Island NatureExploring nature on Vancouver Island, British Columbia and beyond

One of the fun things that you can do with your kids at the beach is look for the dramatic siphons of the Horse Clam (Tresus sp.) at low tide. Most people don’t connect the somewhat grotesque looking tube sticking out of the sand with the feeding apparatus of a clam but that is indeed [...]

Common shore crabs on Vancouver Island are usually pretty easy to identify. Colour isn’t always a good way to separate out the Green Shore Crab (Hemigrapsus oregonensis) from the Purple Shore Crab (Hemigrapsus nudus) since both have some variability in colouration. The more reliable way to tell the two apart is to look at the [...]

On the beach with the kids this week and we found a beautiful hermit crab in its shell. All we could see was its blue claws. I thought that with those blue claws this would be an easy crab to identify. I think that it might be a very worn Grainyhand Hermit (Pagurus granosimanus) which [...]

There’s something lurking beneath the mud in the Tofino Mudflats Wildlife Management Area. Actually, there’s a great deal of biodiversity underneath the nearly 1770 hectares of tidal mudflats protected since 1997 by this WMA. The challenge is getting out to see it without getting stuck in the quicksand like expanse of the mudflats. I’ve always [...]

Often when jellyfish are washed up on the shore at Long Beach they don’t last long. At first glance this stranded Moon Jelly (Aurelia labiata) appears to be forgotten. A closer look reveals that some of the beach’s most aggressive scavengers are hard at work dealing with the jelly’s remains. Water-line Isopods (Cirolana kincaidi) commonly follow [...]

Earlier this week I spent two hours at Florencia Bay in Pacific Rim National Park Reserve. The beach here is sometimes overlooked by tide pool explorers heading to better known locations like the rocks at Wickaninnish Beach, Green Point or Schooner Cove.    I love poking around in Florencia Bay because access is easy and [...]