References
Scientific references
muckdiving.net is a website written by divers about finding and photographing animals on black sand and silt. It is not a scientific publication and has no scientific accreditation. For names, identification and species data, FishBase, WoRMS and the other databases below are the best sources available online.
Every critter entry is checked against these sources for its name, size, depth and range. Where an entry and a database disagree, the database is the better authority, and the entry is corrected once the difference is reported.
- FishBase
- Size, depth, habitat, range and biology for the fishes, from frogfish and ghost pipefish to the gobies living with shrimps in the silt. The first place to look for any fish.
- SeaLifeBase
- The same kind of species account for everything that is not a fish: octopus, cuttlefish, crabs, shrimps, sea slugs and worms, which make up much of a muck dive.
- World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS)
- Which scientific name is currently accepted, and who described the species and when. The names on this site follow it unless an entry says otherwise.
- MolluscaBase
- The mollusc part of WoRMS, covering the nudibranchs, other sea slugs, cephalopods and shells.
- Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes
- The California Academy of Sciences catalogue of fish names, with the original description behind each one.
- IUCN Red List
- Conservation status, for the species that have been assessed.
- OBIS
- Records of where marine species have been found, gathered from surveys and museum collections.
- GBIF
- Occurrence records for all living things, used alongside OBIS to check that a species is really recorded in a region.
- Sea Slug Forum
- Bill Rudman's archive of sea slug identifications at the Australian Museum, still one of the most useful resources on Indo-Pacific nudibranchs.