Below is a link to the second of four papers planned with my twin sons on nudibranchs and allies from Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties, this one on Tar Pits Reef in Carpinteria.

Tar Pits Reef is a small, but rich intertidal site for nudibranchs, especially in the late spring, at the height of the blooms of epiphytic hydroids but before inundation of parts of the reef by sand in late summer. During our 40 total trips to this site we recorded 3590 total individuals in 52 species of heterobranch sea slugs, 45 of which were nudibranchs. The reef is also the type locality for Pacifia goddardi, which was described and named after me in 2010 by Terry Gosliner and which has since been found subtidally at Santa Cruz and Anacapa Islands, Malibu, and Palos Verdes. Craig Hoover and I published a paper of the distribution, seasonality and diet of P. goddardi (as Flabellina goddardi) in 2016, and I have also provided below a link to that paper.

Since 2020 we have sampled Tar Pits Reef for sea slugs twice more, once in April 2021, when Ziggy added Eubranchus sp. 1 of Behrens et al. (2022) to our list for the reef (and extended its range from La Jolla: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/75602522), and most recently on a pre-dawn trip with @alanarama3 on the 4th of this month.

Link to Goddard and sons (2021): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wHagF8rf_h92jzGzUfpb3VfWyDvWKIXm/view?usp=sharing

Link to Goddard and Hoover (2016): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1B6pJK4o_FladZ93CcuoQcqCVt7NNQGH5/view?usp=sharing

@anudibranchmom, @chilipossum, @passiflora4, @chloe_and_trevor, @kestrel, @rebeccafay, @nudibitch, @kueda, @dpom, @craigahoover, @lemurdillo, @lorri-gong, @lutea11, @alanarama3, @alex_bairstow, @imlichentoday, @skatingflamingo

Posted on June 23, 2023 03:09 PM by jeffgoddard