graham_montgomery's Favorites

Check out its weird way of moving in this video: https://flic.kr/p/PqGe2P

Found by @jeffgoddard. Same individual as: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/18597683

I was honored to be out tidepooling with Jeff that day :-) The audio captures our puzzlement and the fact that I saw another one earlier that day but was too busy hunting for nudibranchs to realize what I'd seen! :-O

His paper: zookeys.pensoft.net/article/95139/list/9/

??? Moth Lacewing ???
What is it?
1" +/- length. Clear Winged
striped / variegated body greenish body.

Thousands of individuals mating, flying, crawling in/around desert mountainside. No buzzing; just the sound of insects crawling/falling.

*No predators

Holotype (CASIZ 182590), 33 mm long as shown here, on which Terry Gosliner based his 2010 description of this species (as Flabellina goddardi). I found it on a calm and bright overcast morning crawling in the open in a low intertidal pool at Tar Pits Reef. The 2nd image shows the egg mass, 14 mm in diameter, laid by this individual on 10 May 2008. The uncleaved zygotes averaged 65 microns in diameter, were packed one per capsule, and took 7 days at an average of 16 degrees C to develop into hatching planktotrophic veligers. The 3rd image shows, in right ventro-lateral view, one of the veligers just prior to hatching and with a shell 105 microns long.

Unlike most specimens of this species observed subtidally, individuals found intertidally vary in possession of white lines on the body and cephalic tentacles from completely absent (as in this specimen) to incomplete, to complete. With those white lines, subtidal specimens have occasionally been mistaken for Coryphella trilineata.