Mystery Nudis from Coral Street, Monterey
Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 3:06 pm
If you get down here, go to Coral Street at high tide and have a blast. It's not deep, we didn't even break 30 feet, but we found more critters than we could count, including three new-to-us nudibranchs. I have some tentative ID's, but I'm looking for confirmation if possible. The Sea Slug Forum isn't accepting any new material right now, so here I is. It's been suggested that this first one is a baby Triopha maculata, and looking at the picture of a little one in Behrens/Hermosillo p. 66, I'm leaning that way. This guy was less than 1/3 the size of my little fingernail; we couldn't even see that he had the frontal veil until we were examining the pictures.
Someone suggested that these next two are both Aldisa sanguinea. I can buy that for the first one, because there's a pic of one pretty much just like it on the Sea Slug Forum under that species. I'm not so sure about the second one, because the spots match, but the color is yellow rather than red and I haven't found any info about such a color variation. Hence, my cry for help:
On a side note, this second guy has just about the most unusual branchial plume I've ever seen, even in a book. That's really how he was carrying it, I watched him for close to a full minute and he wasn't pulling it in. Also, that is the actual color, I haven't monkeyed with it.
There are more pix of all these guys, along with lots of other critters we found at Coral Street, at
http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb13 ... 8/?start=0
Someone suggested that these next two are both Aldisa sanguinea. I can buy that for the first one, because there's a pic of one pretty much just like it on the Sea Slug Forum under that species. I'm not so sure about the second one, because the spots match, but the color is yellow rather than red and I haven't found any info about such a color variation. Hence, my cry for help:
On a side note, this second guy has just about the most unusual branchial plume I've ever seen, even in a book. That's really how he was carrying it, I watched him for close to a full minute and he wasn't pulling it in. Also, that is the actual color, I haven't monkeyed with it.
There are more pix of all these guys, along with lots of other critters we found at Coral Street, at
http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb13 ... 8/?start=0