BACK TO DUXBURY

Ah, another successful slug safari. I’ll spare you the cold and soggy details and skip directly to the pictures.

Shaggy mouse aeolid (Aeolidia papillosa), 2-3cm

Dirona picta, 2-3cm

Yellow-faced aeolid (Cuthona flavovulta), ~1cm

This one was pretty small and my pics didn’t really come out, but you can still see the yellow face, the white rhinophores and tentacles, and gold-flecked black cerata.

The following two weren’t new, but they were pretty large, so I though I might get better pictures than before. That might have worked out if not for the obvious presence of my hand or my flash. Le sigh. For some reason there were quite a few exceedingly large individuals in this one pool. Kind of like the Land of the Lost or something.

Hilton’s aeolid (Phidiana hiltoni), 4cm

Spotted triopha (Triopha maculata), 4cm

Aside from the beasts of unprecedented mass, another weird observation I made was that some pools just seemed to have a disproportionately higher diversity and abundance. I’d search one pool pretty thoroughly for maybe 10 minutes, then turn around to another right next to it, about as deep, same kind of substrate, plant life, anemones, corals, etc, and that one would be chock full of slugs. No doubt there were some environmental characteristics I wasn’t taking into account, but it seemed pretty non-random.

Anyway, the full list:

Nudibranchs
Shaggy mouse aeolid (Aeolidia papillosa)
Yellow-faced aeolid (Cuthona flavovulta)
Hilton’s aeolid (Phidiana hiltoni)
Clown dorid (Triopha catalinae)
Spotted triopha (Triopha maculata)
Doto amyra
Opalescent nudibranch (Hermissenda crasicornis)
Flabelina trilineata
Dirona picta
Sea lemon (this is what I’m calling it, but could have been one of a several yeloow dorids found around here that I don’t yet feel qualified to distinguish)
Unidentified white dorid (~1cm, white, concical papillae, long lamellate rhinophores, didn’t get a good enough pic to id)

Arthropods
Kelp crab (Pugettia producta)
Cryptic kelp crab (Pugettia richii)
Flattop crab (Petrolisthes eriomerus)
Purple shore crab (Hemigrapsus nudus)
Countless little shrimp that I didn’t have the patience to work out
Some kind of Pycnogonid, again too small to get a good photo

And lots of other cnidarians, corals, bryozoans, and other things about which I know very little…