Things strange and beautiful

This weekend I was supposed to take a photographer and his assistant into the field to hunt for staurozoans. I mean a real photographer, one who has worked for National Geographic. He also wrote the book One Cubic Foot. You may have heard of the guy. His name is David Liittschwager. Anyway, his assistant contacted me back in March, saying that he was working on something jellyfish-related for Nat Geo and hoped to include staurozoans in the story, and did I know anything about them? As in, maybe know where to find them? It just so happens that I do indeed know where to find staurozoans, at least sometimes, and we made a date to go hunting on a low tide. Then early in May the assistant contacted me to let me know that David’s schedule had changed and he couldn’t meet me today, and she hoped they’d be able to work with me in the future, and so on.

None of which means that I wouldn’t go look for them anyways. I’d made the plans, the tide would still be fantastic, and so I went. And besides, these are staurozoans we’re talking about! I will go out of my way to look for them as often as I can. Not only that, but I hadn’t been to Franklin Point at all in 2018 and that certainly needed to be remedied.

The sand has definitely returned. The beach is a lot less steep than it was in the winter, and some of the rocks are completely covered again. This meant that the channels where staurozoans would likely be found are shallower and easier to search. But you still have to know where to look.

See that large pool? That’s where the staurozoans live. They like areas where the water constantly moves back and forth, which makes them difficult to photograph in situ. And given that the big ones are about 2 cm in diameter and most of them are the same color as the algae they’re attached to, they’re a challenge to find in the first place. I looked for a long time and was about to give up on my search image when I found a single small staurozoan, about 10 mm in diameter, quite by accident. It was a golden-brown color, quite happily living in a surge channel. I took several very lousy pictures of it before coming up with the bright idea of moving it up the beach a bit to an area where the water wasn’t moving quite as much. I sloshed up a few steps and found a likely spot, then placed my staurozoan where the water was deep enough for me to submerge the camera and take pictures.

Cute little thing, isn’t it? I had my head down taking pictures of this animal, congratulating myself on having found it. When I looked around me I saw that I had inadvertently discovered a whole neighborhood of staurozoans. They were all around me! And some of them were quite large, a little over 2 cm in diameter. All of a sudden I couldn’t not see them.

I know I’ve seen staurozoans in the same bottle green color as the Ulva, but this time I saw only brown ones. As you can see even the animals attached to Ulva were brown. Staurozoans seem to be solitary creatures. They are not permanently attached but do not aggregate and are not clonal. Most of the ones I found were as singles, although I did find a few loose clusters of 3-4 animals that just happened to be gathered in the same general vicinity.

Not much is known about the biology of Haliclystus, or any of the staurozoans. I collected some one time many years ago, and brought them back to the lab for closer observation. They seemed to eat Artemia nauplii very readily, and I did get to observe some interesting behaviors, but they all died within a week or so. Given that I can find them only in certain places at Franklin Point, they must be picky about their living conditions. Obviously I can’t provide what they need at the marine lab. The surging water movement, for example, is something that I can’t easily replicate. I need to think about that. The mid-June low tides look extremely promising, and my collecting permit does allow me to collect staurozoans at Franklin Point. Maybe I’ll be able to rig up something that better approximates their natural living conditions in the lab.

In the meantime, I just want to look at them.