It’s true, I’m easily excited. Pretty much any animal I have worked closely with, or spent a decent amount of time photographing or writing about becomes my new favourite. Hey, I’ve got room for all of the animals in my heart, just not in my home (although to be fair, the possums continue to live in our roof!)
But I have to say, when I recently got word of the possibility of finding some of my absolute favourite critters, yes, even more loved than some of my other favourites, by the time I threw together my camera gear and headed to the beach, I was shaking with excitement.
And just what could have someone like me – who has been lucky enough to have Red Pandas clamber up their bare legs and Meerkats climb over them in search of mealworms – breathlessly digging through tangles of seaweed just to catch a glimpse of them?
The Blue Dragon Nudibranch, that’s what. These tiny sea slugs, glistening with metallic blues and silvers, sometimes get washed up after strong north-easterly winds, although they are so small they are often overlooked.
The larger of the two species, Glaucus atlanticus, identifiable by its longer tail and more silvery hues, can grow up to 3cm, while the Glaucus marginatus with its deeper shades of blue generally only gets to about 1cm in length and when washed up onto the shore, they tend to smoosh up, their ‘wings’ folded up, their bodies wrapped up into themselves. Some of the ones I encountered the other day were smaller than the finger nail on my pinky finger!
They live out on the ocean’s surface as part of the ‘blue fleet’, along with bluebottles, which we all know and some of us love more than others, and the not-as-well-known blue buttons, by-the-wind-sailors and violet snails. These little sea slugs eat the bluebottles they drift with and store the stinging cells in their own bodies which they then use as part of their own defence system. The more bluebottles they’ve eaten, the greater the sting!
And while the bluebottles and by-the-wind- sailors have their own built-in float/sail, and the violet snails make a raft out of mucous bubbles that harden and keep them floating along, the blue dragons (also known as the blue angel, blue lizard or sea swallow) stay afloat by swallowing a little air bubble which they keep in their stomach. So should I just go ahead and assume that the Blue Dragon is now one of your favourite animals too?
