Happy Holidays from The Right Blue!

Christmas Tree worm (Spirobranchus giganteus) and Pillar Coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus), with polyps extended

by B. N. Sullivan

We chose this image for our holiday post because we thought it looked festive. We hope you agree.

The photo, taken during a night dive off  Providenciales in the Turks and Caicos Islands, shows a stand of Pillar Coral (Dendrogyra cylindrus) with its polyps extended for feeding.  Nestled cozily in the coral is a kind of Polychaete worm called the Christmas Tree worm (Spirobranchus giganteus).  The worm burrows into coral and secretes a calcareous tube in which it lives.  Only its pair of feathery 'Christmas Tree' shaped crowns are visible outside its tube. The feathery tentacles on the crowns trap tiny tidbits of food, and also are used for respiration.

The Christmas Tree worm can retract its crowns into its tube for protection.  When the crowns retract, a structure called the operculum closes snugly over the tube like a lid or a little trap door.  Christmas Tree worms come in lots of colors: red, orange, yellow, blue, and white. We also have seen a version that is striped!

We hope all of our readers are enjoying the holiday season, and we wish you all a very happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year.

It's a Pipefish, but which Pipefish?

Unidentified Pipefish, Fukui Point, Bunaken Island, Indonesia

by B. N. Sullivan

Nature photographers sometimes find it difficult to positively identify a creature they have photographed in the wild.  Certainly those of us who began taking pictures of critters in pre-Google days had (and still have) shelves full of reference books that we pored over, looking for photos or descriptions of animals we were trying to identify.  Nowadays, the task is made easier due to the wealth of online materials, searchable databases, and so on.  Still, many online photos are misidentified, so the trick is to find authoritative sources.

Generally, large animals and very common animals are easier to identify, while small, and/or less common creatures still can present a challenge.  Relying solely on an animal's coloration or markings to identify it does not always work.  For many species, the males and females look quite different.  As well, many creatures undergo drastic changes in appearance as they progress through their various developmental stages.  In some cases, similar species can be distinguished from one another only through laboratory examination of structures not visible externally.

But I digress...

This is a about a pipefish.  Recently, The Terramar Project published an article about a pipefish photo that prompted some marine scientists to think that it depicted a new species.  The article reminded me that I had a pipefish photo, taken many years ago, that I had never been able to identify with certainty.

That's my mystery pipefish at the top of the page.  To me, it resembles the so-called Network Pipefish (Coryichthys flavofasciatus), but may not be an exact match.  Now, perhaps the resolution of the photo is not as crisp as it could have been.  The markings thus may not be clearly represented.

But if anyone knows with a fair degree of certainty what Pipefish species is in my photo, please let us know.  Leave a comment or send us a tweet: @TheRightBlue

For the record, the fish was photographed (on film) at Fukui Point, Bunaken Island, in Indonesia's Bunaken National Marine Park -- in 1993!