My first encounter with the Lined Sea Hare involved getting hit over and over again by tiny sticky brown blobs as I walked through a shallow tide pool at low tide.  They were everywhere, drifting in the current, catching themselves on rocks and floating algae, and getting washed out to sea as the tide rose.  It wasn’t until I looked closely (or the camera did) that I realized this was a bloom of sea hares.  And though most of them were tiny and young, the odd larger, more mature one bore beautiful gold and blue circular markings as well as lines and pronounced papillae.  Cory Pittman and Pauline Fiene discribe similar drifts and blooms on their Sea Slugs of Hawaii website. Like them, I have noticed the numbers of these animals fluctuating greatly over periods of days and weeks.  I have returned to the same pools and found none for a few years, and then suddenly they show up again in great numbers.  The individuals photographed here were anywhere from 5 mm to 50 (2″).  The brightest, lightest and most colourful were found in a more protected area among a group of Eyed Sea Hares in North Kihei. While these bear the tell-tale lines of the Stylocheilus striatus, they could, at first glance, be mistaken for the less common  Stylocheilus (?) sp.#1 which are also marked by blue and gold ocelli. The darker, duller, and smaller animals were drifters, found in tidepools off of Ma’alaea Bay.