Lomentaria articulata | An Bollenessor

As in Falmouth, the rock pools in Flushing are not looking that great at the moment. Lots of the Corallina has turned white/died (although the clumps in my tank are still their normal purple!). Of course, many species were still thriving, Grape pip weed Mastocarpus stellatus (top), Bunny ears Lomentaria articulata (bottom), new Thong weed Himanthalia elongata ‘buttons’ and a young blade of kelp along with some green Ulva:Among the seaweeds that were thriving was Slimy whip weed Chordaria flagelliformis (I am by no means a seaweed expert and I might be wrong about this, please comment if I am!) and also the beautiful Harpoon weed Asparagospis armata growing as an epiphyte on some darker coloured False eyelash weed. Harpoon weed is invasive and so a good candidate to do well int he aquarium (as most invasive species are quite opportunistic and not too finnicky). It died off in the tank before, but I decided to bring some home to try again now I have a chiller.

Another tangling invasive species: Bonnemaison’s hook weed Bonnemaisonia hamifera (a characteristic curved hook can be seen in the top-middle):Loads more seaweeds to be found but I will save those for another time. All kinds of tunicates pop up in spring, some of them pretty (see for instance here), some of them less so. For instance the invasive species, the Leathery sea squirt Styela clava and an out-of-focus photo of a second, large (>10 cm) species that did not get a lot of response on the NE Atlantic Tunicata FaceBook group. Aplidium nordmanni was offered, see here for a much smaller version of that species. Not a looker either in any case!

I brought my little aquarium net and found many juvenile (<1 cm) fish as well as Mysis shrimp. The fish look like gobies but it is hard to see. They were completely translucent and so you can see what this one just ate. I should take some bits of seaweed home to see what comes crawling and swimming out under a little USB microscope (quite easy to make little videos). It is hard to come up with decent images squatting and squinting on a slippery rock with a salt-encrusted mobile phone!

I had to remove the False eyelash weed from the aquarium; some bits were looking fine but in general a substantial amount of the branches had died off. Perhaps this is what normally happens in nature, only in rock pools any dead material is quickly washed away and so it goes unnoticed. I had to make some water changes to get rid of the debris which required some healthy exercise bringing buckets of waters down from the quay. Although it was windy and cold, I could not resist the urge to have a look at my local beach in Flushing last Saturday, hunting for some more seaweeds. It was noticeable that one particular seaweed had started to grow everywhere: Dumont’s tubular weed Dumontia contorta:

Slightly slimy and impossible to remove from the rock without ending up with a hand of loose strands. I therefore have placed a large pebble with one small plant in the aquarium just to see how it goes. I found small plants of Solier’s red string weed Soliera chordalis again that did well in the aquarium last year, as well as a whole bunch of other red seaweeds that I have trouble to identify (not the first one, that is Bunny ears Lomentaria articulata):