Here is a navanax with its internals showing. Can you see the tiny orange creatures running around on it? What do you think they are? Parasites? Sea slug fleas? Why are they on it? For protection? Food? Do you notice the two leg-like limbs coming off the ends of them? This begs a specimen and a microscope don't you think? I looked it up and believe they're copepods, Why do you think the navanax is exposing its insides? It's not easy finding answers to these things.
Here are some more eggs the kids found at the bay. It's like jelly lace. If you look closely you can see the individual eggs. Are these also snail eggs?
Found this little guy on our milkweed this morning. I watched it for a while and he was so afraid to leave the safety of the rib of the leaf where he clung... or so it seemed to me :)
Here are some images of an unhatched egg from the same plant under the microscope. I had to see if it really looked like the corn cob image in the children's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar - it does!
Here is a video of a monarch larva cocooning. It's from an earlier set of monarchs from a few weeks ago. Interestingly, there were three of them - two under our kitchen window and one on this loose window we had leaning against the wall in the garden - and they all cocooned on the same day and emerged from their cocoons on the same day.
They cocooned March 16, 2015. And then emerged April 2, 2015. Exactly 17 days. Here is the butterfly getting ready to emerge - the cocoon becomes translucent and the creature to emerge is clearly visible.
In case all of this makes you want to sing for joy, you can!
On a nice day in February, we headed to the bay in Long Beach, not exactly OC, but close enough. The waters here are calm on this side of the peninsula creating a different habitat for sea-life.
As we walked in the water we could feel slime at times on the bottom and saw many of these bubble snails all over. We guessed Spring is on its way and it's mating season.
When you put the bubble snail in a container, it oozes slime as you can just above the rear of this snail - the slime with bubbles trapped in it. Why does this snail slime so much?
We came back in early June and found what we think are its eggs floating along the edges of the water looking like debris more than eggs, until you look closely. It's beautifully striped.
We brought a piece home and took a look under the microscope.
There stripes are in fact rows, upon rows, upon rows of tiny eggs!
Here you can see how they are very busy eggs. Why do they spin so much?
We saw many little bubble snails everywhere this time.
Here are some other curious snail eggs we found along with a navanax. The collar type structure is a moon snail's egg collar and it has some other type of eggs pasted onto it.
And here's a ziploc bag that the kids found in the water with even more of the unidentified eggs on it. The snail was glad to have something sturdy to lay its eggs on.
How does a creature so slimy create such remarkable egg structures?
This is a mystery find on the kelp (red fringe?) at Strands. From pictures, it looks like it may be some kind of mollusc eggs. Do you know? If you look very closely, you'll see each white strand consists of many tiny little eggs within it.
We found this giant kelp holdfast washed up on the beach today.
Look closely, can you see anything?
There are brittle star tentacles. There were literally hundreds of brittle stars within this one clump of kelp. And I noticed an orange substance on my hands after I touched it. I'm pretty certain they were eggs. You can see them, orange in color, on the stems (stipes?) in the picture here. I'm not able to find anything conclusive about the looks of their eggs on Google for the time being. Do you know?
