Lovey doveys

In my aquarium there are always a good number of snails, mostly the invasive Asian mud snail that now inhabits all our beaches, and whelks. In the last few weeks, a couple of tiny patterned snails has shown up. They wander about, on the glass, on the eelgrass, plowing along the surface of the sand, mostly together. Where one is, the other is usually nearby.

They are tiny! They may grow up to 1 cm. long. Here they rest between two whelks with an amphipod for company.

They probably arrived on a handful of eelgrass I brought home for the hermit crabs to climb on and clean up. They also hang out on kelp, but the kelp I brought home that week had been tossed well up on the beach and was dried out.

Alia carinata, the carinate dovesnail. The pattern of the shell is variable, the flesh and siphon mottled.

Zooming in.

The Asian mud snail, with amphipods. Compare the size; the amphipods are 1/3 to 1/2 the length of the dovesnails.

One of the whelks, with attendant amphipods and copepods.

Here he is again. The corner tape on the aquarium serves as a good ruler. It is 8 mm. wide. That makes this snail just under 5 cm. long, tip to tip.

I just passed the aquarium a minute ago. Both of the dovesnails were near the corner, a few millimetres apart.

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En mi acuario siempre hay un buen número de caracoles marinos, por la mayor parte el caracol invasor Batillaria attramentaria, que ahora se encuentra en toda la costa, los bucinos. En las últimas semanas, han aparecido unos caracoles muy pequeñitos, con conchas pintadas en café y crema. Andan de aquí para allá, en el vidrio, en la hierba Zostera, en la superficie de la arena, casi siempre juntos. Donde hay uno, el otro está cerca.

Fotos:

1. Aquí están entre dos bucinos y con un anfípodo. Son muy pequeños; los adultos pueden crecer hasta 1 cm. de largo. Probablemente llegaron entre un manojo de hierba marina que traje de la playa para mis ermitaños; les gusta treparse entre las hojas y comerse lo que crece allí. También estos caracoles se encuentran entre los quelpos, pero el quelpo que había traído a casa esa semana lo recogí en la parte superior de la playa y ya estaba seco.
2. Son el caracol paloma, Alia carinata. El diseño de la concha varía, y la carne y el sifón llevan manchas negras.
3. Haciendo zoom.
4. El caracol marino asiático de lodo, Batillaria attramentaria con anfípodos. Compara los tamaños; los caracolitos paloma miden de 2 a 3 veces el largo de un anfípodo
5. Uno de los bucinos, con sus anfípodos y copépodos.
6. Y otra foto del mismo bucino. La cinta que cierra la esquina del acuario sirve como regla. Mide 8 mm. de ancho. Eso marca este bucino a un poco menos de 5 cm. de largo.

Acabo de pasar por el acuario hace unos minutos. Los dos caracoles paloma estaban cerca de la esquina, separados apena por unos milímetros.

Thousands of eggs

 Sunny day. Low tide. Rocky shore, with tide pools.

I found whelk eggs!

Hundreds of egg cases. Thousands of eggs. And a few proud parents.

Down on my knees to get a better look.

Some are yellow, others are pink. I think these are frilled dogwinkles, Nucella lamellosa.

Work done, a whelk plows her way home.

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Un dia asoleado. Marea baja. Piedras expuestas a la luz del dia. Y pozas intramareales.

¡Y encontré huevos de bocinas (Nucella lamellosa)!

Fotos: 1 a 3: concentración de huevos en la zona baja. Cientos de sacos de huevos, miles de huevos.

Foto 4: una bocina, trabajo concluido, forma un surco en la arena.

#Invertefest

Empty shore?

It looks bare, but it's full of life.

Gulls, rocks, worms, rockweed. And mist.

But the sand is full of worms, and their hopeful feeding tubes.

Walking over this "bare" sand, every few steps, I get sprayed by an invisible resident just under the surface, reacting to the vibration of my steps and retreating quickly to a deeper level.

The stony end of the beach, colour-coded.

The bright green areas are sandstone with maybe half an inch of green algae on top. Brown areas have about an inch of another seaweed; brownish green is rockweed, maybe two inches deep. And the tan areas are sandstone, the only safe place to put down a foot.

The green algae are as slippery as wet ice; the brown algae is worse; it's like wet ice with a coating of slush on top. Rocks roll; they're just loosely scattered on the sandstone. Stepping a bit more confidently on a patch of rockweed - silly me! - I slipped and ended up sitting in a hollow in the rock, which luckily halted my fall before I twisted anything major.

It's not a human-friendly location. But there are tiny fish in every pool, crabs under the rocks, barnacles and limpets and tiny snails everywhere.

Limpet and barnacle community on the sheltered side of a rock.

The underside of the rocks are bursting with life. Here, a large striped whelk, with a little periwinkle on its tip, a dead clam wearing a pair of limpets, assorted seaweeds, barnacles, and everywhere you look closely, more periwinkles. If you look inside that empty clamshell, you may find a surprising assortment of critters; hermits, crabs, worms, amphipods, limpets, you name it. On the deep underside of the rocks, a few starfish cling, and plumose anemones dangle loosely, waiting for the water to return.

Around the drier rocks, a swarm of tiny flies flitted and danced, almost never stopping. (How do they eat, if they never stand still?) Whenever I stopped to look at anything, the flies moved over to circle my head, tickling a bit, but never landing.

I tried to find one stopped to get a better look, but finally gave up and shot several dozen photos of a spot where they were congregating. I caught two of them:

Long legs and it seems that the wings are striped, or spotted.

And maybe a striped abdomen as well.

I don't know what they are. Nor where they go when the tide comes in. Do they sleep on the bare rocks of the breakwater until the water leaves again?

Whelk

Live, on drenched sand.

What she finds to eat in this barren (at least visibly), mostly sandstone shore, I can't imagine.

My camera's empty, the weather is wet. I've taken photos of dripping deer through the car window. And deleted them; too dark, too blurred. But the deer are out trimming back the new spring greens. I'm going out to look for more.

Eggs in urns

The whelks are laying eggs.

A small collection of egg cases. Each one holds about 20 to 100 eggs. Of these, only a dozen or two will mature into baby snails.

These egg cases are new; as the eggs develop, they show up as slowly moving dots inside the translucent casings. One has already been broached by a predator, probably a crab looking for an omelet.

The same eggs, with their blurry mother, a whelk. (Species not identified.)

The clear dot at the top of each egg case is a "cork" of gelatinous material. Over the incubation period, this gelatin dissolves, finally leaving an open passage for the baby snails' escape to the big world out here. (See A Snail's Odyssey; Whelks and relatives, for more info.)

No two alike

Whelks.

Wrinkled dogwinkle, Nucella lamellosa. (Probably) Stories Beach.

These snails are extremely varied, both in colour and shape.

A most peculiar species because of its ability to vary so much in shape, color, and texture from one individuals to the next. ... It is one of the most common intertidal whelks in the Pacific Northwest. (From Wallawalla.edu)

A fan of this species, Dan Yoshimoto, has a page of shells found on both coasts of Vancouver Island, and on the mainland, from California to Oregon: over 200 shells, not counting the group photos at the bottom of the page, and so variable that it is difficult to believe they are all the same species. Go see.

Nose to the glass

A few random aquarium shots, taken while I waited for a hermit to try on a new shell.

"First dibs!"

Very small crab, just outside his present burrow underneath an oyster.

These crabs always amaze me. I knew he was digging under the oyster before he appeared at his front door, because the whole oyster was bouncing up and down. And the oyster is at least 10 times his length and width, thick and solid. And yet, the crab, standing on his tippy-toes, bounces the whole thing on his back.

I weighed a rock that a crab lifted a couple of years ago; the rock was at least 100 times the crab's weight!

Tiny hermit in an unusual shell. It looks like two broken shells cemented together.

In the second-hand shop, looking over used shells. Someone chose the polka-dot one, and is wearing it today.

Val, festooned as usual, with broken shells and a red algae scarf.

Barnacle eater, looking for the barnacle patch after I moved it. A channelled dogwinkle, probably. The shell is a deep, purplish blue.

Algae-eating snails, like the mud snails and the limpets, move along the glass, their jaws moving rhythmically, cleaning off microscopic algae as they go. Looking closely, I can even see the radula, the belt of tiny teeth inside the mouth.

These predatory snails just hurry about their business; their mouth is never seen on the glass. When they reach a barnacle, they extend a proboscis with the scraping radula* on its tip, bore through the barnacle's shell, inject digestive juices, and then suck out the semi-liquid mess. From an observer's point of view, all that can be seen is a snail stuck on a barnacle, and then later, an empty barnacle shell.

*Microscopic photos and diagrams of this can be found on A Snail's Odyssey.

Tiny home interior design

A whelk at home:

And his beautifully decorated foyer in pearly whites and plummy reds.

And a whelk home with a new tenant:

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus. Wonder if he likes the interior colour scheme?

That interior is probably silky smooth throughout. Very comfortable, if you're a soft-bellied hermit crab.

Peachy

Whelk and periwinkles.

In a shallow tidepool, upper intertidal zone.

A handful of hunters

Almost two years ago, on the last long weekend of the summer of 2010, we joined the crowds on and around Boundary Bay. Luckily, the tide was at its lowest; we walked out to the edge of the water, and waded in. I picked up an old clam shell loaded down with barnacles, found it full of life, and brought it home.

But it was a busy time for us; I was still catching up with photos from Campbell River, there was my trip to Bella Coola, and afterwards, parties to go to, more beaches to visit. Somehow, the clamshell and its passengers got set aside for "later".

Now it's later.

Messy, heavy, clam shell

It was welded half open by barnacles.

This is why it's heavy; it's swarming with critters inside. Visible at first glance; a whelk, snails, and hermit pincers.

The whelk. A hungry predator, busy decimating the population.

At home, I pried the shell open and washed out its residents. There were more than I'd bargained for: the whelk, a few mud snails, slipper snails, trophon snails, assorted worms, several grainy hand hermit crabs, and a colony of what I think are probably tunicates: all crowded in, crawling over and under each other, higgledy-piggledy.

This poor little hermit has chosen the wrong mud snail shell. It is so encrusted with barnacles that he can barely walk on a smooth surface. Here he is, suffering, in a bowl. Once I'd put him in the aquarium, he was fine.

Another grainy hand hermit. This one is carrying a large slipper snail, probably a female; the smaller one attached to her would be a male.

All hooked slipper snails begin life as males and later become females. Smaller males may stack themselves on top of females. (Beachwatchers, WSU)

A fifteen-scaled worm, Harmothoe. possibly imbricata. These are predatory; in the clamshell, they had a nice source of living meat.

With another species of polychaete, unidentified.

The green polychaete, cleaned up a bit to show the parapodia (feet or paddles) with their bristles. This was a small one, about an inch long.

One of many flatworms in and on the shell. They prey mainly on snails and barnacles; they're tougher than they look.

And one more worm; a green ribbon worm. This one eats barnacles.

The area where the clamshell lay was sandy, with a light layer of seaweeds and eelgrass, but not many small critters were apparent. The clamshell provided shelter for the hermits, snails and barnacles, and this had attracted quite the collection of predators; I was surprised at their number and variety.

Oh, but that's not all! I'm still working on identifying the mystery animals; I'll post them tomorrow, named or not.

And here are a few more of those baby shrimps, picked up the same day, but in a tidepool further up the beach.

Five or six shrimp and an amphipod, in a bowl of water. The floating debris serves as camouflage; the shrimp eyes mimic dots of rotting seaweed.

Orange eyes, a flying crab, and eggs on stalks.

Although the wind was strong, last Thursday, the sun was bright and the tide was low. Beach-combing time! And spring has finally worked its magic; every rock, every pool on the White Rock beach was bursting with life. The flatworms were out in force. So were hordes of hairy hermit crabs, and scrambling masses of shore crabs, red and green and white. There were gunnels and sculpins, whelks and periwinkles, assorted long worms, and the crows and gulls searching for them among the stones. Kelp flies buzzed, beach hoppers hopped, and eagles squealed somewhere in the treetops. And the red mussels sat glowing among the blues and blacks. We could have stayed for hours, but the tide doesn't take time off; it was racing up the beach before we got to Kwomais Point.

We took too many photos and I'll be sorting for quite a while, but here are a few of my favourites.

Alternating stripes of light and dark; looking into the sun, over wind-ruffled water.

A two-inch, brown starfish. We found two like this.

And the usual purple starfish. About 6 inches.

I like the way the water breaks up the light. Eelgrass in ankle-deep water.

I turned over a large slab of rock, and found an entire community underneath. This sculpin was not too pleased, so after we took his photo, I upended a large clamshell over him for a hiding place. That scared the crab off his head, too.

Same photo, cropped so you can see the colour of the eyes. I don't remember seeing an orange-brown sculpin before, nor eyes like this.

Fuzzy photo of a tiny, tiny, tiny red crab. I could barely see it; just a red speck running down the rock. I put a finger below him, and he ran onto the tip and stopped there. I was holding my hand up for Laurie to take a photo, and the wind caught him and blew him away. 

A group of whelks laying their eggs. The little black shell holds a hermit crab.

Side view of whelk eggs, showing the stalks.

Another ascidian colony. Interesting pattern.

And back at the shore, dandelions in the semi-shade of newly-budded blackberry canes.