veltkamp's Favorites

Holotype (CASIZ 182590), 33 mm long as shown here, on which Terry Gosliner based his 2010 description of this species (as Flabellina goddardi). I found it on a calm and bright overcast morning crawling in the open in a low intertidal pool at Tar Pits Reef. The 2nd image shows the egg mass, 14 mm in diameter, laid by this individual on 10 May 2008. The uncleaved zygotes averaged 65 microns in diameter, were packed one per capsule, and took 7 days at an average of 16 degrees C to develop into hatching planktotrophic veligers. The 3rd image shows, in right ventro-lateral view, one of the veligers just prior to hatching and with a shell 105 microns long.

Unlike most specimens of this species observed subtidally, individuals found intertidally vary in possession of white lines on the body and cephalic tentacles from completely absent (as in this specimen) to incomplete, to complete. With those white lines, subtidal specimens have occasionally been mistaken for Coryphella trilineata.

A large specimen, found on Bugula in the Charleston, OR boat basin. Cropped from the 2nd image, which shows four other species of Bugula-feeding nudibranchs found on the same date. Scanned from a 35 mm slide.

Two of the 21 O. rosacea we found in the rocky intertidal at Whiskey Creek on 16 June 2015. Like these two, most were on their bryozoan prey, Integripelta bilabiata. That's Hermissenda opalescens out of focus in the foreground of the 1st image.

I was driving home from a morning of photography up on the Cascade Lakes Highway. I got lucky and saw the Mount Bachelor Sierra Nevada Red Fox crossing the road. I pulled over and it stopped and gave me a couple looks. Just enough time for a few pics.