Eubranchus Follyneus

I met up for a dive at Folly yesterday with Andy (no longer MIA) Martinez and Dave (it’s never too cold for a wetsuit) Norman.  What a beautiful day – the sun was out, the air was warm, the water was flat calm.  It was one of those days when you just knew visibility was going to be great.  Well, that is until my two cohorts got in the water and started thrashing around.  But that’s a story for another day.

Today, I want to talk about Eubranchus pallidus – specifically, the one I found on the right side of the cove.  E. pallidus is a beautiful little nudibranch that my man Bobby Boyle first brought to my attention years ago.  It’s rarely more than a half-inch in length but stands out from other species because its cerata appear to be inflated, jostling around on its back like so many helium balloons.

But not yesterday’s.  Instead of looking inflated, its cerata just looked kind of thick.

Now, this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen such an E. pallidus.  But for the first time I really started to wonder why (yeah, sometimes it takes a while).  In the past, I’d always assumed these were just young specimens that had yet to reach the full bloom of their inflated glory.  But yesterday's seemed larger than normal – definitely not a juvenile.  So was it on the geriatric side, with its flattened cerata actually a sign of its impending demise?  Or did its cerata look like this because it was starving?  Or could it have been in the process of building up spent defenses?  Or maybe it (and the others like it) are a different but similar species.  Argggh.

This is the amazing thing about diving.  The more you look around, the more you think, the more you realize how much you don’t know – especially about the things that you thought you did know.  The good news, though, is that there's only one solution to the problem.  Just keep diving.