Kinky Sea Slug

A “nudibranch” is not, it turns out, a local public library where patrons walk around without any clothes, as I’d always believed.

“Nudibranch” actually refers to a “taxonomic clade of soft-bodied, shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusks noted for their often extraordinary colors and striking forms,” according to Wikipedia – a description that I still think would apply to patrons at my local public library if they were to walk around without clothes.

Last month, after my talk at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, a gentleman in attendance named Robert Stowe told me about nudibranchs and sent me a photo of one that he himself had taken while diving in San Diego Harbor’s “Wreck Alley.” This brilliant specimen, he said, is called a “Spanish Shawl.”