A broad aeolid with short crowded cerata, found on rubble with the anemones it eats.
A broad, rather flattened aeolid to about 4 cm, the back crowded with short cerata set in rows running across the body rather than in tidy clusters. Each ceras is stout and often slightly swollen towards the tip, brown, olive or grey with a paler or white cap, and the digestive gland shows through as a darker core. The body beneath is cream to brown, the oral tentacles are long, and the whole animal has the outline of a small flattened pad rather than of a slender slug.
It feeds on sea anemones. Aeolids store stinging cells from their food in the tips of the cerata, and in this genus, as in Cerberilla, that food is anemones rather than hydroids. The two are separated by where they are found: Cerberilla ambonensis is a burrower that spends its time under soft sediment hunting buried anemones and surfaces mainly at night to cross open ground, while these animals are on the surface of rubble, dead shell and weed, on or beside the anemones themselves, and the search is for the prey rather than for a trail across sand.
Several species occur in the region, they are separated on the shape of the cerata and on internal characters, colour varies with what the animal has eaten, and a good number of photographs are not identifiable past the genus. Recorded from about 3 to 25 m.
Ratings are per location: 1 means found on most dives that look for it, 5 means a handful of records. Where enough dives have been logged the figure is calculated from them; otherwise it is an editorial estimate, and says so. We publish habitat and destination, not the dive site.
