To round up sea slug January before we move onto sponges, I wanted to have a look at the amazing difference in community and diversity of sea slugs across our hubs in the UK.

The communities you find can change a few miles down the coastlines, and there are species you can find in Cornwall and Devon that have never been seen in Scotland, and vice versa. To look at this further I’ve downloaded all sea slug iNaturalist recordings for these areas.

Here’s a brief summary of the main stats on diversity and abundance, but bare in mind some of our newer hubs haven’t had as much search effort yet, especially those that are harder to get to. There will likely also be higher species numbers in National Biodiversity Network data.

Hub Name Number of Species Number of Observations
Mount Batten 21 116
Castle Beach 22 289
Menai Bridge 57 757
Ovingdean Beach 3 4
East Sands 3 13
Kilve Beach 0 0
Beadnell Haven 3 12
Lee-on-the-Solent 0 0
Shoeburyness 2 5

The Menai Strait certainly seems to be the place to go for rockpool slug diversity! Huge well done to the volunteers down there that have been finding such an incredible variety of species! But remember, the hub areas used on iNaturalist won’t include observations from snorkelling or diving, and either way I’m sure there are plenty more species to be recorded rockpooling at our newer hubs particularly.

To visualize the different communities, I’ve made an interactive map showing the 1st, 2nd and 3rd most common species recorded currently for each hub. You may have to zoom in on a particular hub to see all of them! Click on each image to get a link to some species information about the slug, and to see the owner of the image. While some hubs have yet to record any on iNaturalist, I can’t wait to see how many you have recorded by the end of summer!

Thanks for having a read guys! See you next month to look into the Sponge diversity around the UK!