Research and Other Topics of Interest

Research:

Our group decided to research nudibranchs. The questions we propose have to do with their slime trails. It's a good thing that these creatures are so interesting to look at because they definitely don't have my favorite tanks to clean.

Things we realized too late:

Hint #1 If you're studying slime trails, slime is involved.

Hint #2 If something moves on a slime trail it moves really slowly making the study of weather they follow each other, other species, currents, run from predators, etc., is going to take a long time

Hint #3 If you read that some of the species are cannibalistic toward others, chances are that I would be the one to catch it and allow it to eat one and a half of our pretty ones.

I've only caught two nudibranchs and I've been banned from catching any more. The first one that I caught was found to secrete toxins that are harmful to other nudibranchs, the second was the cannibal that ate the pretty nudibranchs. The toxic one is small and we keep in the big tank and the cannibal is in a homemade cage made of tupperware, screen and what looks like green painter's tape; he will be used as a predator later in our research.


As you can see by the exceptionally large belly and the feather hanging out of the mouth of this anthropleura xantogrammica just swallowed a sea gull. Well, not really, but that's what it looked like! We're supposed to have 100 pictures in our photo journal for marine ecology so I figured that I'd have 100 serious ones and then this one thrown somewhere in the middle. Some sea stars eat barnacles, some sea gulls eat sea stars and some anemones eat sea gulls - just to see if the grader is paying attention.

Yesterday, we had our OP at Cape Arago and it was beautiful!! The tide wasn't as low, so I wasn't able to find epiactus prolifera (a brooding sea anemone) but I was able to get pictures of other ecological events and some panoramic views of happiness.

P.S. The first picture is of anisodoris nobilis (the noble sea lemon nudibranch) with freshly laid egg ribbons. Apparently the conditions of their captivity were favorable for egg laying but we'll have to wait to see if they're favorable for hatching.


Why don't I live in Oregon??