Sea Slug

It started in Khao Lak — a village in Phang Nga province, sitting just south of the mountain it shares a name with. I saw my first sea slugs there and thought they were pretty, and that might have been the end of it. But I kept reading about them, and the more I read the less ordinary they became.

Then came a few months in Chumphon, shore diving at Ao Yai almost every day. That was what did it. Walking into the water each morning not knowing what I would find, and finding something new nearly every time — a colour I had not seen, a shape that made no sense, a creature the size of my thumbnail wearing patterns I could not have invented. My dive log stopped being a record of depths and started being a record of them.

There are over 3,000 known species and scientists keep finding more. Their name means naked gills, for the feathery plumes on their backs that they breathe through. Most of them are not hiding — those loud colours are a warning, a way of telling anything that might eat them that it would be a mistake. Divers call them the butterflies of the sea, and once you start looking for them you cannot stop.

That was the problem, really. I wanted to keep looking at them when I was not in the water. That is where this design came from, and eventually a deck of 52 sea slug cards — one for each, so they could come along on the surface intervals, the long boat rides and the days between trips.