Not What I Was Looking For

I dove earlier this week hoping to find two specific species of nudibranch – Dendronotus robustus and Flabellina salmonacea. Neither is rare but they’re definitely uncommon. Still, I had high hopes. It's the right time of year, other divers have recently seen one of the species, and I was feeling lucky.

Twenty minutes later, though, I had found neither and could feel my spirits starting to lag. But just then I looked down on a kelp bed and saw something in deep, wrapped around one of the kelp stems. I worked my way in and saw it was a scale worm, circumnavigating the stem diagonally with its body.

All of a sudden, in the close confines of the fronds and the stems, a stream of eggs started to rise up from the worm into the water column like so many miniature helium balloons. It must have wrapped itself around the kelp to separate the scales on its back and give the eggs an open path to rise up and drift away.

So, what was it I was looking for again?