New critter adventure…

I spent hours roaming the beach yesterday before a storm rolled in during the afternoon, and loved every minute of it. “But there is nothing unusual about that,”you say, “you always enjoy the beach.” What made yesterday extra special was that I met not one, but four different critters that I had not yet had the pleasure of making acquaintance. All of these will be added to the appropriate critter pages.

018Almost as soon as I started walking I ran into this fella, that looks to me like an exceptionally large Kirby cucumber. Yes, I’ve seen many boomerang shaped Lined (Green) Sea Cumbers, but this is a Hairy (Brown) Sea Cucumber, which can be elongated or almost spherical. I have never found an elongated one, and the round ones I have found have all been surf worn and smooth. This one still retains bumps from the tube feet that cover the entire body in life. Sea cucumbers live in shallow burrows an shallow water and are often washed up after rough weather, which makes sense with stormy weather we have had of late.

054This next critter (critters, actually) I found in a tidal pool, I suspected what they were, but when I picked them up and gave a squeeze, my suspicion was confirmed, I had a mass of Leathery Sea Squirts, and true to their name, they squirted. Sea squirts live in shallow waters attached to rocks, dock, shells, and debris by their basal end, opposite the siphons that are visible here. They will wash up on shore singly or in groups.

055The next critter was a completely unexpected find in a surf tangled mass of goodies that I untangled because I wanted the small whelk egg case. I got my egg case, but also found something new hidden within. In the first photo below you see on the left two whelk egg cases, and on the left you have a Sea Whip skeleton and the exterior tube for a Decorator Worm. But what is the thing in the middle that looks like a dirty potato?

That is a Sandy-Skinned Tunicate, and their thin test (the covering, kind of like a thin shell) is embedded with sand and mud, and often times small shells and rocks. The second photo is another that I found later on its own, and you can clearly see the adhered bits of shell here.

“Enough with the brown lumps,” you say. Well, the last critters I found were not brown, and they were not lumpy. In fact, they looked like pretty purple and cream striped Straw mushrooms. I found a half dozen of these in tidal pools and at first I was clueless. They were about the size of the first joint of my thumb, felt “meaty” when I handled them, and I could see fine tentacles coming from the bottom of the bell shape (see first photo). I knew it wasn’t a jellyfish. An itty bitty octopus of some kind? No, the tentacles weren’t right. And why was the one clinging so tightly to a deceased Spider Crab? Dinner?

By time I had found a few of them I had it figured out, I was just surprised at how large they were. These are Hermit Anemones, and believe it or not, they are related to corals. These anemones commonly live on sea debris and on the gastropod shells occupied by Hermit Crabs, hence the name. The anemones and the crabs share a cooperative relationship where the anemones get to travel fairly quickly, while offering protection to the crabs because a Hermit Crab carrying an anemone is less likely to be attacked by an octopus. And because the anemones will eat anything that fits into its mouth, it gets any leftovers from the crab. Win win! I’ll take a guess that the Hermit Anemone was indeed having dinner of the decaying flesh of the Spider Crab.

I can’t wait to get to the beach again and see what I can fins!!

 

Leave a Reply