"While we are thrilled to see this beautiful bloom of normally rare nudibranchs, we are concerned about the long-term consequences of our changing coastal environment,” said Dr Terry Gosliner, Academy of Sciences Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology.īack in 2011, Gosliner and his team discovered a link between periods of warming ocean temperatures and nudibranch migrations. Image: Jeff Goddard, California Academy of Sciences Scientists are reporting densities of up to dozens of nudibranchs per square metre. What makes this year's population explosion different to the spikes of decades past is that no official El Niño exists on record for 2015 – leading researchers to worry that this latest bloom could be a signal of a much larger shift in ocean climate. These nudibranchs are a mainly southern species, and they have been all but absent for more than a decade," said John Pearse, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "We haven't seen anything like it in years. Now, researchers from UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, Bodega Marine Laboratory and the California Academy of Sciences have joined in, recording the vast cornucopias (that, apparently, is the collective noun for slugs) along the central and northern California coast, where the animals are rarely ever seen. In fact, the species has not been spotted this far north, or in such large numbers, since the strong El Niños – periods of heavy rain and unusually warm ocean water – that occurred in 1983 and 1998.Ĭitizen scientists were among the first to raise flags about the strange population boom, tracking their observations on the website iNaturalist. But over the past few months, the flamboyant molluscs have been seen crowding tide pools far north of their usual haunts – and rising ocean temperatures are likely to blame, scientists say. The Hopkins' rose nudibranch is a hot pink, inch-long sea slug that usually hangs out in the waters of southern California.
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