Sea Slug Scientific Serendipity (I do love the smell of alliteration in the morning

A nudibranch if not the species in question

I remember someone defining serendipity as looking for a needle in a haystack but finding the farmer’s daughter. This definition will hold for many but for a naturalist perhaps serendipity is finding a new species in your back yard (so to speak)

According to Science Daily this is what happened to Jeff Goddard, project scientist with the Marine Science Institute at UC Santa Barbara.

Goddard was working in the tide pools at Carpinteria Reef, in Carpinteria State Park, Calif., when he found a new species of nudibranch. Recognizing it as new, Goddard carefully documented the living specimen before preserving it and sending it off to Terrence M. Gosliner, an authority on the taxonomy of sea slugs at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco

Gosliner named the new sea slug after Goddard when he described it -- and one other newly discovered species of California nudibranch -- in the Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences.


Not much of a story if you are not interested in sea molluscs of the gastropode sort but I would be as pleased as Punch (but only half as handsome, sadly!)

It does provide an excuse for my next post too