I will keep this post short, as my third Silver Steps shoredive of the year was a week ago. As you can see above, my dive was made by encountering the beautiful nudibranch Antiopella cristata (although I prefer the old name Janolus cristatus…). My camera battery strangely gave up straight after taking these pics (argh!), otherwise I would have bothered it for at least another ten minutes! The 60mm lens is great. Look at the European cowrie Trivia monacha below which is less than a centimeter in length. Not a great shot but it shows that it is possible. Finally, a common Phoronid worm Phoronis hippocrepia (Thanks Allison, please check out her great blog Notes from a California naturalist). I hope the wind will die down and I can go back soon. 
Tag Archives: Trivia monacha
Macro Practice II
I am running out of original blog post titles; these are just some more macrophotos practicing with the mzuiko 60mm lens. Friday afternoon was a gorgeous sunny, windstill day here in Falmouth. Although I somehow did not manage to find a stalked jellyfish, there were plenty of other things to see floating around in the shallow pools. I tried my hand again at the European cowrie Trivia monacha (see last post) with better results. It is hard to get the strobe position right, so I now hold it in my hand (rather than attached to the ‘tray’ that also holds the camera) to try to take as many different shots as possible. Below, a small Light bulb seaquirt Clavelina lepadiformis and the colonial seasquirt Morchellium argus. Finally, I noticed a shanny Lipophrys pholis hiding in a crevice. It was too large to capture its whole face with the macrolens so I tried to get one eye at least. It will be fun to try to get some fish portraits next time. Btw, catch me on instagram: @an_bollenessor.
Macro practice
I managed to squeezed two snorkel sessions in this week to practice with the macrolens. Today it was sunny and still, finally after weeks of bad weather. I returned to the same Rainbow wrack as pictured in the last post and found some other mollusc species but none of the shots worked. (Also, very annoyingly, I had not put the lens on the 1:1 macro setting meaning I had to get out of the water, walk back to the car to dry my hands, remove the camera from the housing, set the lens and then come back…) Because I always (and often) snorkel at the same spot, I know where certain individual seaweeds are. I returned to a Codium plant on which I had seen the solar-powered seaslug Elysia viridis before and found one, 1-cm long individual. I spent most of my time trying to get a decent shot of this slow, cooperative individual. I am getting the hang of it, and played around minimising depth of field to get more light in and to remove distracting background. The backscatter is still a problem. I think having a snoot could work wonders, but I probably should try to practice some more and not fall into the trap of buying new toys. I was too lazy to meticulously tweak photos on Photoshop but used Windows Photos to spice them up, see below for a before and after:
Last Sunday the weather was less good. Instead of lying motionless in front of a sacoglossan , I lay motionless in front of a European cowrie Trivia monacha. I could not position my strobe well, at least, that is my excuse. What is always interesting to see when looking at photos on the computer later are the other, even tinier, organisms photobombing such as this amphipod on the right side of the shell: 
animals that did not do that well in my aquarium…
A while back I wrote two posts on my personal top ten animals for the (unchilled) aquarium (here and here). Of course, there were also organisms that were not such a success. Animals can be unsuited for the aquarium for many reasons, and of course this depends on the size of aquarium, the combination of animals and what you define by ‘unsuited’; so please keep in mind that the following is a personal account!
Aggressive species: Another reasons that makes animals unsuitable for a community tank is that they are bullish. (Animals becoming too big is not a real problem for the native aquarium as you can release them again and replace with smaller individuals.) Crabs often get rowdy for instance. I kept a small (5 cm carapace width) Edible crab Cancer pagurus for a little while (his name was Barry). It would bury (Barry!) itself during the day, but as soon as the lights turned off it would go about and rearrange the tank. Rocks weighing over a kilo were knocked against the glass and I found a Cushion star cut in two. It was quite an operation to remove it from the tank using a net (but during all that rummaging I interestingly saw bioluminescence in the tank which was very cool). Shannies like to feed on snails and hermit crabs and so in a relatively small aquarium at least, so sometimes you have to choose between one or the other:
Truly littoral species: I had a couple of limpets Patella vulgata in the aquarium that just sat in the same place on the glass for months. At this time, algal growth was a problem, so I should have known if they had moved during the day or night by the tracks they would have made but they did not move a millimeter. The animals seemed a bit thinner in their shell, but seemingly they can survive for very long periods without food. Not being able to emerge from the water as they do normally seems to be a big problem for these animals.
Secretive species: Other animals simply are too shy or live underneath rocks; no point really in putting them in the aquarium if you cannot see them. This happened with Broad-clawed porcelain crabs, a Shore rockling and also a Shore clingfish (although hidden, all of these animals did survive for a long time). I have seen Brittle stars in a Mediterranean aquarium but the ones found in the intertidal here tend to live under rocks and I never saw one back in the aquarium. A Sand star Astropecten irregularis quickly buried itself in the gravel:
Filter feeders: I quickly realized that filter feeders, mussels or tunicates for example, were very difficult. There simply were not enough algae growing in the water to feed them (unfortunately, at times there were plenty of algae growing on the rocks and on the glass). One way to keep filter feeders is to separately cultivate algae for food. A really nice blog describing such a project can be found here. Another solution might be to feed these animals with artificial plankton, which is available commercially. This requires very good skimming to get rid of excess nutrients though. Both options I find too cumbersome at the moment. Having said all this, one filter feeder managed to survive for many months in my aquarium: the variegated scallop.
Other fussy eaters: Worm pipefish did OK in the aquarium, but that was probably because I regularly brought in new seaweeds housing fresh zooplankton. Unlike Mullet, Gobies or Blennies, I have never seen them take frozen food and therefore I will not keep them again until I can provide them regularly with live brineshrimp or similar. Snakelocks anemones always did well in the aquarium, but Beadlet and Strawberry anemones didn’t (they actually did not die but seem to shrink rather than grow over time). The former are able to grow because of their symbiosis with photosynthesizing algae and so do not rely as much on food. I must say that the latter two species are probably relatively easy to keep when you make the effort to regularly dunk a piece of dead prawn on them. The European cowrie Trivia monacha feeds on tunicates which I had trouble keeping alive and so they are unfortunately not an option yet:
Unknown reasons: On a few occasions a species just died and I had no idea why. The only thing this taught me was to not try that species again. This happened to a Common starfish Asterias rubens:
Mud pooling
When it was very low tide last week, I decided to skip the ‘rock pools proper’ on my local beach in Flushing and to check out the zone just below where the rocks and the sandy bottom of Penryn River (an arm of the Fall Estuary) meet. All common rock pool inhabitants – winkles, top shells, edible crabs, worm pipefish and shannies – still live here, but some other organisms are more abundant here than in the rock pools.
Sponges are very common in this silty environment, especially the Estuary sponge Hymeniacidon perleve:
The Breadcrumb sponge Halichondria panicea:
In addition to sponges, I noticed quite a lot of the colony-forming ascidian Botrylloides leachi (see previous post). That explains why I could also find a couple of European cowries Trivia monacha, their predator. Also very common here are the Variegated scallop Chlamys varia and the Thicklipped dog whelk Hinia incrassata (top right picture). I am not sure what the slimy beige stuff is!
I spotted a couple of new things as well, the Red speckled anemone Anthopleura ballii:
Also a first, a Sea spider Nymphon (gracile?):
I found a large patch of these beautiful eggs:
and someone guarding them, a rock goby Gobius paganellus:
A Butterfish Pholis gunnellus:
Very common were little Squat lobsters Galathea squamifera (no picture), rapidly swimming backwards to escape. Even more abundant were these little Hooded prawns Athanas nitescens:
An Bollenessor 