CNC--Fun things on the marine rock platforms--Deborah Evans
Knowing I’d be at a marine volunteers weekend at Anglesea YMCA Camp, I planned my Friday morning for maximum number of easy species to tick off—the local residents such as my roosting Welcome Swallows which had to be caught before they were up and away for the day and the resident lapwing pair; the squabbling throngs in the nearby flowering street trees; and then the well-fed waterbirds at St Augustine’s Lake who swim or waddle up to have their photos taken.
The YMCA camp environs have nice walks for some familiar coastal and heath plant species, although I didn’t cross paths with the Rufous Bristlebirds that some others saw. One of the Saturday workshop sessions was on the use of iNaturalist for marine observations, so I was able to spruik the City Nature Challenge for the weekend. I joined Pete Crowcroft who put his moth sheet up on Saturday night and who got some excellent photos.
Sunday morning was the main field sessions and I chose to go hunting on the exposed Pt Addis rock platform for nudibranchs with the VNPA ReefWatch (including Sea Slug Census) team. It was amazing to watch a 1 cm strip of greenish ‘something’ in a rock pool and realise it was moving—Elysia Coodgeensis, a fairly common species. My favourite for the weekend though was Lamellarias australis, which is a prosobranch gastropod like most of our familiar gasteropod sea shells, not an opisthobranch (sea slug) at all, though it looks ‘squishy’. It has a fragile internal shell completely covered by the fleshy lobes of the body and is in the same superfamily as the cowries—you learn something new every day!
Monday was my Orange-bellied Parrot roster for monitoring the captive released birds, and after we finished the main tasks we went for a walk in the saltmarsh with our receiver for the birds and camera for the plants, many of which are, of course, OBP food plants. Not as easy to ID everything to species level as I had expected, but I’m now good at spotting Frankenia pauciflora, particularly when it does deign to put out a flower or two.
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