Almost always, egg masses appear sometime after I leave at night and before I return the next morning.  I was lucky with this batch, because Mom seemed to be doing something on one of their favorite egg-deposition plants.

E. clarki laying eggs 11/12/14

You should be able to see the egg mass underneath her as it is being deposited.  The eggs to the right are the remains of an earlier mass that should be close to hatching.

Next morning, there it was in all its glory.

Egg mass laid 11/12/14

It’s a good one to collect for timing of development.  So, here’s what they look like on day 1.  Balls of cells and yolk, as far as I can tell.

1 day-old embryos 11/13/14

I know you are still eagerly awaiting photos and videos of the developing embryos, but this is just too cool not to post immediately.  The eggs I collected October 25 (laid the 18th or 19th) started hatching this weekend.  I always thought veligers hovered about in a stately manner, but they really zoom around like radio-controlled helicopters.  The video below is pretty awful, but gives a sense of how they move.

Even more exciting is that some of them have settled,like this little one, who still has her shell.

Veliger crawling on Bryopsis.

It gets even better. A few have shed their shells and started to crawl around.

Larva crawling in dish 11/6/14

There has certainly been a lot of mortality, and I am trying to figure out how to keep a large proportion of the veligers from getting stuck at the surface.  I have also learned that some of the predatory flatworms infesting the Bryopsis are very fast and eat veligers like candy. Little by little, we are figuring things out.