Lemons of the Sea
- Caleb Venturo
- Nov 7
- 2 min read
©2025 by Daniel Venturo
It was a nice evening on the Oregon coast, and we had decided to take a tide pooling excursion before cleaning up and having dinner. We climbed through the rocks and started finding things—mammoth green anemones, orange and purple starfish, and spiny sea urchins. We called each other over to see tubeworms , new kinds of starfish, or strange gelatinous blobs.
Then, as we peered under a large boulder, we saw a lemon! As we gathered around to examine the strange object, we found it was actually not some sort of fruit. It was an animal—a bright yellow, oval-shaped, slimy something.
As it turns out, what we saw actually was a lemon, although no ordinary one. It was a sea lemon! But what is a sea lemon?!
The sea lemon is a type of nudibranch that lives from Vancouver Island, Canada, to Baja California in the lower intertidal. It feeds on sponges by rasping on them with its radula. Predators will not eat a sea lemon because of its acidic taste. Although most sea lemons are yellow, some of them feed on red volcano sponges, making them a bright orange. There is a small, branchy extension near the back of the sea lemon. What is that for? This is called the nudibranch’s “gill rosette,” and is used for breathing.
Fast Fact: Sea lemons smell like lemons as well as look like them!
Predators will immediately spit out a sea lemon if they eat it by accident. When we become a Christian, we should immediately “spit out” wickedness (2 Timothy 2:19b).
Photo by Joshua Venturo. Video by Daniel Venturo
Information from: https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/sea-lemon
