Specimens posted to iNaturalist and Project Noah

We have posted for identification four specimens at Project Noah, and one at iNaturalist, and are waiting to see what sort of responses we receive.

At Project Noah, we have posted these four specimens:

 A white, pink-ringed variation of the usually green aggregating anemone Anthopleura elegantissima from deep under a rock ledge in Gerstle Cove at Salt Point State Park? See Project Noah.

A completely calcified example of the Coral Weed  Corallina officinalis from atop a bed of Endocladia and Mastocarpus in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary at Pacific Grove? See Project Noah

Another example of calcified algae, here of the red encrusting algae Lithophyllum incrustans from Fitzgerald Marine Reserve? See Project Noah.

A specimen of the Mossy Chiton Mopalia mucosa, also from Fitzgerald Marine Reserve? See Project Noah. There is a page full of Mossy Chitons at Flickr – take a gander and see if they look the same as this one. The Mossy Chiton was also posted to iNaturalist.

We’ve also added at iNaturalist an example of rockweed we cannot identify. At a glance, it looks like Endocladia, that “Brillo Pad algae,” and covers large surface areas in the intertidal in the same way as Endocladia, dramatically reducing available real estate for other life forms, but a closer look shows it to be quite different.

Not that it has anything to do with intertidal invertebrates, but we have to mention that a fellow just walked over to where we are staying in Timber Cove CA (for the Salt Point Gerstle Cove survey) and bought a copy of Yang Shen! He likes the detail in the novel (so there! I loaned him a copy to look at overnight, and this morning told him I could get it for him wholesale. I suppose that we should now go over to the Old China Books blog and post something about the intertidal survey, for the sake of reciprocity.)