Low Tide Part 2

Another fun example of the low tide. This trawler was moored at the hake plant. Usually the hull or at least the deck can be seen, but in this pic all you can see is the flybridge.

By the time I got downtown (a whole two blocks from where this started!) my flip flops had dried out enough for my feet to stay on them. Onward to Big Beach! It was only just past seven in the morning, and although the sun was shining hot and bright, no-one was around but me. By the time I'd walked to Cynamocka I was stripped down to just tshirt and shorts. 

This is my first summer living in Ucluelet, but the salmon berries seem late. These were the first ones I'd noticed. Maybe the birds are getting to them before me. 

The pic below is how it looked at Big Beach upon arrival. It's hard to see, but quite a bit more shore was exposed...those two rocks in the center of the picture have been pretty much obscured by waves on other visits.

Correction; other visit. This is actually only the second time at Big Beach. For me. The last time I was here with Stacey after the opening of Ucluelet's new community hall. This was the first real visit where I could explore to my brain's content. I started scanning the beach as soon as I got there...the tide was starting to come in...o no.

First I found this:

Actually, I am ashamed to say I have no idea what it is. I believe it to be animal, not vegetable. But it could be a coralline algae for all my knowledge. Hopefully someone will pipe up in the comments and direct me to the appropriate web article.  And there was a LOT of seaweeds to look at. Phycology is not my strong point, but   I know the common names for some of them. The funky nubbly bit of red and white is Turkish towel seaweed. This piece is a bit...dead. The red stuff (rotophyll?) is being bleached out. My mother always got excited when we found this stuff on Pender, and that excitement lingers even though it's as common as nails around here.

The one on the right is hard to identify as well. It doesn't look like any of the Laminaria species I know. My guess is some type of Alaria  but those usually have a prominent centre stalk. I'm sure it's pretty common around this area...it gets wrapped around salmon and stuffed with lemons. Then the whole package is wrapped in foil and steamed. Yummm! This specimen looks a little discoloured for that kind of treatment. Most of the seaweeds or algaes around here are edible. It is surprising that nobody is collecting and promoting this abundant and free source of food. Maybe it will have to be me......?



Believe it or not, the wacky patterns on the rock are seaweed as well. Apparently these growths (as well as the tar spot looking things on the rocks) are part of the life cycle of the leafy seaweeds. It wasn't until DNA analysis was done on seaweed that anyone discovered this. Evidently the life cycle of these plants is crazy complex. The company that Stacey works for retains an army of people that know about this stuff, and they use surveys of marine algae to determine the relative environmental health of habitats. I tend to associate biodiversity with biohealth...which makes this area very healthy!


On Hornby Island much of the rock is sandstone, and the wind and waves have hollowed out little holes and pockmarks. The rock around here seems to be largely volcanic (igneous, is that right?) but also has lots of little holes and pocks. Some of the holes are really deep (longer than my fingers) and spaced pretty far apart. I wonder if these have been worn in the rock as well, or are they part and parcel of how the rock was formed? Escaping gas bubbles? A combination of the two?
The cool thing is that the rocks themselves are almost like colony animals...

These pockmarks are almost too perfect. I have no idea how they were formed. I'm sticking to my bubble/foamy rock theory...

The limpets and barnacles sure love these rocks. I assume there must be microscopic algae all over the rock for them to eat...the limpets, anyway. Barnacles are filter-feeders....they wave their back legs in the water to gather floating bits of detritus. Which is a fancy way of saying they eat floating garbage. Mmmm. I've no idea what the feathery algae on the top of the rock is, but there is some Ulva  near the bottom. I even see a little red shore crab peeking out from the bottom. It seems to me one could spend a lifetime studying just one rock like this!










The seaweed on the left is common around here. It's called Dead Man's Finger (Halosaccion).  Limpets and snails eat the stuff, and kids love to squeeze it to make it squirt. After all that talk about salmon and seaweed, one has to wonder if stuffing these babies with crab meat or halibut might be nice....? I shouldn't blog on an empty stomach. Everything looks like food.

The stuff on the right that looks like deformed dead man's finger is actually called Sea Cauliflower. There are two seaweeds that are very similar both known as Sea Cauliflower. I think this one is Colpomenia peregrina. The other one (Leathisia sp. ) is slimier and softer.


This stuff on the left is some kind of Sargassum, which I think is a recent arrival to our shores. A lecture in 1996 pointed this out as an invasive species, but it's pretty ubiquitous now. It grows into massive clumps which break loose in storms. When cut loose it grows pretty fast and those clumps can become sargassum islands! Almost.

There was tons of eelgrass like green spaghetti. There are no eels in eelgrass, it just looks long. Maybe they call it surfgrass here, even though there are no surfers in it. It sure looked pretty, though.

The pink glop in the next pic was in a narrow crack in the rock. I think the camera flash did a good job here. I'm pretty sure this is some kind of tunicate colony. The other encrusting animal around here is Bryozoans, and they don't have siphons (the part that looks like little volcanos). Tunicates are sort of cool because they are a link between animals without backbones (invertebrates) and brave animals with backbones (us.) Tunicates have a notochord (pre-backbone) when they are developing, but they absorb it as they mature. I have noticed this same trait in aging men :-)

Below is a tiny teeny leather star (Dermisterias imbricata). It looks like a magic wand above my finger. They eat sea anemones and sea cucumbers.

This green shore crab made a nice shot with the reflecting water. He could see me taking the picture even 6 feet away.

As I got closer to the water, there was less to see. From diving in similar areas I knew that there would be tons of cool little animals living underneath the masses of seaweed. But the sun was hot, and digging in the seaweed to expose them didn't seem like a great idea. Besides which, balancing on the EXTREMELY slippery rocks in my flip flops was starting to make my feet hurt. And while I was lucky to get a day with almost no surf to speak of....the tide was beginning to come in rather quickly.

The whole place looked like a clear-cut forest. Only instead of being hauled away to become toilet paper and sundecks, it was just lying down for a rest. Until the surf came back to animate everything. I guess this would qualify as an eclipse for all the little sculpins, crabs, lumpsuckers, and anemones. I hope it also protected them from my weighty steps.

The wide shots are from my iPhone and stitched together with a great little app called Autostitch. In default mode it can get a little blurred, but panoramas in the future should look better.

I had so much fun poking about in the shallows. And best of all, this was just the first of three days of low tides.

I really wanted to show the fallen forest to Stacey (asleep in bed) the next day.

The panorama below shows 180* with the Black Rock Resort in the right hand third. I will go back and take a panorama at high tide so that you can see what a difference 10 or 12 feet can make.