June, 1999 
SCAMIT Newsletter 
Vol. 18, No.2 
would take notes when they see these 
organisms whether or not eggs are present, 
time of year and size of the animal. As well, he 
would like to see these animals with their 
commensals and/or predators still attached. In 
other words, preserve together the branch of 
the pen and the nudibranch, ovulid, etc.. Do 
not remove the commensal/predator and 
preserve it separately. He would also 
appreciate any specimens of Clavularia or 
Alcyonium that people may have and could 
spare. These animals are rocky substrate 
organisms not commonly seen in POTW’s 
monitoring programs. If you should run across 
any, please consider sending them to Eric. 
The request for pennatulid specimens is in 
support of a new examination of the west coast 
fauna; a continuation of the treatment in the 
Atlas. This will involve Dr. Gary Williams of 
the California Academy of Sciences as well. 
He has reviewed most, if not all, of the 
important types which are still extant. He has 
also recently been working on virgulariids from 
New Zealand and is now ready to tackle our 
problem ridden local species. 
We next discussed the Cnidaria volume of the 
Taxonomic Atlas series. Since our comments 
on the first two chapters, authored by Eric and 
John, were generally only editorial we decided 
to list them and send them along to Eric for 
correction in any future second edition. Our 
comments on the third chapter, the Anthozoa, 
were more critical and much more substantial. 
We generally felt, for instance, that the use of 
illustrations of related species, or of 
representatives of putatively wide ranging 
species from other oceans, was ill-advised. We 
also felt that the effort was particularly light in 
areas where much information is available 
locally, such as the edwardsiids. This may 
reflect the nature of the collection examined, 
but left us very unsatisfied. It was concluded 
that our issues and requests need to be clearly 
spelled out and forwarded to Daphne via Eric. 
A wonderful, healthy lunch of sandwiches and 
fruit was enjoyed by all outside on John’s 
property. The entertainment was provided by a 
mass of hummingbirds which swarmed John’s 
house in order to partake of the large feeders he 
had provided. These feisty little guys give new 
meaning to “eating like a bird”; they drain 
several gallons of sugar-water each week. 
The afternoon was spent examining specimens, 
mostly anthozoa. Among which were many 
Thesea, including the form called The sea sp A 
in the B’98 sampling by CSDLAC. As it turns 
out John never had a Thesea sp A, he started by 
adopting the Thesea sp B used by Dave 
Harden. This then became our commonly 
encountered form. A voucher sheet will be 
prepared by Don Cadien for Thesea sp A, a 
substantially more robust form than any other 
Thesea encountered locally. We also examined 
several uncommonly encountered anemones, 
and an odd gorgonian from about 90m on the 
rocky shelf off San Miguel Island. This was 
initially interpreted as similar to Gersemia , but 
both John and Eric recognized it as an early 
stage of a briariid gorgonian, probably in the 
genus Suberia. A similar form is illustrated by 
Kiikenthal (1924, pg. 33). We also reviewed a 
few hydroids, including a large clump of 
“Tubularia” to illustrate the morning Tubularia 
vs Ectopleura discussion. 
21 JUNE MEETING 
We began the Bight’98 polychaete meeting 
discussing dorsal organs in spionids, a topic 
that Vice President Leslie Harris raised during 
a recent (2 June 99) posting to the Taxonomic 
Discussion List. Dorsal organs occur on the 
dorsum of several different genera and species 
of Spionidae. The structures are ciliated 
sideways “U” shaped or longitudinal structures 
that run down the dorsum of some spionids. 
These dorsal organs are neither sex-linked nor 
do they occur on any particular setiger. These 
organs are quite obvious when they do occur. 
They have been found on species of Spio and 
Microspio but these structures are not to be 
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