Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 5

86. A Soft Collision

The slow-motion pace of this website over recent months is in good accord with this post, which chronicles an encounter between two gastropods under the sea.

On the left, above, we have Hypselodoris bennetti, a nudibranch; on the right, much larger, a Rose Bubble Shell, Hydatina physis. I came across them at Nelson Bay. The initial scene was like this:

Two gastropods, minding their own business. But the nudibranch turned, and soon they were on a collision course, as in the first photo above.

W...

85. Gorgons (and Covid notes)

The gorgons in Greek mythology were three snake-haired sisters – Medusa the most famous – who were daughters of Echidna and Typhon. (Australian Echidnas may have been named, by Cuvier, for Echidna, referring to their chimeric appearence.)

Under water, gorgononians are octocorals – soft coral colonies made of many flower-like polyps. At Nelson Bay, Australia, gorgonians are often bright yellow. (The genus is apparently Euplexaura, though I don’t know a lot about them.) They are beautiful in thei...

84. Bower Life, 2

This post has some more photos from Cabbage Tree Bay in Sydney – from the Fairy Bower and Shelly Beach sites. Most are from the same dive, last month, as the previous post. The first animal I saw, starting out on that dive, was the beast above.

There are two species of large rays found in this stretch of coast, the Smooth Stingray and Black Stingray. They look similar but have different personalities. Black Stingrays, which we more often see further south, are placid, self-absorbed giants. Smoo...

83. Bower Life

A couple of weeks ago I did my first dive for a while at Cabbage Tree Bay, in Sydney. In a vague way, the bay has two sites, Fairy Bower and Shelly Beach, with a shallow expanse of sand separating them. Early winter is Giant Cuttlefish mating season. This one above, small but purposeful, was patrolling the shallows on the Bower side. I encountered him at the end of the dive, the bulk of which was taken up with a swim from the Bower to Shelly, and two other cephalopods encountered on the way.

Th...

82. From the Shore

All the photos in this post, except one, are from a shore dive I did a few weeks ago in the coral garden at Fly Point, Nelson Bay. An earlier post on this site had some natural history first and then reflections on the situation we are all facing. Today, it will be the pandemic first and animals at the end.

My previous posts (1, 2) discussed two issues: the extent of the lockdowns, given the trade-offs between immediate and longer-term harms, and the excessive policing of behavior in some...

81. The Lockdowns

The previous post on this site urged a recognition of tradeoffs in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic tradeoffs between the direct effects of the virus and effects on public health of the shutdowns now in place in many countries. I also highlighted a newly visible divide in society between people, like me, whose salaries continue through the shutdowns (the easy side of the divide), and people whose income has, through no fault of their own, suddenly vanished (the hard side). I expressed some...

80. White’s Colors

With a hint of irony given the name, Whites seahorse, the most common species at my New South Wales dive sites, appears in many color forms. Ive seen at least four colors that are markedly distinct yellow, orange, pale grey, and dark brown and at least some intermediates between these. I came across the pair below last week, and they nudged me into doing some reading.

The reading yielded two immediate surprises. First, I had assumed that the color forms were either permanent or at least...

79. The Fires

I set tonight aside to write a post about the Australian fires, beginning with the welcome fact that those fires are now receding, from our area at least, and it’s possible to take stock and think about things in a calmer and less smoke-choked way. It seemed that we were coming out of the hardest period, as many areas have had decent rain for the first time since winter. Though I knew it was probably optimistic, with at least four weeks of the fire season to go, it seemed we had turned a...

78. Ecomodernism?

Occasionally on this website I’ve criticized the way commentators and activists talk about climate change in relation to other environmental issues – the other issues are too often sidelined. I’ve also been dissatisfied with discussion of how to handle climate change itself. A little while ago, I heard on the radio some ideas that have me organizing my thinking on this issue much more than before. The radio interview was with Jonathan Symons,who works at Macquarie University in Australia...

77. Melibe

Some years ago, still new to the Opithsobranch world, I wrote a post on my old website marveling at an animal called Pteraeolidia ianthina, or the Blue Dragon. It was then my candidate for the strangest looking creature I’d ever seen. No longer. While diving at Lembeh Strait earlier this year, we came across the animal above.

I literally could not work out head from tail. It seemed to be moving mostly with one end in front, but that end had a particularly implausible head candidate, a large flat frying-pan or shovel. That seemed a...

called Pteraeolidia