Sea Rabbits

"Sea Rabbits"!?!  Sometimes you really have to love the Indonesian translation for things… In English, they are the difficult to pronounce and remember, Nudibranchs, or affectionately called Nudi’s (actually a little bit of a double-entendre, since these sea slugs are without a shell)!

Anyway, I just found out that the Indonesians refer to them as Kelincin Laut (or Sea Rabbits)… take a look for yourself and see how appropriate this is!  With their rabbit-ear-like rhinopores, and their fluffy cotton tails (actually their lungs)...

I found this nudi 2 feet from the Kalabia under the jetty at the village of Meos Manggara in Raja Ampat:

And this one in the process of laying its eggs on a cement piling at the jetty at the village of Fam.  I'd seen these beautiful floral arrangement-like egg deposits before, but never actually encountered a nudi in the process of laying them - so special!  It was a split moment in time as well, since several hours later when I went in to check on the progress, the 'mama' was nowhere to be found!

There are hundreds (thousands?) of species of nudis, if you can imagine!? 

I generally prefer the above 'soft and fluffy' type to the more-common (at least in my experience), 'hard and knobbly' ones like the one below.

Oh, and to give you an idea of the size of these little guys - there are only a few species that get much bigger than this...