David Strike wrote

> I don't care that the rest of you don't appear to have been diving.  :-)

Poop.  My season is just starting.  I've put the wetsuit away until next
winter and have already started increasing my intake of nitrogen.  I thought
I posted it here, but just in case I didn't, my dives weekend before last
were pretty spectacular.  The usual thousands of fish were around, but being
usual, I often forget to mention them.  Dive one included a sea turtle that
was posing atop a sponge.  When one of our 4 many drift diving group
approached, he moved slow off, heading straight for me.  From less than a
foot, we kind of looked each other over before he turned for a pet, which I
was happy to provide, and went in search of more attractive submerged land
critters.  As nice as dive one was, dive two was considerably better.  About
half way through the dive, an out of town guest, a Yankee at that, started
shouting, pointing and generally doing wierd things.  It was clear that
something had her excited, but not immediately evident what she was excited
about.  It soon became clear.  A great hammerhead had just come into view.
As we all watched with varying degrees of awe and fear, a hammerhead I
judged to be about 8 feet and others judged to be about 12 feet, approached,
turned a bit to give us a good look and then swam off into the distance.
Those of you who dive or have been diving where hammerheads are the primary
attraction may not be too impressed, but this was the first hammerhead I've
ever seen while diving.  Quite a treat.

> Diving at Shelly Beach with Julian and Co., I discovered two nudibranchs
> that apparently live in Indonesia and the far northern reaches of the
Great
> Barrier Reef.  It was black with geometric white markings and a
'boggle-eyed
> white band' across its head.  With a forked tail resembling that of a
> swallow, the first one that I saw was following the mucous trail of
another.
> Eventually they got together and began doing what - and I'm not quite
> certain how boy and girl nudibranchs do whatever it is that they do? -
what
> any red blooded nudibranch would do when it discovered another of its
> species so far from where home's supposed to be!  :-)

I'm surely not an expert on nudibranchs.  We have a few varieties here, but
they're not seen very often and are not generally of the spectacular quality
I keep seeing on the Discovery Channel.  The Discovery Channel brings me to
my point.  Just recently, they showed scenes of a nudibranch similar to what
you describe, doing what you describe, following a mucous trail of another
nudibranch.  In their film, it was food, not sex that was on the mind of the
trailing critter.  He was a predator in search of prey . . . in the form of
the other nudibranch.  I haven't the foggiest whether the one you saw was a
fighter or a lover, only that there's more than one possibility.

Lee