Return to Muck Diving, Maui Style

Since it is one of Heidi's favorite dive sites she really wanted to get one last muck dive in before heading out on a month long tall ship sailing adventure to the equator and back with S.E.A. So we headed back to our nudibranch heaven and it did not disappoint. We saw ten different species of slugs. And as you can see from these first three pictures of brightly colored kangaroo nudibranchs the visibility was incredible.

 The term 'muck diving' can be a bit confusing. I know it brings images of silt everywhere and not being able to see your hand in front of your face. But the 'muck' doesn't refer to the visibility of the place but rather the bottom. The viz can range from very poor to very good. This was the clearest this site has been for us yet.
  Besides the nudibranchs we also found a rare Hawaiian green lionfish, hiding in the halimedas grass. Another rare find, a squat anemone shrimp, was a first for me. The brown with white polka dotted pattern on the shrimp at first made me think I had spotted a new nudibranch.

This blue, black, and golden slug is called a swallow tail slug. They are a little different than nudibranchs, notice the lack of exposed gills on the back when compared to the black and blue gloomy nudibranch pictured below it. We always find a number of gloomy nudibranchs here but today there must have been twenty or more slowly sliding over the sandy bottom.

   But the two that really stuck out were these imperial nudibranchs. Head to tail in a classic mating pose, these two trailed each other across this silt covered rock.