Category: crustaceans

Readers’ wildlife photos

May 19, 2019 • 7:30 am

Today we have several photos of a rodential nature, and from two readers, whose comments are indented. As lagniappe, there’s a crustacean and a bird.

The first batch comes from Gary Womble:

Only whole grains for this little guy:

I would not want to get between him/her and those nuggets:

And finally, the kill!

A crustacean from Gary:

This little guy at Curry Hammock State Park in the Florida Keys takes its home everywhere it goes.

Another squirrel from Joe Dickinson (photo sent May 8):

Here is a squirrel photo with a moral:  don’t leave food unattended in your campsite.  It was taken this morning at New Brighton State Beach near Santa Cruz, CA .    It is a neighboring campsite, not ours.  The subject is on top of a cabinet inside of which is meant to be secure food storage.  Clearly, the top doesn’t work so well.

From reader Tom Carrolan, sent March 21, who saw an American woodcock (Scolopax minor):

This morning, Blue Tusk owner Tim Yorton flagged me down coming out of Starbucks to show me a bird that had his staff in a tizzy… naturally.

I then did my “Woodcock Walk” for Tim, his bartender and bar-backs, cleaning crew, and kitchen staff. . . I’ve done dozens such programs on this subject over the years, but this was the first where glassware, brooms, and white chef’s coats were involved. I peented, described the bird’s display flight as a large falling maple seed, tossed in some nocturnal migration… well ya had to be there.
You can hear a “peent” here.

Giant isopods on the sea floor rip apart an alligator carcass!

April 13, 2019 • 12:30 pm

Reader J. J. sent me a link to the fascinating video below along with the commentary below, which, along with the video, tells you all you need to know. I’ll add, though, that this euthanized gator was placed ten miles off the coast of Louisiana and 1.25 miles down on the sea bed. And I have the feeling that this study was motivated as much by simple curiosity than by the more arcane questions the scientists raise in their narration. You can almost imagine a Gary Larson cartoon with a couple of lab-coated nerds saying, “Hey, I wonder what would happen if we dumped this big alligator carcass on the bottom of the sea and watched it?”

Giant isopods are crustaceans that live in the deep sea and scavenge for food. And they are giant. As Wikipedia notes, “the adults generally are between 17 and 50 cm (6.7 and 19.7 in). One of the “supergiants”, B. giganteus, reaches a typical length between 19 and 36 cm (7.5 and 14.2 in), with a maximum weight and length around 1.7 kg (3.7 lb) and 76 cm (30 in), respectively.”  A 2.5-foot, four-pound isopod! I wonder if they would make good eating? They are, after all, crustaceans.

From J. J.:

I just came across this culinary video of giant isopods dining on a dead alligator. I don’t know if you’ve seen it: it’s dated April 5, 2019 on Youtube.  There’s informative narration from two of the scientists involved in the dropping-dead-alligators-into-the-sea-to-see-what-happens project. (The gators were donated from a project to save American alligators, and were humanely killed.)

The meal itself starts about 2 min. in. Grisly but fascinating. However, the video preface is interesting because it shows some crazy denizens of the sea floor that I’ve never seen before, even on WEIT (or missed them), which frequently posts about weird sea creatures — a red fish looks as if it has a propellor on one side, another fish that looks like it’s on stilts,

I’m glad that you had a good trip and showed us photos of your culinary adventures — much more civilized than the isopods eating the gator, but I’m sure their special dinner was just as delectable to them as your Dutch dinners were to you, …especially since they might not eat again for years​. I’d bet it was a 5-star meal to them — some gorged themselves so much that they dropped to the sea floor in surfeit.​

 

Readers’ wildlife photos

December 21, 2018 • 7:45 am

I’m scheduled to go to Antarctica in the fall of next year, lecturing on evolution on two separate cruises to Patagonia, Antarctica, and the Falklands, so I was excited when reader Daniel Shoskes sent me some photos of a trip he took recently to Antarctica and Chile. I present his photos (bonus Darwiniana!), with Daniel’s words indented.

Darwin visited Santiago Chile as documented in Voyage of the Beagle. Here is a plaque dedicated to his visit on St. Lucia hill that he wrote about (page 279)
Punta Arenas Chile at the “end of the road”, just beyond where the Transamerica Highway ends. I found this local owl having a rest. HMS Beagle sailed through this strait and Darwin may have seen some of the trees here as they are hundreds of years old. Perhaps the owl is a descendant of those Darwin saw (page 252):
Model of the Beagle at Straits of Magellan museum:
Local alpacas [Vicugna pacos]:
Alpaca born a few hours ago:
Hill north of Santiago that Darwin climbed and took survey measurements from:
Gentoo penguin [Pygoscelis papua] carrying rock back to help build its nest:
Humpback whale [Megaptera novaeangliae] fluke:
Landing on an active volcano. The sand was so hot that krill [order Euphausiacea] were cooked on the beach. You can see the stomach filled with green phytoplankton, organisms responsible for 20% of all oxygen on the planet:
Chinstrap penguin (Pygoscelis antarcticus):
I’m going to add here that another reader, Peter Nothnagle, wrote me telling me this about Daniel:

Danny is an accomplished performer on renaissance and baroque lute, and I have engineered three CDs for him. But that’s only his avocation – in his day job he is a highly respected kidney transplant surgeon in Cleveland.

And he sent a link to Daniel playing the lute, which is here:

The remarkable sand bubbler crab

October 5, 2017 • 2:30 pm

Should I have called this “You won’t believe this amazing crab?”. Or maybe “Samantha Bee throws shade on haters of bubbler crabs”? Regardless, you need to know about—and see—this remarkable animal. I knew nothing about it before I came upon this video, taken from BBC’s “Blue Planet” series.

Sand bubbler crabs comprise a variety of species in two genera, and live on Indo-Pacific beaches. As you see from the video below, they form sand into lovely spherical pellets after extracting the organic matter—the “meiofauna”. Sand bubblers forage only at low tide, and then retreat to their burrows.

Now what is “meiofauna”? The answer from marbef.org:

The term “Meiofauna“ is related to microscopically small benthic invertebrates that live in both marine and fresh water environments. Meiofauna is formally defined as a group of organisms by their size, larger than microfauna but smaller than macrofauna. In practice these are metazoan (some researchers include protozoan as well) animals that can pass unharmed through a 0.5 – 1 mm mesh but will be retained by a 30 μm mesh but the exact dimensions will vary from researcher to researcher. Nowadays the term meiofauna is used interchangeably with meiobenthos. Meiofauna is mainly found in and on soft sediments, but also on underwater algae and higher plants as well as on other hard substrates. The heterogeneity of meiofaunal habitats is so large and meiobenthic taxa so diverse.

Now watch and be impressed:

Readers’ wildlife photos

July 9, 2017 • 7:45 am

Reader Kurt Helf sent some photos and captions (the latter indented):

This past spring the family and I went to Destin, FL for my daughter’s last cheerleading competition.  I visited Gulf Islands National Seashore and took the first two snaps. These smooth goose barnacles (Lepas anatifera) had colonized a long piece of wood drifting in the Gulf of Mexico and met their doom when they washed up on shore and dried out.

The weather was mostly stormy with high surf and so the beach had the usual crop of hydrozoans washing up on shore: Portuguese Man O’ War (Physalia physalis) and By-the-Wind Sailors (Vellela vellela). The former can be quite beautiful but I wouldn’t want to encounter one in the water!

I found Mr Eastern Box Turtle (I assume Terrapene carolina carolina) just around the corner from where the cheer competition was taking place.

Spider on Web: I was having my morning cuppa on the patio yesterday and I noticed this web reflecting the early morning light.  I have no idea what species this is.

The hermit crabs were numerous and all seemed to favor using the shells of this unknown (to me) marine snail.  This is the thinstripe hermit crab (Clibanarius vittatus). Note the barnacles on the shell.

Reader Peter in Iowa found a weird squirrel, which he calls “a squirrel with lemur leanings”. His notes:

I distribute sunflower seed every morning for any passing rodent or bird , and consequently we have quite a lot of gray squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in our yard (in east-central Iowa). Most of them are indistinguishable gray ones, but we’ve had a number of melanistic individuals, ranging from charcoal-gray to black. We even had a couple of black ones with vivid orange tails. However, this week we have a new visitor, with markings I had not seen before – rings on its tail! Photos attached.

Jerry: Is this striping or some kind of fur loss?


And from Stephen Barnard, sunset from his property in Idaho, taken last night:

Poor Nemo!

February 15, 2017 • 10:00 am

by Matthew Cobb

Here’s a gorgeous photo of clownfish, which just won the photographer, Qin Ling of Canada, an award in the Behaviour category at the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition (click to enlarge) – you can see all the winners here.

5760

Ling’s photo is entitled ‘Your home and my home’. Look closely at these Nemos. Look at their mouths. Those little eyes peeking out. They are not drawn on, as PCC(E) first suggested, nor are they Photoshopped. And they are not babies. They are isopods (like pillbugs or woodlice), which are parasitic. They eat the fish’s tongue, and then replace it, sitting in there, presumably getting first dibs on the food as it comes in. They occasionally turn up on people’s dinner plates when folk order fish and get a crustacean chaser.

The photography judge said:  “Six eyes all in pin-sharp focus, looking into the lens of the author … this was one of my favourite shots of the entire competition.”

Isn’t nature wonderful?

*********

JAC: Let me add two references and two videos.  You can read Carl Zimmer’s take on these parasites at National Geographic, or Wikipedia’s entry on Cymothoa exigua, the “tongue-eating louse,” which appears to be the only species that does this.

Here’s a video, which has only one photograph:

Here’s another video with photos; it claims that this is the only case in which one organism replaces another organism’s body part:

Readers’ wildlife photographs

December 27, 2016 • 7:45 am

This is the second installment (first here) of photos taken by Jeffrey Lewis on Bonaire. His notes are indented, and I repeat part of the introduction to the last batch. There will be one more installment:

These were all taken on a family vacation to Bonaire, an island in the Caribbean just off the coast of Venezuela.  It’s a special municipality of the Netherlands – almost but not quite a normal municipality.  It’s a rather small island, only 114 square miles, with a population of around 17,500.  Its main claim to fame is in being one of the premier locations for shore diving, with many reefs close enough to shore that they’re easy enough to swim to without having to use a boat.  In addition to all the open water scuba diving & snorkeling that we did, we also explored the island itself, including a tour in some of the island’s caves, and a kayaking trip through mangroves.

Land Crab (possibly Gecarcinus ruricola):

311-img_4166-land-crab-near-cave-entrance

Unidentified fish in a mangrove pool.  Our guide said they were juvenile parrotfish, but this particular guide made a few questionable statements, so I’m not sure if he was correct on the fish id.

407-img_8380-school-of-fish-in-mangroves
Unidentified fish. I just really liked the way this guy looked peeking out behind the mangrove roots:

408-img_8385-fish-hiding-in-mangrove-roots

Unidentified fish species in the sea grass near the mangroves:

415-img_8425-fish-in-seagrass

 

Coral head: Possibly Boulder Star Coral (Orbicella annularis) with a couple Foureye Butterflyfish (Chaetodon capistratus):

509-gopr0075-coral-head

Yellowtail Snapper (Ocyurus chrysurus):

511-gopr0105-yellowtail-snapper

Spotted Moray Eel (Gymnothorax moringa):

516-gopr0141-spotted-moray-eel

Probably a Blue Angelfish (Holacanthus bermudensis), although the Queen Angelfish (Holacanthus ciliaris) is very similar, and Wikipedia says that they can sometimes breed to produce hybrids:

517-gopr0143-fish