Description:

This is my 1000th spotting! Yay! --------------------------------------------------------------------------I've been trying to figure out what exactly this is for years. I've taken it to my bio teacher and he couldn't ID it so he showed it to other bio majors and they couldn't figure it out either. So I'm thinking maybe it could be a new species? There are lots of them in the intertidal in Avalon bay year round. They seem to be some sort of keel worm (Pomatoceros), but all the pictures I see of them are white. None of them are purple like these. They all vary in length but are usually a few inches long.

Habitat:

Tidepools in Avalon Bay. On and under rocks in the intertidal zone.

Notes:

The only other keelworm I see is Pomatoceros triqueter, but they're all white. According to Wikipedia: "This species is found in the Arctic, eastern North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, Adriatic, Black and Red Sea, the English Channel, the North Sea, Skagerrak, Kattegat the Little and Great Belts and Øresund north east to the Bay of Kiel." None of them say Catalina Island or west coast pacific. So have I found myself a new species? Or is it a subspecies of Pomatoceros triqueter that somehow got introduced to Catalina and turned purple?