Undescribed Cladobranchia
Summary 2
What I’ve temporarily and rather unimaginatively nicknamed the “Undescribed Cladobranchia” is very small, about 5 mm, and cryptic. Picture yourself trying to locate a single grain of rice hiding deep in a rice-colored environment, through silty saltwater in bad light while you’re bouncing up and down on a floating dock. The nudibranch’s white-and-brown speckled body and orange-banded rhinophores blend in well with the small hydroids (possibly in genus Hydractina) I saw it perched among. At first glance, it looks a bit like a small Trinchesia albocrusta, but lacks the white markings. Some scientists who saw my photos and videos wrote that this Undescribed Cladobranchia might be a new species, while others suspect that it might be a known, introduced species, maybe related to Trinchesia hiranorum, found in the Sea of Japan and the Kuril Islands between Japan and Kamchatka, Russia, or perhaps T. pupillae. Another researcher in The Netherlands wrote that it might be related to a Trinchesia species seen there and in France. Hopefully it will be sequenced and studied further in the near future, joining the pantheon of scientifically described California nudibranchs.
Sources and Credits
- (c) Robin Gwen Agarwal, all rights reserved, uploaded by Robin Gwen Agarwal
- Adapted by Robin Gwen Agarwal from a work by (c) Wikipedia, some rights reserved (CC BY-SA), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladobranchia
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iNat Map
| Color | brown, orange, white |
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