What better way to start a new blog than to talk about sex?
This morning at the Seymour Center I noticed a blob of what looked like nudibranch eggs on the wall of one of the tanks. Looking around for the likely culprit I saw three big nudibranchs on the tank. Ooh, cool!
This is Dendronotus iris, a large nudibranch, or sea slug. This bad boy/girl had a foot (the flat white bit that you see reflected in the aquarium glass) that was about 15 cm long. The brownish branched structures on the slug’s back are its cerata, which function as gills. These animals do not have the ctenidium, or gill, that is typical of marine snails. Other nudibranchs carry their gills in a single plume that surrounds the anus.
There is one other big slug in this tank. It has a paler body color and cerata that are banded with orange and tipped with white.
Nudibranchs are among the rock stars of marine invertebrates–they are flamboyantly colored, have short adult lives with lots of sex, and leave beautiful corpses when they die. After a planktonic larval life of a few weeks, adult nudibranchs spend their time eating, copulating, and laying eggs. Each slug is a simultaneous hermaphrodite, capable of functioning as both male and female, and mating involves an exchange of sperm. In some other species of nudibranch the act of love can be followed by an act of cannibalism.
Nudibranchs lay egg masses in ribbons or strings that are characteristic of the species. It turns out that Dendronotus egg masses look like Top Ramen noodles:
Each of those individual little white blobs is an egg capsule that contains 10-30 developing embryos. These eggs were deposited yesterday (3 June) and the embryos have been developing but are not yet at any distinct stage. With water temperature at about 13C, I think they’ll develop pretty quickly.
OMG! SOO COOL! Love the new BLOG, Cossin! Won’t be able to follow regularly but here in the Winwards Islands there’s lots of (finicky) internet! YAY!