Success!  The Quest is complete.

For the third dive we had a definitive lead on where we’d find the Corynactis viridis.  My friend Laurent Foure is the curator of the public aquarium in Cap d’Agde; about 2.5 hours westward along the coast of the  Mediterranean. Laurant is an avid diver, and is very familiar with the marine environment nearby his aquarium.  He was able to connect us with a dive operator who could take us by boat to a dive spot inhabited by Corynactis viridis…

Read the rest of this entry »

Not your average Aiptasia… this Aiptasia mutabilis is the largest and most beautiful Aiptasia anemone I’ve ever seen… This one is about 10cm in diameter.

For the second dive on the ‘Corynactis Quest’ we moved 8 km east towards Marseille to a small and picturesque harbor village called Redonne…

Read the rest of this entry »

Echinaster sepositus sea star with Parazoanthus axinellae zoanthids.

From June 1-9 I was in France on a a two-fold mission.  The first half of the trip was spent in the south of France in Marseille and the surrounding area.  I stayed with my good friend Yvan Perez,  a professor at the Institute of Mediterranean Ecology and Paleo-Ecology at the University of Provence in Marseille. Yvan acted as my dive guide and translator as we searched along the coast for the temperate Eastern Atlantic/Mediterranean corallimorph Corynactis viridis.

The second half of the trip was spent in Strasbourg in the Alsace region of France near the German border where I gave a lecture on the Caribbean corallimorph species at the annual convention of Recif France, which is the society of French reef aquarists. Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting a series of articles on this trip, specifically the quest for Corynactis viridis…

Read the rest of this entry »

Awesome New Republic’s Rational Geographic Volume 1 compact disc art.

Our comrades at Honor Roll Music have asked us to contribute artwork to their trilogy of Rational Geographic releases for 2009. The image above is a Discosoma sp. corallimorph from Indonesia, and is featured live in our Discosoma 2.0 aquarium at Sweat Records in Miami, Florida.

Download Rational Geographic Volume 1 for FREE via Zip File or Official Torrent.

Rational Geographic Volume 1 cover art.

Unidentified Floridian Algae #1, an iridescent rhodophyte (red algae).

We stumbled upon this mesmerizing iridescent macroalgae a few weeks ago and noted its unusual coloration. Taxonomic research has proven fruitless, and we have included this specimen on our list of unidentified Floridian marine life.

The iridescent blue Coelothrix irregularis macroalgae below was found during the same dive. We hypothesize the blue iridescence might be the work of Guanine crystals.

Coelothrix irregularis.

This lettuce sea slug (Elysia crispata) was cruising over a few Discosoma sanctithomae and D. neglecta polyps on its way to a patch of Bryopsis sp. algae in one of the holding tubs in the Morphologic Lab. It measures approx. 3cm in length.

The lettuce sea slug (Elysia crispata) is not a true nudibranch, as it is often referred,  but a ’sacoglossan sea slug’.  Sacoglossans feed by sucking out the chlorophyll contents of algae, and then incorporate that chlorophyll into their own tissues.  Thus the slugs themselves become ’solar powered’.

Elysia crispata are native across the Caribbean and prefer to feed on Caulerpa species algae like C. verticillata and C. sertularioides.  In an aquarium, when deprived of these preferred species, they will consume the pest hair algae Brysopsis sp. that most other herbivores avoid.

This neon green Ricordea florida polyp displays a few abnormally large tentacles.  This is an unusual characteristic not yet observed before in the Morphologic Lab.