Marta Comes Through Again

    On our last full day in Pemuteran, near the northwest corner of the Island of Bali, Sandra and I spent the morning snorkeling.  It had been raining ferociously in the afternoons, but this morning dawned clear with blue skies.  From the beach in front of Reef Seen Dive Resort, one could look west thirty miles to the Island of Java rising out of the sea bearing the same name.

   The ocean itself was pleasantly warm, in the upper 80s, and we were therefore able to swim for over two hours without getting chilled.  We had snorkeled this spot once before, a relatively flat reef of  sand and coral rubble, interspersed with patches of sea grass that extended at least fifty meters from the shore. Over this large patch, the depth varied from four to ten feet.
Although it was not beautiful, it was never

A look at the Reef Seen Reef from the Sea

the less a treasure trove for the curious muck diver.
  
    If you have been following the blog, you may recall a description of this outing and I will not repeat it here.  Suffice it to say that we made lots of interesting observations and our experience, growing every day, permitted us to put names to many of the animals that we found.  However, we were unable to classify two animals in particular, taking several pictures of each in hopes that these photographs would later aid in identification.  As the months have worn on, such would prove most definitely not to be the case.
 
    The first of these creatures was a damselfish with a distinct caudal peduncle of light ochre.  He has remained unnamed and I need to get back to work on this fish, which I have tentatively named the Java Damselfish.   The second was far more obscure. To me, it looked like a jumble of bright blue

The yet to be identified java damsel

sticks.  There were five or six of these aggregations, bright blue branches and the size of a tumbleweed.  Residing in an area about thirty meters from shore at a depth of about five feet,these clumps were rather close together, not widely dispersed over the reef.  Like the Russian thistle of the American southwest, these clumps rose eighteen inches to two feet from the sea bed and a certain anarchy seemed to rule the disposition of the branches.

    As with the damselfish, the interested parties that reviewed my pictures really had no idea. Could it be a coral, a gorgonian?  Who knew?

    With the paper mache fish exhibit finally complete, resplendent in the Thelma Parker Library, I felt that it was time to renew my efforts to identify the enigmatic clumps of blue sticks.

     For a number of years now I have plagued Marta de Maintenon, a professor of invertebrate

zoology at UH Hilo.  I have never met Marta, but over the years I have had the opportunity to ask her for help with identifications and such via email and she has always been helpful.

Marta Demaintenon  paddling for science

   Preparing for this blog, I did a little troll work on Marta. The University of Hawaii has a site where you can rate your teacher.  Marta scored just over a three with six reviews.  One guy didn't like her because she made him learn too much taxonomy, which I believe was the purpose of the course, and that pulled her average down.

   And she has a Facebook page, which wasn't very helpful.  Her profile picture is of a healthy younger woman paddling an ocean kayak, with a Nature Conservancy Banner and the admonition, "I'm With Science."  Our dear friends Brad and Dale back in La Conner, outdoorsy academic types, are with science, as well.  These days being "with science" must be a sad and lonely situation.  Other than being with science, Marta's Facebook page suggests that she might remind you of the girl with the pearl earring.  In the spirit of social media, I sent her a friend request, along with a link to the blog in which Donal Trump says that thinking of crabs give him an itch.  Certainly anyone who is "with science", especially an invertebrate zoologist,  should like that.

Haliclona kormella Reef Seen reef, Pemuteran 2017

   So two days ago I sent Marta a request for an identification: the jumble of blue sticks.  The blue sticks had stumped the California Academy of Science Naturalist experts, among others.  Marta is interested in gastropods, snails to the lay person (Dumb and Dumber loosely).  Back when I was courting her participation in my invertebrate education, I sent her a night photo of  a money cowry, extending its mantle, on our lanai at Alii Villas.  Not exactly a heart-shaped box of chocolates.

     Curiously, I can not recollect ever asking her about marine snails.  So on a few instances where I have needed  help, Marta has referred me to the appropriate authority.  This time she served as my advocate, sending my picture on to Gustav Paulay, who is the curator of the Florida Museum of
Natural History and an ace marine biologist.  In less than a day Gustav replied:

  Hi Marta - It is a Haliclona, close to if not matching Haliclona koremella.  Cheers - Gustav

and Marta added:   And there you have it! Gustav knows all...

Gustav Paulay Wearing Husky Purple.  Go Dogs!

     A few words about Gustav.  He graduated magna cum laude from Yale and then received his PhD in zoology from Washington, arriving in Seattle seven years after I departed those ivy covered walls after majoring in, you guessed it, zoology.  One would guess that we knew some of the same people.  Go Huskies.

   One last thing about Dr Paulay.  Early in his career he emigrated from Budapest, Romania.  Don't tell Trump.  Budapest is nowhere near Norway... he'll probably have him sent back, sponges or no sponges.

    So now that we have an identification, what about this tumbleweed of the coral reef?  Haliclona is a genus of sponge.  If you scan back up the page, you will note that when I (and everyone else, as far as I can tell)  was attempting to identify this beast, sponges were not part of the discussion.  Once I had this information, I looked at the picture differently and it wasn't terribly difficult to imagine that I was looking at a sponge, however unlike the thing I use for washing dishes.

     Haliclona belongs to the class Demospongiae which includes 90% of all sponges.  They have "skeletons" consisting of spicules of the protein spongin and the mineral silica.  Obviously, most sponges don't grow into long thin branches, but that explains how, in this case, H. koremella manages that open branching structure.

Black Vase Sponges on the wall at Mangroves, Menangen Island

    Obviously Gustav looked at my picture and recognized that he was looking at a sponge.  Its very possible that he had seen this widely distributed sponge in the wild and recognized it immediately.  There are over 200 species in the genus Haliclona.  I doubt that he is able to identify them all, but then I never graduated magna cum laude from anywhere, much less Yale.

   We saw a lot of sponges in Bali.  being first and foremost a lister of fishes, I hadn't considered how many species of sponge I may have seen.  Certainly we saw some amazing barrel sponges and vase sponges.  The cumbersome field guide we have at home, Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific, says that to identify a sponge from a picture constitutes a good guess, at best. 

    So thanks to Marta and hats off to Gustav.   Our thanks to the nice people at Reef Seen Divers'  Resort for the fine job they have done preserving that special habitat and the warm welcome they extend to visiting snorkelers.  

   And Go Huskies