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The rarest sea slug I've ever found...was in my hard drive!
Posted by Graeme Lyons , Saturday 2 November 2024 19:10
So, I have just ticked what seems to be quite a rare sea slug, Trapania maculata. Four years after I took the photos at The Pound in Eastbourne. How then did this happen? Probably easiest to give a timeline. In reverse.
Now: Whilst writing this book www.pelagicpublishing.com/products/pan-species-listing, I was trying to find some photos on my external hard drive of Black Sea-bream. I didn't find them but got distracted by other files. This is story is very much brought to you by ADHD.
Oct 2023: I went out sea-fishing and took lots of photos of line caught fish and then put them somewhere 'safe' for future Graeme to find.
Aug 2020: In my weird year of hanging around with TinyRecorder, I went to The Pound for a rock-pooling session with him. I was keen to refind the amazing Polycera quadrilineata I had found in Mar 2019. To my amazement, I found one quickly and took a series of poor photos, little did I know it was actually the much scarcer Trapania maculata until I find the files four years later and in the intervening time, develop an obsession with nudibranchs. Here are the best shots I took of it and the one featuring Tiny last.
I wish I had got a better photo but this is good enough to clinch the ID. It has that odd equilateral triangle on the back, more yellow on the siphonophores (which are a different shape, with a thin bit at the end), lacks the six tentacles at the front of Polycera, four yellow appendages at the sides like folded up legs (instead, just two larger and less yellow ones at the back) and overall looks quite different.
March 2019: Here's Polycera quadrilineata so you can see how I could have made the mistake. Especially when your're specifically looking for one amazing looking yellow and white sea slug in the exact same place you've found it before, in the exact same way (sweep netting weed in the lagoon). Anyway, the water was really murky when I saw the Trapania too, unlike in March when I found the actual Polycera.
A quick look on the NBN and there are only 24 records for Trapania maculata, where as for most of the other 11 species of nudibranch I have seen there are usually over a 1,000 or in a few cases, hundreds. I am so pleased as this could have remained unnoticed for ever. And I have really missed the nudibranchs since getting back from Jersey. What is most odd, I had lost all memory of this encounter until I saw the photos. As I did very little blogging in 2020, but lots of TinyRecorders which are lost in Facebook, I have not remembered many of these wildlife encounters in the same way I normally would.
Anyways, proper stoked with this find! Also a massive shout out to Bernard Picton & Christine Morrow's for their laminated book of dreams, AKA Nudibranchs of Britain, Ireland and Northwest Europe. I would not have got to the ID so quickly today without it. I love this book and I think spending time just flicking through it recently is why I clocked that as being different instantly today but didn't notice at all four years ago.
Right, need to find that Black Sea-bream photo now...
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