TIDEPOOLING AT BEAN HOLLOW STATE BEACH

That’s right folks, more nerdly naturalism. My cup runeth over. With writhing ectotherms. A month or two ago, I realized a decently low tide was about to coincide with the crepuscular (sorta) hours of a weekend, and so reserved a day off from work to go tidepooling. Of course, I neglected to request a day off for one of my best friends’ going away party the weekend before, giving you some idea of how misplaced my priorities have become. Anyway, the upshot is that this morning I headed for the coast with the Teen Girl Squad (aka Archie, , and Maggie) and one of Maggie’s friends in search of Cool Stuff. Bean Hollow State Beach played host to our adventures, and presented us with a fine spread.

I have spoken before of nudibranchs, of course, but let me restate: they are by far some of my favorite Californians. A nudibranch is a little sea slug, often brightly colored, that bears its breathing apparatus externally (”naked lung”) in leaf-like, branched, or folded protrusions. Today we found more than I’ve ever seen. Note that all of these were quite small, no more than an inch or so.

These are several species we caught. The yellow one on the left is a sea lemon, I believe, and the one on the right is false sea lemon, though my confidence in distinguishing the two is far from absolute. The lower left one is a clown dorid (which I inevitably pronounce “clown droid” in my mind and, regrettably, aloud), my first ever (!!), and the unabashedly fabulous one up top is an opalescent nudibranch. These are great examples of the dorid (clown and lemon) and aeolid (opalescent) body types, which represent two suborders of the order Nudibranchia.

Clown dorid (Triopha catalinae)

Opalescent nudibranch (Hermissenda crasicornis)

Dendronotus sp. (frondosus?). I have no idea how Big E spotted this one, but here’s to her patience and sharp sight because this guy’s amazing. This represents our third (!) suborder of the day, the dendronotid (”tree back”) type. Amazing camouflage. I wasn’t really able to find a species that matched ours exactly, but D. frondosus seemed like the closest.

Three-lined nudibranch (Flabellina trilineata). Another Big E find. Looks a lot like the opalescent, but note the lack of blue along the foot and the three distinct lines running down the back (well, you can only see the center one and a bit of the right one here, but use your imagination).

And we also found some cool crabs, including a kelp crab, a bazillion striped shore crabs, and these two:

Hairy Cancer crab (Cancer oregonensis)

Purple shore crab (Hemigrapsus nudus)

Other cool stuff included a lined ribbon worm (very weird), strawberry anemones, oystercatchers, and tidepool sculpins.

God damn, these nature journal-ish entries take forever. Maybe I should just make the images web friendly and end it at that.