2023-08-25 19:39:01
The Oosterschelde is a nature reserve that never ceases to amaze. New species are regularly found, ie new to the Dutch fauna.
It is now half a century ago that the House of Representatives decided not to completely dam the Oosterschelde, but to keep an open connection that would only be closed in an emergency. This prevented an ecological disaster.
We are not immediately aware of this, but the large infrastructural works of which the Netherlands is so proud, such as the Zeeland dams and the Afsluitdijk, not only mean safety, but are also ecological dramas. The Zuiderzee was split into the salty Wadden Sea and the IJsselmeer, which was sweetened in two years. It is doubtful whether permission would still have been obtained in 2023.
Elodrado
In Zeeland, the Grevelingen became an ecologically dead freshwater lake, fortunately the Haringvliet is now ajar. The Oosterschelde came out the best. The clear water is still salty, harbor porpoises live there and it is an El Dorado for recreational divers. They regularly discover something special, such as a horseshoe worm new to our country in 2022 (which is not a worm but belongs to a separate tribe of the animal kingdom) and this week a nudibranch, the large wartsnail.
Nudibranchs or nudibranchs are often extremely colorful animals, which can also have very special shapes. Most species are quite small, a few centimeters is often quite a bit, but there are also larger ones. The species that has now been found was once described by the Dutch/German naturalist Georg Everhard Rumpf (Rumphius, 1627-1702) and subsequently definitively given a scientific name by Linnaeus in 1758: Doris warty. Where he got the genus name Doris from is unclear to me; verrucosa means warty.
Pre workout
Rumphius’ large wartsnail lived near Ambon, but the species is also found in the Mediterranean Sea and further north along the relatively warm Atlantic coasts of France, England and Ireland. And now also in the Oosterschelde, undoubtedly a consequence of global warming. There is one other species of Doris in our country, the rough wart snail Doris eyes, which grows to about an inch and a half in length. The now found large wart snail grows up to seven centimeters long.
Nudibranchs are a carnivorous group of marine molluscs that do not possess a calcareous shell. They have the latter in common with the slugs you know from the garden, but they are not very closely related. There are about three thousand species of Nudibranch worldwide.
Wart snails, as the name suggests, have a large amount of warty papules and frills called papillae on their backs. The gills (Nudibranchia literally means ‘naked gills’) are also on the dorsal side at the rear end of the animal.
Sports divers discovered the mollusk crawling under the Zeeland Bridge. The nice thing about a find like this is that you can be sure there are more out there. And it probably won’t stop with the horseshoe worm and the rough wart snail. The Oosterschelde will provide us with many biological surprises in the coming years.
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