Pat Webster

🚨ATTENTION SLUG LOVERS! 🚨 Your 2025 “Tasteful Nudes: Diamonds in the Buff” nudibranch sea slug calendars are READY ORDER! Link in bio or via the shop links on this post! Featuring the freshest nudies this side of the Pacific, your 2025 Tasteful Nudes calendar provides the bare necessities to send nudibranchs all year long. Prepare to feast thine eyes upon a baker’s dozen of sealacious super slugs photographed in the last year by ya buoy right here in Monterey Bay. And hey, maybe I threw in a couple more scantily clads from recent adventures, I’ll never tell ;) Calendars are ordered now and should ship by the third week of October. Prints of each featured slug (and more!) are also availavle other on divemola.com. Thanks y’all for the support year after year—you’re a rhinoforce majeure in spreading the Gospel of Stark! Cheers and once again thank you! Codspeed, Pat

“Whale hey there fronds and anemones! It’s y’a buoy, @underwaterpat!” // 🚨🤿 THE DIVE VLOG IS FIN-ALLY HERE!! 🤿🚨 Some of you may know that I’ve been working on a new video series for the last year, and after many fits and starts, it’s time to get it out there to all of you!! The first episode drops tomorrow on YouTube (I’m underwaterpat there too) with an extended cut available right now on my Patreon! Links are available in profile. I’m hoping to bring you behind the scenes of my underwater photography here in my Monterey Bay backyard, and beyond! The format is also bringing some new Reel/TikTok fodder, so we’ll see how this old dogfish pivots to some verticality. Special thanks to @scubapro for the kit, @lightandmotiondive for the lights, @backscattervideophoto for the guidance, @peninsula_dive_services for the air, @oceantechnologysystems for the rig, and to my underwaterPatrons Em, Anne-Marie, Ali, Pike, Shervin, Mike, Michael, Michael C, Connor, Ariel, Leah and Jon for all the kelp. From the bottom time of my heart, I want to thank you all for your support of my piscine pixel pushing, here on the ‘gram and out there in the world. This has been a belabored of love and I hope you’ll enjoy it. Sea you all tomorrow! #kelp #kelpforest #underwater #vlogging #montereybay

“Eggsistential Nudes” // Fresh and final batch of nudibranch calendars are down to JUST TEN LEFT! Sooooo they’re 12% discounted for the amount of the year we’ve gone through so far AND if you enter code SENDNUDES10 you’ll get an extra 10% off above sixty bucks in the divemola.com store. Anyway for your efforts reading through this post here are some newdibranch options for next year’s edition. Thanks for the support y’all! My taxes are brutal this year which means things went…. well? Something like that. Yours in nudes, Pat

“Mona-stare-y” // I hope you’re well out there beyond the screen. Here are few recent looks from ol’ Monty B that hadn’t yet made their way off the home silicon, alternating between a pre-Antarctic January splash with @erwahl_ and some March macro Monastery madness with @sageonophotography and @bahuelga 1. A Quieter Place 2. Snail Pneumania (Dusky Tegula pulligo on Macrocystis pyrifera) 3. Cabezoning Out (Cabezon Scorpaenichthys marmoratus) 4. Polyp Service (Octororal Chromoplexaura marki 110 feet deep) 5. It’s Gonna Be All Black And White 6. Göd Doriopsilla sp. 7. Cabezoomies

“Spill The Staurocladia charcoti” // Cute as a button and about the same size, this algae-surfing hydrozoan jellyfish Staurocladia charcoti was perhaps *the* highlight of my photographic Antarctic critter collection. Exploring one of many beautiful seaweed-swept walls with @gvashton for @lindbladexp a few weeks back, it just so happened that one of these glorious spicy amphipod predators was perfectly positioned ‘pon its pretty pedestal, allowing for some good looks at this ornate jewel of a jelly. Zooming in, I’m not entirely sure what the white orbs are—eggs? Supposedly these animals reproduce asexually through fissuring, but I’m not too sure. The red dots at the bases of the tentacles are its eyes though, that much is certain. What a creature. Hell yeah jell yeah!! (This friendo brings my total of gelatinous beauties over on @inaturalistorg up to 90 species—global number two babyyyyy #humblebrag)

“Snow And Whale” // Under a glistening ceiling of freshly fallen snow blanketing the frigid sea surface, a friendly pair of humpbacks whales meets me eyes to ice in a magical megafauna moment gifted by the great Southern Ocean. These two curious leviathans, clothed in yellow-green diatomaceous girth scarred by battle and barnacle, had spent the last few hours completely absorbed with our ship and its various satellite craft. Kayaks, zodiacs and mothership were systematically investigated, each whale taking turns rolling over and gliding belly up underneath us peculiarly pleustonic apes, sizing us up, seemingly raising their own hypotheses and gathering data, some eurekas exclaimed through exuberant exhales trumpeted before another lazy launch into Inner Space to ponder the mysteries of the airspace invaders. At one point even a raucous minke whale joined in the cetacean exploration station, rocketing by to comet on the whole affair and spy-hopping its bright white chin ahead of a dazzling dust trail of soft sea slush. The whole experience was cosmic, beyond words. And just as we were nearly all aboard, the whales still gliding by the bow, I clambered aboard one of the two remaining zods (with a decidedly dirty GoPro) as we swung around the stern to catch a final look at the gentle giants. And there they were, just as they had been all afternoon, checking us out and coming in close. I lowered the camera over the snowy pontoon, filming blindly as the lead whale gave us an eye full. They then swung over to the other zodiac, eventually diving under the ship once again to start another investigative lap, all the while our radios crackled that all aboard also applied to us, regardless of cetacean circumstances. A special moment in an extraordinary place. Thank you Ocean, these moments only come once in a whale and it was a pleasure to meet these two. Filmed last week with @lindbladexp

“A Frondly Snoot Boop” // Stoked to join some illustrious company at #upy2025 with this🥉portrait of a dastardily derpy South American sea lion from a far-flung phaephyte fortress in the West Falkland Islands. And it’s the cover of this edition’s yearbook no less! Woo! Shouts out to all the entrants for bringing the wonders of Inner Space to the masses, and special shoutout to fellow Monterey Bay Pixel Patrol awardees @sageonophotography @katevylet and @jonandersonphoto!! Thanks to the judges and sponsors for the contest and celebration of the soul of our water world—it’s an ever powerful reminder of what we stand to lose if we’re complacent in the face of those that would trade it all for a buck. And special thanks to @s.s.ono for pushing me to enter the contest rounds this year. Aside the @backscattervideophoto Shootout, it hasn’t been my thing, but with his encouragement and that of many others in this wonderful photo community (you know who you are!) I finally threw my Pat in the ring, and I’m very glad to have gone through the process of refining, critiquing and submitting to UPY. Of course it would figure that with all the work I put into photographing salacious slugs and jiggly jellies that a big sea bear with evolutionary regrets would sway the jury, but hey, there’s kelp on the cover and my alliterative caption passed the editors and that’s all this Monterey Buoy could ask for!! I’m about to cross the Drake one last time with my season’s haul of Antarctic pixels—more coming soon with some better connectivity and thawed digits! And trust it’s mostly inverts 😅 Thank you again @upycontest!!! Till next year! #kelpforest #kelp #sealion

“This Fully Ope-RAYS-tional Battle Station” // Stoked to finally witness all the echinoderm glory that is the Antarctic Death Star Labidiaster annulatus on today’s dive in the South Shetlands with @gvashton for @lindbladexp. These super sun stars can have upwards of 40 rays (this one has 43 if I counted right!) positively plastered with pedicellariae: petite pinchers that are used to snag krill and other unlucky passersby that contact their backside, alongside whatever else they can crawl all over. This one is a Southern Ocean endemic, and a treat to the eyes for those of us missing our sunnies from the starfish plague of 2013—go support your local sun star efforts! @sunflowerstarlab is mine! Oh and for those wondering: 0.5°C / 33°F water today… Balmy!

“Ooh La Limpet” // Antarctic limpets (Nacella concinna) are clear winners in the Southern Ocean Conspicuous Reef-Based Micro Fauna Abundance Challenge. These seaweed-slime-slurpin’ roaming roombas will spend half a century roving about the mineral and algal benthos to molecularly upgrade algae wastes and diatom pastes into adorable gastropodian sombreros. And sometimes, like on this day with @emmet.ire for @lindbladexp, two or many more male and female limpets that love each other very much will assemble into towers of power and release their gametes into the spawntaneous courtyard, maximizing fertilization rates in the potentially days-long orgy that brings about the new generation of hungry helmet hermits. I got very lucky to notice the sexiness unfolding and snapped just this one frame with eggs and sperm intertwining before the juices ran out. (Photo 4). Highlight of that dive for me for sure after the giant isopod! Last frame is a portrait of this amazing little beastie, one that I hope to get even more familiar with on the coming voyage.

“La Coolcaracha” // The Antarctic giant isopod Glyptonotus antarcticus is just one of those critters that has to be seen to be believed. At a distance looking like some unholy cross between a horned lizard and a mega beetle, these beastly roly-poly buddies are widespread throughout the Southern Ocean and a sight to behold up close and personal. The brainy body bumps give them a boost of the bizarre, aside their imposing-for-an-isopod idiosyncrasies like particularly spiky appendages and like-a-little-lobster largesse. I was thrilled to find this friend towards the end of my dive with the isoGod @emmett.ire at Petermann Island for @lindbladexp—check it off the critter list! Now to find some nudibranchs and giant sea spiders!

“Convergence Evolution” // Hmm, the colors are a little off but: Kelp, cucumbers, tunicates, dulse, stars, sponges, bryozoans, spaghetti and feather duster worms, lampshells and limpets, flyby drifters, coralline and invert cover… If I didn’t know this was Antarctica (and if the water wasn’t negative degrees) I could have sworn I’d been here before! One of the great joys of diving for the guests aboard @lindbladexp these past few years has been discovering just how much the coldwater world of my Monterey Bay backyard rhymes with the rest of the world’s frigid seas. While I don’t quite speak the local dialect just yet, it’s been an instant connection with the vibrant icecubemmunity of beyond the Antarctic convergence. Shoutouts to @nicholasbrown68 and @emmett.ire for being my initiators into the coldleidoscope of the Southern Ocean, with these images being from my first photo dive on the Antarctic Peninsula in Commandant Charcot’s old stomping grounds. I’m back down here for some more polar plunges hoping that @gvashton and I get the goods—fish us luck!

“Life Crack” // Spent a good chunk of my commute today trying to excise the festering hunk of My Opinion onto some digital paper lest it see its way into The Discourse. I finally got it out, smarm and dunks and vitriol and rage bait and righteous indignation, written as if to be seen and then filed away not to be. I feel better. We’re in a few trade wars and there’s seemingly an oligarch coup going on. Luka got traded to the Lakers?! This lomito was fire. My politics are top down so, there’s no need to write another manifesto. I know where me and mine stand so, there’s no need to scream into this void—it isn’t a void, there’s people here, plenty hurt more before and now and soon than I was ever or will be by what’s been and will be going on in this season. Overwhelm is one tactic of imposed self sabotage and I thought I’d learned my lessons last time. At least to not poison my own wells. I need discipline. I need my brain space freed up for what matters and with a matching radius much, much closer to home. There’s shit going down everywhere and people are vulnerable right now, closer than you think and than I certainly thought. It was very good to see as many of you when I was home as I got to, and to have such a gift of a network to be supported by and lend my help to. The catharsis to the chaos is in community. It’s 91 degrees in Buenos Aires.