Angel Alcala’s Sea Slug
All marine biologists in the Philippines, and many residents of Dumaguete, where he was active at Silliman University, will be aware of the decorated career of Prof. Angel Alcala, one of the pioneers of marine science in the Philippines. He was active in science even in his nineties, and it was a big loss for Philippine marine science when he passed away earlier this year. He was also a truly nice guy and very approachable, despite all of his (well deserved) fame. I had the pleasure to interact with him a few times.
Chromodoris alcalai
What fewer people know is that there is a sea slug named after Prof. Alcala. It’s a nice tradition to name newly discovered species after senior scientists. Terry Gosliner followed this tradition and named a newly described nudibranch sea slug after Prof. Alcala in 2020. The original (holotype) find of this slug was from Batangas, Luzon, in the north of the Philippines.
Now, I don’t believe in magic, but it was certainly a nice coincidence that I photographed an individual of Chromodoris alcalai earlier this year on Tubbataha reefs, one of the best protected marine areas in the Philippines. One major focus of Prof. Alcala’s work were marine protected areas. I didn’t realize initially that this was Chromodoris alcalai, until I posted the image on Flickr and Erwin Koehler, another nudibranch expert, IDed the animal for me. So a nice coincidence in me finding and photographing Prof. Alcala’s slug was followed by another nice coincidence of someone telling me the right name of the animal, online. There are quite a few Chromodoris, so I wasn’t sure which one I had seen.
This is the official description of the sea slug species, you can see the pdf of the scientific paper in the link:
You can see the high-resolution image of the sea slug on my Flickr page:
Me and Prof. Alcala, ca 2014:
More about Sea Slugs
A brief explainer video I compiled a few weeks ago, with all my original footage from the Philippines:
