An amazing glass squid. When I disturbed it it would tuck in its tentacles and eyes, and even its fins and show big spots. So cool. The area around the brain was brightly iridescent. There are very faint long tubercles around the mantle if that helps with species id.
Really hard to get nice shots with a compact camera sadly.
~2.5cm long
Very small red "clams." Smaller than a Little Black Mussel.
Mixed family: Mallard x Mandarin duck
Beachdrift lowtide, alive
Many smaller ones washed up all down the beach at lowtide
Lots of shells intact and broken
A few eggs and one small slug within very dense obelia bushes on some floating macrocystis heading to shore. I grabbed the blades and have them in my aquarium. Hopefully they might hatch and grow.
~2mm long
Edit (27/4/23): added some better pics (first 3). Image 2 & 3 shows it eating a zooid. And you can see in image 2 a zooid which has been eaten. Also I counted at least 2 slugs now.
Edit 2 (28/4/23): The tank is constantly filled with tiny medusa from the Hydroids! probably ~5 per cm^2. I never realised they constantly released medusa like this. The filter is always sucking them up but they keep coming!
Edit 3 (29/4/23): The nudi is bigger, now ~3mm long. I realised all the medusa in the water are actually from the hydroid polyps themselves. Most of the hydroids are now empty which might not be good for the slug. I didn't know they could do that, it seems they do it when there is low water flow. The higher flow areas still have some polyps. (edit: Unless most did just die and they are just pumping out medusa). I really thought this would be an easy nudibranch to keep with such plentiful food but it seems that's not the case.
Edit 4 (1/5/23): I count 3 now. The biggest one is 5mm. I got some algae with Orthopyxis hydroids but I don't think they like it sadly.
Edit 5 (3/5/23): I set them free as the seaweed was going bad and I couldn't find any more hydroids. I counted 4 in the end.
Abundant in shallow watercourse
This one I think from the niwa memoir. Looks like a small one though. Nice to find a new hydromedusa nonetheless.
~5mm tall
One under the same rock which has had them previously. This rock always has the yellow sponges and the red hydroids that these feed on.
~0.6cm long
Shallow subtidal
Very happy to find this one. The vis was really bad still from rain so I was only searching in the shallows.
I dove down to take pics of a gold-margined nudi on a sponge and caught this one in the corner of my eye on the same sponge. Pretty lucky.
At one point I had lost it, but it had just moved to something with less contrast, which just shows how easily they can be missed if they aren't obvious.
~1cm long
~2m subtidal
just saw this one moving over some Orthoscuticellid bryozoans. Looks like it is regrowing its cerata after dropping them.
~1cm long
~2m subtidal
In high tide/splash zone rock pools.
Quite a few of these - small size with both valves attached.
This was getting too small to see to focus so there's not as much detail as I'd like. Hopefully it's distinct enough for an ID. Please let me know if not and I'll try again.
2mm grid.
From a section of washup on the island. I dug down to the small shells underneath.
This is part of a selection from a second sample taken 11 days after that from 1 May and about three metres closer to the sea.