Doin' Their Own Thing

[Merry]

Here's the last dredge from our recent dives around Palos Verdes.
Anemone Sunset

A minute tunicate from Golf Ball Reef, easily overlooked. Pycnoclavella stanleyi

A robust cluster from Little Reef, but can't be sure if this is Pycnoclavella.

For all you who dive Golf Ball Reef, the barrel is newly and completely covered with the tunicate Trididemnum opacum.

Polycera hedgpethi typically feeding on the bryozoan animal Bugula neritina.

Dendronotus venustus is so beautifully cryptic that when I see it, I think, "Weedy nudi".
But this flamboyant one from Garden Spot sports colors we've never seen. Only its stately rhinophores gave it away amid the tangle of algae.

Same one on a slate.

I watched Polycera atra travel across the reef, crawl up the invertebrate-covered tube, check out the egg mass and crawl back down.

Polycera tricolor as we normally see them.

Felimare porterae hanging on in the surge.

Felimare porterae mating.

Acanthodoris lutea from Garden Spot.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

My favorites are the Felimare porterae hanging ten and the Polycera atra Christmas Tree.

 

[TSandM]

I like the doto-looking nude on the spotted surface.

But really, I like the tunicate photos. I love people like you guys, and Jan Kocian, who take photographs of the animals the rest of us see and dismiss, or ignore because we don't really know what they are. The underwater environment becomes so much more fascinating if you realize that almost everything you see is alive, with its own place in the ecosystem, and its own unique behaviors, foods, and reproduction.