Nudibranch Slime
I was helping Garrett and Hannah out with cataloging and photographing their nudibranchs that they had collected in Dr. Carrington's lab. As I watched Garrett photograph these organisms on the black background of the desks, I noticed that they began to secrete increasingly disturbing amounts of slime onto the desk which then began to drip in an offensively dramatic way down the side of the desk and land in little "spats" on the concrete floor. Though the slime reminded me of spit and I hate spit it was awesome that these little blobs of slime could produce so much of it themselves. It's also really cool to see an organism that spends its life in water out of it, because it can usually rely on that water to keep it up and looking fresh, but when it's in the air, it collapses on itself and just starts to look sort of sad and blobby. That's how a nudibranch is though. The rufus ones were the worst because of how much they open up in the water. They expand all their little tiny parts and they look like a piece of purple broccoli or something, but out of water they look like a boiled ham hock. Anyways after all this we went down to the dock where we released them back into the sound. They floated slowly down into the shallow abyss and I'm sure are up on the pilings by now joining the pyncnopodia and shrimp that we noticed there as we released them. We also netted a liparis sp? we believe. It was a rather large one too.
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