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.

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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…

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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…

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