Thordisa sanguinea Baba, 1955

Ho ho ho. The Holidays are upon us and it's time to Celebrate Sea Slugs. This species with its Santa red mantle seems like the perfect image for this event. Lindz has captured a festive slug dressed up in Santa attire, complete with long scruffy beard-like papillae on the dorsum.

Described by the great Dr. Kikutaro Baba from Japanese waters, it is also common in the Philippines, feeding on red sponges.

With this critter, webmaster Mike, photographer Lindz and I would like to wish each of you a great diving, productive sea slug hunting and a very Merry Christmas.

On the photographic front, the only reason she ever took it up was purely to document what she saw when diving. She started with a second hand Nikonos II, then a Nikonos III and later progressed to a Nikon F3 in an Aquatica housing only moving to digital in 2011. However she also became an accomplished photographer of land & air wildlife, human life events, of capturing special moments. And yet still her first love remains with marine life, especially opisthobranchs.

Having dived in many areas of the world including UK, the Mediterranean, (Spain, France, Corsica), Red Sea, Bahamas, USA (Florida, California, Hawaii), St Lucia, Montserrat, South Africa, Madagascar, Brazil, Fiji, Tonga, French Polynesia, the Tukang Besi Archipelago, SE Sulawesi, Lindsay now spends most of her time in Indonesia diving in places such as Bali, Alor, Lembeh as well as Komodo, Flores, Sumbawa, but has also recently ventured further afield to the species-rich Philippines.

As some of you probably already know, Lindsay spent several seasons in the mid to late 1990s in the Wakatobi National Park islands (Tukang Besi Archipelago, SE Sulawesi, Indonesia) with Operation Wallacea. I am sure it is there that she perfected her technique of non-invasive underwater photography, something I will never master. Lindsay is able to photograph with a 105 mm lens and Macromate wet diopter while hovering about the subject without actually settling down on the seascape. Once more, she is able to do this with macro and super macro subjects. The results are amazing as the reader can see.