Re: Aeolidiella alba in Mexico

Dear Ali,
I guess it would be nice to know if the cerata move in Mexican animals the same way as I have described for Australian animals.

What else should you check on? If you are asking about your whole survey work at Bahia de Banderas, not just about Aeolidiella alba, I would suggest you make a note of anything that is interesting about living animals you come across. If they wave their mantle, is it all the mantle, or just the anterior end etc, etc. Do they wave their gills? If so is it a regular fast flicker, or a slow irregular movement? These things may not seem important at the time, but in a few months or years you may be looking for a character to sort two species which are very similar in colour or anatomy, and such a character may become extremely important.

The other thing you can't do with preserved animals is learn about their egg ribbons development type or food. So my advice would be to try and incorporate this into your survey work. When you collect specimens, try and collect a sample of their food. Getting food items identified is often difficult, as there are few competent experts in the world in most marine invertebrate groups. So to make your food sample appealing to an overworked expert, take a good photo of it so the expert gets a specimen and a photo for their records. From my experience, being able to show a sponge or soft-coral expert a photo, usually makes your request for an identification much more interesting to them than just a preserved decolourised specimen. It is also useful, if possible, to keep animals you are collecting alive for a while, even overnight, in the chance they will lay an egg ribbon, which you can photograph.

In brief, make notes about your animals, don't rely on your memory, and even if you are taking good photos, make a quick sketch and note the basic colour pattern. In a year or two you may discover when you dissect one of your 'species' that there are two quite different species with almost identical colour patterns. Unless you have good colour notes of your earlier collections, the only way you will be able to separate them is to dissect them all, and you really don't want to have to do that. And finally, the first time you find a species may be the last time you see it, so never say to yourself I'll take a photo and draw this one next time I find it.

These of course are impossible standards. We all regret the one we should have photographed but were too tired, or hungry etc.
Good Luck,
Bill Rudman