A gift for Little Momma

Sorting old photos, I came across a file of spider shots that I'd put aside "to deal with later", and then forgot about. They showed a pair of American house spiders, Parasteatoda tepidariorum, grandkids of the one I'd been tracking since 2007, still living in the same corner.

I obviously hadn't looked closely at them, back in 2009. I did today. Look what I'd missed!

Day 1, afternoon. Female in her skimpy web at the bottom, male visitor (suitor) at the top left. The fat, "boxing glove" pedipalps identify him as a mature male.

Day 2, 5:48 PM. He approaches with a gift, a silk-wrapped weevil.

Will she accept the gift? If not, she may eat him instead.

Yes! "Thank you very much; this is delicious!"

5:49 P.M. 16 legs. They're mating. He's on the far side; you can still see his pedipalps. She's not letting go of the weevil, though.

5:50 Success! He's impregnated her, and escaped uneaten. She's busy.

5:55 He rests, she eats.

And the next day:

Day 3, 5:07 P.M. She's finished with the weevil, but he's brought her a gift-wrapped bug.

And from what I remember, they raised a healthy brood of spiderlings, several egg sacs worth.

Hungry!

I am constantly amazed at my sturdy anemone, "Val"; in little over a year, she has gone from a blob of torn tissue to this:

At rest. Occasionally, she inflates that column by another third, and stretches upward about 4 cm. The tentacles now measure over 4.5 cm.

The disc, with its big mouth, flanked by crumbs from her last meal.  Open like this, she dominates the whole aquarium.

And she probably has more growing to do. She now eats a snail or two every day, plus two big pellets of shrimp meal. And any amphipod that loses its way. She would eat my fingers, if I let her; she grabs them if I happen to get too close.

Blue and white

November and December are slow months on our beaches. The only low tide of the day is scheduled around 3:00 A.M. Walking the shore in the afternoons, only sometimes are we lucky enough to get a couple of feet of intertidal zone. But the clouds make up for it.

Boundary Bay, looking south

I'm having computer problems; spent most of the day today reading the machine the riot act, and it's still misbehaving. Two year old computers are more stubborn than two year old kids.

A Skywatch post

Well-lighted passage

The water in Georgia Strait this weekend was flat, even glassy in spots. The ferry skimmed along smoothly, almost imperceptibly, except for the wash streaming straight out behind us. And wonder of wonders, someone had recently washed the windows on the first ferry! I was able to stay inside, in the warmth, and still see the coasts of the islands our route passed.

First half of the trip across the Strait. Our route marked in red. Google maps.

Saltspring Island

Light beacon on point. I notice that a lot of them now are solar powered.

Just a gull playing in the ship's air stream.

Hole in the wall. These little, usually unvisited, creek openings have always intrigued me. I want to row over, go and clamber over the rocks, see what's living in there.

Another inviting spot. A sun-warmed mossy rock, with light beacon.

Huge winch and chain.

Ferry and two beacon lights, one on the point, and one out in the channel. Plus a little marker buoy (with a light) beside the ferry. The end of a dock on the far right holds a row of cormorants.

Lighthouse on the shady side. Georgina Point, Mayne Island, at the eastern end of Active Pass.

It's a tricky route. The ferry track passes barely a stone's throw from several rocky reefs. The gap between Clive and Knapp Islands, just out of Schwartz Bay is just over 300 yards wide; Active Pass is double that, but ferries pass each other along here. I'm glad there are so many markers.

Wordless: sparkly

Well, almost wordless. Processing party photos tonight. Beach tomorrow, weather permitting.

An opportunity lost.

I made a quick trip to Victoria, for a birthday party. We were early, so we stopped for supper beside the Inner Harbour, and afterwards walked to the Parliament Buildings and back. It was chilly, but that just makes the lights shine brighter.

Parliament Buildings, Victoria

The blue lighting on the water behind the boats is the old Undersea Gardens, an underwater aquarium that allowed visitors to view marine life in situ. I was disappointed to read later, that it is now closed, after almost 50 years of operation. I always meant to visit, and never got around to it. My mistake.

Red-eye special

My aquarium setup now includes two tanks. In one, the hermits and crabs, a big polychaete worm, four or five kinds of snails, the big (and still growing) anemone from Campbell River, and a varying assortment of temporary visitors all go about their business; eating, mating, climbing, watching me. There's a strong pump with a filter, and a bubbler; everything is constantly in motion.

The other tank is quieter. I don't stir it up; there's no filter, just a smaller bubbler. Here amphipods and copepods breed happily, without being swallowed by the filter. Here, too, the occasional miniature snail or hydroid appears, seemingly out of nothing. It's a good place for babies.

A couple of times, I've seen a transparent bubble with tentacles resting on the glass. Tiny things; I had to bring out the microscope to see the bubble part. A few days ago, I saw a larger one, and thought it might be big enough now to handle the active tank.

One of the first photos.

Here it is, from the bottom, parked on the glass, tentacles streaming in the current. The circle is about 3 mm. across. In the center (the "yolk" of the "egg") is the column, seen from the bottom. The tentacles sprout from nine radiating arms; they're beaded all along their length.

To the naked eye, the whole thing is transparent jelly; the colour comes from the lighting and the background.

Disturbed, the critter bounces away, and swims, bubble first, tentacles following behind. It's really cute to watch, almost impossible with my equipment to photograph. Imagine one of those deep, transparent umbrellas with streamers hanging from all the tips. Now, watch it swim by opening and shutting itself. With each quick closing, it zooms off in a different direction, completely unpredictable. It coasts for half a second, then opens-shuts, and it's gone.

Resting on sea lettuce. Side view, showing the bell and the central workings.

I think this is a baby Red-eye jellyfish, Polyorchis pencillatus. ( I could easily, easily, be wrong.) These are common on our coast, growing to about 3-4 inches high. They are mentioned on several sites in eelgrass beds; that's probably how they have come to my tanks, riding the eelgrass that I collect for the hermits' jungle gym.

The tentacles can shrink or stretch to much longer than the bell. I saw this happen a couple of times, when the swimming jelly miscalculated and swam into the tentacles of a small anemone on the wall. The anemone didn't try to reel it in, and after a few minutes, the jelly extricated itself, and dropped to the bottom of the tank. I thought it was dying, but it recovered right away and swam off. But for several minutes, the tentacles were shrivelled and twisted.

Look at the base of the arms; see those dark dots? They are eyespots, red when the light is right, which gives the species its English name. They don't see much, but they are light sensitive, helping the jelly to orient itself. Two similar local species do not have these spots.

Side view, showing central column.

Usually, at least when I've been looking, the central section is a column the entire height of the bell. In most photos of mature specimens, it's a tangle of organs dangling from the central top.

It's been in the big tank for 3 days now, and seems content. Right now, it's riding the eelgrass.

Look what I found!

This showed up on the wall of the aquarium a couple of days ago.

Unidentified medusa, about 3 mm. across bell.

More photos and the complete story, tomorrow.

Wordless - Tree skeleton

Rove beetle

I found this beetle on a wet leaf, and put him in a plastic container to have his photo taken. He spent the whole time scrabbling at the walls, trying to escape, or maybe trying to attack his reflection.

"Who's that, out there?"

The Beaver Wars: round ten to the beavers

It's a long story, going back to 2008. (Previous posts: May, 2009; November, 2011; January, 2012; March, 2012; November, 2012.)

History to date:

We first saw signs of the Cougar Creek Park beavers in 2008. They were colonizing the newly-landscaped lagoons, and had dammed the lower creek outlet. The next year, they had dammed the inlet as well, creating a small pool on the upper level.

The city (Surrey) has objected; this was not in the official plans. So they've fenced and wired the trees, sometimes reinforcing them with wired-on chunks of wood. They've removed the dams, they've caught and killed a male, they've cleared trees off the banks, completely removing a shady stand of evergreens; the resulting erosion has turned the upper end of the original pond into a muddy slough.

The beavers shrugged off their losses and went back to work.

By November of 2012, the family had succeeded in damming the upper creek, filling in what had been a wasteland with a slow, muddy trickle down the centre. It made a pretty duck pond, striped with reflections from the alders around it, over patterns of green and gold animated by swimming, dabbling ducks.

Map of ponds, November 2011, with the dammed upper creek marked in blue. The pond now extends to the bridge at the far right.

In January, 2012, the dams and the new pond were gone. By that March, the three dams were back; the upper pond was filling again. Mallards, wigeons and mergansers were busy in the new feeding ground; as usual, a heron was hunting along the edges.

I took my grandson down to the park to show him the beaver dams in September of that year. We were disappointed; not only had the city removed all the dams, but they had gone into the wasteland with machinery and scraped off much of the vegetation, leaving an oozing, muddy mess, scattered with garbage. (So much for the much-advertised "Releafing Project".) A lonely pair of ducks patrolled the lower lagoon; nothing else, not even the heron.

We went back last November. (I calculated this as Round 8.) Now there were three good dams, and a lodge. The upper pond covered the machine scar nicely, and they'd built another dam at the top, making a new, third pond. The ducks were back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

2013:

This spring, we found the upper pond area scoured clear again. By summer, there was a start on a new dam, near the bridge. It didn't last; the next time we visited, the creek was trickling over bare mud again. There was no sign of beaver activity anywhere. I wondered if they had finally given up.

The beaver is a stubborn animal.

I took a friend to the park last week to look at ducks. And found the beaver ponds expanded once more, swallowing up most of the space between the schoolyard and the fenced houses on the map above.

The ducks are happy with twice the water to dabble in.

The newest dam, raising the water level a couple of feet. Lots of good-sized lumber in there, probably incorporating trees the city had felled.

This latest project is quite ambitious; the beavers have cut down some large trees, red alder wood for construction, the juicy bark and cambium for food.

Two trees, the smaller one gone to the dam. The other will have to be cut in small chunks if they plan to use it for building.  If not, it has a whole season's worth of groceries under the bark.

Toothmarks in wood, cambium, and grey-green bark.

Part of the new pond.

In earlier episodes, the lodge was usually built in the lower lagoon. (The small, squarish one in the map above.) Here, it was highly visible to anyone walking on the paths, crossing the bridge, or in the back yards of the houses to the south. It never lasted long.

Someone, some beaver, has been thinking. The latest lodge is well hidden.

In the new pond, water has overflowed the previously established banks; much of the "bush" - salmonberry, elder, Indian plum, ferns and the inevitable blackberry canes - has its feet underwater. We walked around from the upper end, as far as we could go without wading. And hidden between trees and bush, we found the lodge.

It's a big lodge, high and long. This was as close as we could get. I think that's cattail growing on the far side; a new addition to the vegetation here.

And I still haven't seen the beavers themselves.

Hangin' in there

I'm back; bruised and sore, missing a small chunk of jawbone, but I'm beginning to think I'll recover. Thanks for your good thoughts!

I found this spider last week, smack dab in the middle of the trail through the bush behind Cougar Creek. Luckily, the sun caught the web just right; I saw her first, and she didn't catch me.

Waiting, just at face height.

Zooming in, nose to nosefangs

I find it amazing that she can make sense of that tangle of lines, some dotted with glue, some stretching out to the salmonberry bushes on either side to support the web, some to stand on, at least one always held in a back foot to alert her to a catch, and a bunch of loose threads and knots. (I wonder what's the purpose for these.)

Distant peeps

At Mud Bay . . .

Coming in for a landing by a mud bank

And a moment later, they were just specks in the shadow.

(Dental surgery in the morning; taking a day off from the blog, I think.)

Indefatigable weeds

It's November; even the evergreen blackberries have stopped work for the year, but a few plants never give up. Around Mud Bay, the tansy, the hawkweed, and the sea rocket are in full flower. After all, there are still a few flies and beetles around to pollinate them. Can't waste an opportunity!

These plantains, growing in the shelter of the railway approach to the bridge over the Serpentine River, seem to think it's still mid-summer.

Plantago lanceolata, at Mud Bay Station

Stretching two feet tall

Mushroom in the grass

Mud Bay Station

A spot of warm colour on a grey day

The 'fly who came in from the cold

Such fun I've been having with one little critter!

It started 6 weeks ago, with a yodelling caterpillar. At the end of September, he lived, eating nasturtiums, on my desk for a few days, then he built himself a hammock and turned into a chrysalis. I set him outside in a glass case by the door, and kept an eye on him. The chrysalis gradually lost its bright green colour, fading to a yellowy white. Nothing else seemed to be happening, but of course it was, invisibly; all that rebuilding from the inside out.

I almost missed the next act; I was too late for the first scene. I checked his cage just after breakfast last Thursday, and there he was, out of the chrysalis. Barely out. His wings were still wrinkled, and he was slowly unfolding his legs.

I posted a photo of those legs, the only ones stretched out at the moment. (You commenters are pretty good; you knew it was a butterfly, just not what species.)

9:33 AM, on the inside of the glass case. Three legs

He seemed to discover more legs, as he untangled himself.

9:34 AM Six legs. Cabbage white butterfly, mostly yellow.

9:36 AM

While he stretched, I looked at the empty chrysalis:

The head end is down; the chrysalis is split from the "beak" to the "waist".

It was too cold outside, just above freezing. I left him there for a few hours, but he didn't want to move, so I brought him in and he perked up right away.

A warm corner on a vase by a light.

On a glass bottle.

On the back door. No, he didn't want to go out. I asked.

Next day, on the kitchen floor.

He was a male, as shown by the one black spot on his forewing, and should have been looking for a mate. But it was miserably cold out there, and his friends weren't flying, so I let him stay at home in the warmth. Unfortunately, a spider finally got him. Sometimes I could wish that spiders were vegetarian.