Comparing it with the shrimp, which was about 4 inches long, I would guess that it is probably about an inch long. There are brown, mottled nudibranchs the right size, the barnacle-eating nudibranch, Onchidoris bilamellata, for example, but the vanes would be gills, and they should be feathery, and maybe smaller. But they would explain the number of empty barnacle scars on these pilings.

Help!

Underwater flower garden

When I see the word, "worms", my stick-in-the-mud brain still jumps to the picture of a soft, pink, eyeless, squirmy tube; the earthworm of my gardens. I still have to remind it of worms with eyes and jaws, worms with legs; a multitude of legs, worms with long conveyor belt tentacles, worms with lids, worms that conduct imaginary orchestras. And worms that look like flowers.

Maroon, peach, green, pink. Feather duster worms, growing downward, under the dock.

Pale green and blueberry "flowers".

My Marine Life Encyclopedia has 49 pages of worms, almost 300 different species of marine worms in this area, including 8 species of feather duster worms, like these, from half an inch tall up to about 10 inches.

I'm not sure which species these are. The largest are about 6 to 8 inches tall, as far as I can tell without diving to measure them. The community may be a mixed grouping of the Split-branch feather duster (8 inches, solid colour plume), the Vancouver feather duster (10 inches, banded crown) or the polymorph feather duster (7 inches, variable crown); and the whole bunch of them have tiny eyes, looking back at me.

Lifer! Probably for both of us.

Under the logs and lumber of any floating construction, down where the sun rarely reaches, the water level is constant, the currents weakened, myriads of animals and plants live their sheltered lives, away from the prying eyes of the humans who clomp along overhead. Unless there is a gap between the floats, the surface is mometarily still, the light turns down at the perfect angle, and a human just chances to look down that gap at that moment. And then, if the human happens to be of a curious bent, she flops down on her knees or belly, and peers down that gap. And sees eyes, staring back at her.

Spiny pink scallop, Chlamys hastata. She has dozens of eyes, lined up along her lips. She can't see as well as I do; all she saw of me (I think) was my shadow.

Another angle, showing a bit of her shell, and two anemones sheltering underneath. The blue "pillar" is a mussel shell.

I'll back off a bit, to show the mini underwater garden along the base of the float I was lying on.

Tunicates, purple stuff, more tunicates, mystery critters, worms, and hydroids. Yesterday's anemones were just to the left of this patch.

Moving to the right; more tunicates, and the scallop.

I cropped these photos down, to show the individual critters a bit better:

Tunicates, unidentified. (With intake, outflow siphons circled.)

As far as I can tell, the pale cyan blobs have siphons, as well, and would be another species of tunicate (aka sea squirt). The red line in the centre points to another animal that is so transparent that its internal organs, and its food are visible through the wall. I think the other red line points to a half-way shut down anemone. On the far left, there is a hydroid stalk, and on the left of the base of the big tunicates, the flowery shape is the feeding tentacles of a worm.

Tunicates, tunicates, worms, etc. And what are those two potato-like blobs?

And there's still that pink thingie:

I think it may be a compound ascidian. like the red ascidian, or maybe the mushroom compound tunicate. Or something else? What do you think?

Worms tomorrow.