In conjunction with National Sea Slug Day last Monday, the
California Academy of Sciences released colorful photographs of 17
newly identified nudibranch species.
Striking colors and unusual color patterns were given a special
focus in a genetic study that is helping to group the nudibranch
species and understand how they evolved. Hannah Epstein, affiliated
with the California Academy, was the lead author on the research
paper published in the
Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
When it comes to types of fish, seahorses are about as odd as
you will ever know. The males, rather than females, are the ones
that give birth after carrying their offspring in a pouch, as you
can see in this popular video on YouTube.
It’s been about a year since Monterey Bay Aquarium opened its
exhibit “The Secret Lives of Seahorses.” Thanks to KQED Television
in Northern California, we can learn a great deal about sea horses
from two videos. Both look great in high definition, which means
you can play them full-screen.
The first video
features Healy Hamilton, director the Center for Biodiversity
Research at the California Academy of Sciences, whose passion for
sea horses comes across at the outset of the video:
“Seahorses completely captured my heart in that first encounter
that I ever had. I was snorkeling through a mangrove forest. I knew
immediately when I saw it because it had its tail wrapped around a
mangrove root. I took my pinkie finger and I rubbed it down her
belly, and she unwound her tail from the mangrove root and wrapped
her tail around my finger and just stood there holding hands with
me. I was completely hooked; I was crying in my face mask.”
The piece goes on to talk about the endangered status of
seahorses in the wild, in part because they are taken for
aquariums, novelties and especially Chinese medicine. What can be
done to recover seahorses from the brink of extinction also is
described.
If all this truth about seahorses isn’t amusing enough, I’d also
like to share some photo art that I enjoyed. The creativity of
photoshop artists really comes through in their interpretation of
the odd seahorse and their concerns about its future. See the Web
site called Freaking
News.