Sometimes I feel bad not being more specific on the species of critters I am sharing – remember that shrimp goby post from the other day?
But sometimes it is really difficult. Case in point, this looks like a fairly distinct nudibranch, but once you start going through books, you quickly find that there are a bunch of species with very similar coloration. Here’s what it looks like when I’m trying to identify something tricky…
My photo on the laptop, two different books, each with multiple pages of potential candidate species, and that’s not even getting into the internet searching. Plus, if you look closely, you’ll see that multiple entries in that book in the front are just labeled as “Chromodoris sp” with a number – I believe that generally means there is not enough data for there to be a positive identification, it could be a different species or just a different color morph… so I guess if it happens in the ID books, I shouldn’t feel so bad about doing it on my little blog here.
