A brutal end to innocence

I came home from DC to find the Aquarium breathing heavily with dying, decomposing seaweed. The local seaweed just does not seem to do well in the 72-degree waters, and no matter how much I try to cool the Aquarium, the ambient temperature always creeps back up to 72ºF. All the animals love it, but the plants suffocate. I really need to go get some warm-water plants. Either that, or a cooling system.

And in my absence, despite Andres' tender loving care, they had made a royal mess. Detritus scattered everywhere, the Mexican Sponge keeled over on its side, the White Coral fallen and half-buried in the sand... no, just a mess!

What are you going to do. The entire universe tends toward chaos.

But I was delighted to see that the smaller hermit crab had taken up residence in the bright orange shell I had placed in the Aquarium some weeks back, in the hopes that one day he would find it. And today he did! Perched demurely atop the edge of the Mexican Sponge, he looked all of a million dollars in his new outfit. I wanted to take a picture of him, but I was busy with client work and the afternoon ran away with me.

That decision I would soon live to regret.

* * *

Later tonight, Andres and I went out for dinner at Bistro Basque, our favorite watering hole. It's a French-Basque tapas and restaurant, great atmosphere, gorgeous décor, and the food easily the best in town. We had a lovely evening. It was the end of a long week, spring had finally arrived, and downtown was buzzing with people thrilled to pieces they can finally wear shorts.

We had little idea of the horrific sight that awaited us at home.

I had turned the Aquarium's light off before we left, as it was nighttime. When we returned, all I wanted to do is snuggle up with a book and relax. Just a last little peek, I thought. Just to say good-night to my babies since I'd been away for a few days. So I peered in, and there in the darkness I saw a shrimp with something very strange in its front claws. I couldn't make it out. I wasn't sure if it was entering or exiting, if you catch my drift.

"Andres, there's something really weird. Something's going on with one of the shrimp."

Andres had already settled into his fly-tying mode; tomorrow before dawn he was going out to flyfish for striped bass.

"Hmm-mm."

"No, really. There's som–"

I had turned on the light. The shrimp was devouring something, that was clear, but what in heaven's name? Then my blood froze. It was one of the hermit crabs. I scanned the Aquarium floor... and there it was, the bright orange shell the hermit had worn just a few hours prior, lying empty on the sand.

"He's eating the hermit crab! He's killed him!"

"Something else did," said Andres, absorbed with his flies. "Something had to pull him out his shell."

"But what?"

"That's a good question. Maybe one of the worms? Shrimp aren't hunters, they're scavengers."

Hunters, scavengers, whatever. The bloody shrimp was eating the hermit crab, and the crab was still alive. Immediately I plunged in a long, thick wire that I shaped specially to clean the Aquarium, and tried to pry the hermit crab out of the shrimp's grasp. The shrimp freaked, darting back and forth in frenzied determination to hang on to dinner. Of course I didn't want to hurt him, so I was careful, but firm. No crab for you mate, sorry.

He did finally drop it, but the crab was barely moving. I waited, baited breath. He really was still alive. He was trying to get up, but couldn't do it. He was missing a front claw and some of his legs, and his bottom was a little messed up, clearly from the bites. Weak and badly battered, he couldn't even stand up against the light current produced by the filter. He lay there bobbing back and forth in the current.

I moved the orange shell next to him, to see if he musters the energy to climb back in and recuperate.

Ah, but here comes another shrimp, licking his chops. A quick whisk of the wire and he's gone. But here comes another... chase him away too. Good heavens. The crab is probably on his way out, if they're smelling him from everywhere.

He managed to climb into an open muscle shell nearby, to rest. I looked away for a second to tell Andres he's safe now, but in that split-second a shrimp had plucked the hapless crab and was spiriting him away to a safe place to finish him off. I chased the shrimp with the wire across the Aquarium, and finally he dropped him. The crab floated down toward the Aquarium floor, where more shrimp immediately converged on him. Keeping them all at bay, I didn't even see the Silverside. In a blink of an eye the Silverside had the crab by his bottom, sucking him in with all her might, her mouth open as wide as it could go. Only the crab's legs and eyes were sticking out of the fish's mouth.

And because she's a fish and not bound to crawling, she easily won the battle for the crab. The shrimp and I lost.

It was at that point that I made the gut-wrenching decision to document this horrifying end of an innocent little hermit crab. I bowed to Nature's brutal discipline, and set up my camera. Here is one of the to-be-expected-out-of-focus shots of the Silverside darting about the Aquarium digesting the crab alive:

After a few minutes of this, the Silverside decided this meal was simply too big and expelled the crab. As he floated down, now officially dead, his belly partially digested, he was swiftly swept up by a shrimp, who was in turn immediately pounced upon by other shrimp, and finally, emerging victorious, climbed up on the oxygen plant to savor his prize.

Yes, dear readers, this is clear and incontrovertible photographic evidence of a hermit crab being digested by a shrimp. And for a final look, for those of you intrigued by the stunning ammorality of Nature, here is a close-up view of this shot:

There are millions of hermit crabs in the ocean, millions of shrimp, and millions of silversides. But I had gotten to know this little crab, and loved him along with all the other inhabitants of the Aquarium. He will always be missed.

And we won't ever know who or what actually pulled him out of his shell ...

One fish's poop is another crab's breakfast

First off, apologies for the title of this episode. But that's the raw and solid truth in the ocean, and much more so in the little microcosm we've created in our saltwater aquarium.

For the past several days I've been thinking about what kind of instrument I should get in order to clean the aquarium floor of all the fish poop the minnows have been happily producing. A medical vacuum pump? Some really fine-tipped tongs? A miniature suction hose?

None of the above. Our very own pooper-scooper is already signed up and employed. It's the smaller hermit crab. I spotted him this morning holding a nice big juicy one in his claws, chomping down on it like an organic chocolate chip granola bar. The worst (best?) part is, he really seemed to enjoy it. It was just before breakfast for me; needless to say I delayed eating for a few hours.

Really.

I mean, nothing like seeing a hermit crab devour fish poo to help you lose weight.

But there is something wondrously complete and right about this natural reality. It makes you realize what true sustainability is. It's not the latest green brand parading around on the stage of global public relations campaigns. It's not a sound bite, a conference presentation or even an environmental policy.

It's every one of us living and working within the cycles of life in our own homes and communities.

p.s. Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Just watch what you slurp tonight.

Moving Day

I run a web design firm so I can appreciate colors. But not in an aquarium. Right now there are just too many solid colors growing in various spots... china red, burgundy violet, play-doh green. Just a few spots, but that's how it starts. They're fungi, and they can ruin the aquatic balance of life.

And so, we did a major cleaning of the Aquarium today. Sucked up all manner of guck and poo, retired both seaweed rocks, the mollusk egg case spiral and a few empty shells, cleaned the Oxygen Dreadlocks, and scraped all those tiny algae off the walls with a cotton ball. Finally, we reshaped the entire aquarium floor so the sides slope up, leaving a depression in the center. This is to allow the detritus to gather in the center, making it infinitely easier for me to clean.

Of course, it took a little convincing that this was the right thing to do.

"The crabs are going to asphyxiate! The baby shells are going to be buried!" I protested as the sand was swept up and over the hapless creatures. Andres rolled his eyes.

"What do you think happens in the ocean, when the waves roll over the sea bottom?" he said. "That the shells go into their Hollywood trailer?"

OK maybe not. But I was still anguished. Then it struck me. This was like moving day. Not sure which part—the moving out or the moving in—but the similarity stuck like a snail on an aquarium wall. Boxes strewn all over your living room, peanuts everywhere, people running around asking you where you want stuff. So it was here too: marine dust and sand kicked up, pieces of seaweed floating about, rocks being moved, the fish darting around inquisitive, the crabs desperately trying to bury themselves under something, anything that wouldn't move. Only the baby shells and the snails remained, as ever, nonplussed.

Finally. All done. Ready to pour in the day's truckload of fresh seawater. Oh, I forgot to mention—in order to clean and reshape and re-landscape, it does help to suck out half the aquarium. Otherwise you might have a mini-tsunami on your living room carpet.

Fresh seawater is in. Now the copepods. Fiesta Nacional! Love those guys. But this time I am wiser: no more all-at-once. I put in about 25% of the copepods, and watched the fish have a feast. Not just the fish, either... finally, at long last, I saw the anemones slurp up the wee things too. Fleakiller caught one with one of its tentacles, and then the Matriarch, in the cozy shade of the Mexican Sponge, reached out for a juicy copepod and leisurely ate it, its little body disappearing nanometer by nanometer inside the voluptuous translucent cone. Two of the Matriarch's presumed offspring caught their very first copepods too.

All in all, a successful inhouse move. Tomorrow I go hunting for new sea furniture.

The Splitting Anemones

This morning I went to check on the Aquarium, as I do every morning. Fleakiller (remember her from the "Death during prime time" episode?) was hanging out on the back wall. Nothing unusual there. It was a little elongated, true, but I thought nothing of it.

Not till I came back an hour or two later. There was a new little anemone off to the side. Fleakiller had split in two! So this is how they reproduce. I call Andres and he confirmed it. It's called "lateral fission". That explains how the three original anemones I had unknowingly brought in on what I now call Anemone Rock, are now 5 on the back wall and 4 on the Rock. It also explains why Killer was stretched out so thin.

My only regret is that I don't have a time-lapse underwater camera.

Here come the fish!

Today was the first warm day of 2009 in Milford. How does a day qualify to be determined "warm"? When you can sit on the beach in your beach chair in your bathing suit.

And today was that day. But of course, ever since I became an officially infatuated aquarist, the idea of coming to the beach without my aquarium gear is strange and alien. I didn't last long in the beach chair. Neither did my little sister Kira but then she's all of 8.

Wading through the pools left by the retreating tide, turning over rocks muttering for us to leave them alone, probing the large heads of seaweed lying flat and dull on the wet sand waiting for the high tide to return them to their ethereal marine beauty. Found four sea fleas and a few perfect rocks with barnacles and seaweed. Put those in the large white bucket with some fresh seawater to tide them over till we introduce them to their new home.

And then we saw them.

The first fish of the season. In a large tidal pool not too far from where we were. Mud minnows probably, or mummi chugs. Breathless, I called over to Andres and my mother who had joined us. Kira and I wasted no time. Got our green aquarium nets and in we went. But running (read: sloshing like a drunk elephant) after the minnows was proving to be frustrating—after all, they are made for this environment, are hydrodynamic, and much too nimble for our clumsy tools.

Teamwork, however, won the day. (Didn't I read that somewhere in some how-t0-succeed-in-business book?) Kira snuck up on one of the minnows, it panicked and raced straight into my net. Woo hoo!

Into the bucket my dear, you're going to have a very posh life now.

I relax in the beach chair, content with the day's achievements.

"Why don't you get another one, so it can have a friend?" Andres offers up nonchalantly. I sit there, looking at him like a fish out of water and peering down into the bucket at the now seemingly lonely minnow. Everything in moderation, right? But one fish isn't moderate, it's downright cruel and unusual treatment of animals to isolate the very sociable minnow.

Kira at this point is busy building a sand castle so I go to brave the odds on my own.

I am still not sure how I managed but I did catch a second minnow! It really just takes patience, faith that that little living thing knows you do not intend to harm it, and a little observation and technique.

And then a very careful ride back home, where the two minnows were gently welcomed into the wonderful world of our Aquarium.

Here is one of the minnows (although I do have to get a better shot. They just won't sit still for me.)

Pulgon Rising

So it's now twelve hours later, 10:30pm and we are once again staring into the Aquarium. But tonight we have a special reason to stare.

The Pulgon has emerged.

Remember the little sand crab Andres caught a few weeks ago? We call him Pulgon, that's his Spanish name. "Sand crab" is just so... unsexy.

So anyway, pulgones, or sand crabs (see here below one we grabbed on a Florida beach a few years ago) spend most of their time burrowed in sand.

They do come out to filter microscopic organisms, but are extremely hard to find. If you know where to look, and how to spot them, you can see them scurrying like little fleas on turbo power across the sand. They pop out for a split second and burrow back in again in about a blink or less.

But you can catch them—we do it by lunging at the spot where the little guy has just burrowed, and then very gently filtering the sand through our fingers. That's how we got the little one in Florida, and that's how Andres got the Pulgon for our Aquarium.

Except now we can't exactly lunge at the sand. When we first put him in, he swam around for 1.5 seconds and in a flash was buried somewhere in the back of the Aquarium. Then we didn't see him for a week. Not a peep! So we thought, oh gosh maybe he didn't make it.

But tonight our fears were calmed. It happened when we rubbed apart a little piece of bunker for the new inhabitants the minnows. The oil and scent of the bunker must have overpowered the Pulgon's natural instinct for timidity: first we caught an area of the sand moving, as if something were rummaging around underneath.

Then, a few seconds later, the Pulgon shot up, swam around in a little circle, then divebombed back into the substrate. But this time he stuck his eyes and his antennae out:

Needless to say, Andres and I were spellbound. We have spent the past hour just watching him, oohing and awe-ing about his every move. Pathetic no? We of course don't think so but we are heavily biased.

I mean, how often is it that you see this incredibly intricate, fragile yet tough little living thing peeking out from the sand at you? So close that you can see its eyeballs.

But Pulgon wasn't done with us yet. He treated us to a real show: right there mere centimeters away from us, he whipped out his filtering whiskers. I did my best to immortalize those as well on digital film, but without a high-speed camera that was pretty much impossible. So here is a shot of the little cowboy doin' his thang....

...and another shot of his mouth or filtering mechanism, with a little more detail.

I'm going to put the camera down now and enjoy this magical moment before he disappears for another week....

The Worm Chronicles/Part I

Took my morning walk today, down to the beach. Clear skies, sunny day, right after a rain so the beach was silky smooth. No humans had walked it yet today.

As I skipped down the stairs, I was stopped dead in my tracks by a thick pink body lying on the sand.

A worm. Alive.

I couldn't believe my luck. Thrilled beyond words, I hunted down an oyster shell—because, after all, I was not quite excited enough to touch it with my bare hands—and picked it up. Nice, healthy color. No wounds to indicate some higher species tried to eat it. No fungi or other apparent diseases.

Definitely a contender for the Aquarium.

And so in he went, into my tomato-jar-turned-saltwater carrying case. At home, I slipped him into the Aquarium and peered closer to watch how he acclimates.

First reaction, he coiled up in the front left corner and whipped about a little, no doubt confused and feeling out of place. Here he is:

Nice, no? In fact let me give you a closer look at his spines:

Now you know why I don't pick up sea worms with my bare hands. Nothing to do with being a girl. Not even my seasoned fisherman husband would touch it. You never know what kind of poison or toxic juices these creatures have.

Oh, he's now burrowing into the substrate. Fleshy pink segments disappearing into the white coral sand, dislodging the rocks above. Let's let him dig in.

Death during prime time

"We have a problem."

I know that undercurrent of Andres' voice. It means business. I was watching CNN, and he was peering intently into the Aquarium.

"The anemone is eating one of the fleas."

"What!" I exclaimed, rushing over.

I couldn't believe my eyes. The little tube anemone, one of the original three that had been carried over on the Anemone Rock, which had, if you will remember, climbed from the Rock up onto the back wall of the Sea Aquarium, was indeed, and in fact, sucking up one of the sea fleas.

The flea was dead as a doornail, no question about it. What creeped me out was the way it was being eaten. Its rear end was literally being dissolved by the sea anemone. Don't believe me? Here, check this out:

OK so it's blurry. But YOU try and focus on a 2-centimeter violent death on the back wall of a 10-gallon aquarium through refracting water currents with a fixed macro lens. Now I understand all those citizen photographers of the Lochness monster, Big Foot, and UFO's. It's hard to focus when you're excited.

Andres explained that sea anemones are actually poisonous. That's how they catch their prey. Their tentacles sting unsuspecting creatures as they float or swim by, then pull them into their mouths and digest them alive. Sounds like a lot of fun. Could you apply that technique to business development? I wonder.

Sea anemones not pretty flowers or plants that the uninitiated eye perceives them to be (yes that would be me 3 weeks ago). They are what you call "First Animals", meaning they have some serious seniority privileges in the evolutionary hierarchy of Life. In other words, move over T. Boone Pickens.

OK so let's go over this again. The lesson we learned today is,

SEA ANEMONE

+

SEA FLEA

=

NOT A HAPPY ENDING.

p.s. Oh, and by the way, little cute sea anemone. Thy name now be Fleakiller.

Goodbye Bob

As much as it pains me, we had to make the decision. The fuzzy barnacle rock was no longer so fuzzy, and this morning I caught Bob scraping more baby barnacles off another rock.

Then there were the pits and piles all over the sand bottom, coral bits mixed with the native sand. Incontrovertible evidence of Bob's nocturnal processing.

Bad Bob. Bad, bad Bob.

I mean, I get it. He's a large hermit crab. He needs to eat, and he needs to filter. Who am I to stop him from doing all those hermit crab things he does?

But he's just too big for this Aquarium. He needs a larger playground. So I picked him up, stowed him away in my carrying mug and drove him to the beach. Andres and I walked out some way into the sea, put him gently down onto the soft sandy seabottom and waved goodbye as he scuttered off into the open ocean.

He seemed really happy. I know how he feels. Being at a resort is great, but only for so long. There's nothing like the freedom of the wild.

How it all began...

Today, Andres and I took a walk on the beach here in Milford as we customarily do. We have been taking these walks ever since we moved here, weather notwithstanding. If it snows, we wear down winter jackets. If it rains, we put on our Goretex. If it's sunny, we enjoy it all the more. Whatever the weather, we love the ocean and every free moment we get, we're there—kayaking, fishing, walking, exploring.

And so it was that on a cloudy drizzly April day we took our walk along the coastline. I brought my tea along to keep me warm. It's about time spring came, we said. It's April! We suffered through another winter and were sick to death of having to fight the cold.

Suddenly I stopped and pointed down at the sand. There at my feet was a little gelatinous blob.

"Wow, a jellyfish!" I exclaimed.

"Spring is here," nodded Andres. "Spring is finally here."

It was true. These small translucent jellies are a sign of spring. They're also incredibly beautiful, their tiny fragile filters bioluminescing as they work the water around them. We saw a few more as we continued walking. On the way back, I had this idea of taking one home with me. I don't really know why... but I was drawn to it. I had finished my tea, so I filled my mug with saltwater and scooped up a jelly from the water's edge. It was still alive, and perked right up in the mug.

At home, I poured the saltwater into a pyrex bowl. Plop, in went the jelly. I watched it navigate around the bowl for a while, mesmerized by the luminous colors running up and down its edges. That was the poet; the scientist in me wondered where its brain is, or whether it has any sort of consciousness. Oh, yes, and you could see all of its internal organs. I was suddenly really grateful we have opaque skin.

But it really was breathtaking. This perfectly translucent living thing floating around on my dining room table, unaware of a much more complex species observing, admiring it.

What a great shot this would be, I thought.

So I set up my camera on a tripod, thinking I'd take a few shots before turning in for the evening. Famous last words. The jelly would not cooperate. It kept spinning around the bottom of the bowl, turning exactly into the position I did not want. I tried a few different angles, tripod heights, and before long brought in the black backdrop cloth and the studio lamp. I even set the jelly up in a fancy tea glass. Maybe Vogue would notice... and the Jelly would become world famous, bobbling down the catwalks of New York, Milan, London and Tokyo.

I spent the rest of the night taking shots of the Jelly. And little did I know what this magical day had sparked...

if you want to know, read on... !