An aeolid that lives under the sand and surfaces to cross open ground.
A broad, flattened aeolid to about 8 cm, translucent white to pale grey, covered on the back by dozens of short cerata each tipped in orange and white, and with a pair of very long oral tentacles trailing forward from a wide flattened head. The overall effect is closer to a small pale hedgehog than to the slender aeolids on hydroids.
It is a burrower. Most of its life is spent under the surface of soft sediment, where it hunts buried burrowing anemones, and it is seen when it comes up to cross open ground — usually at night, leaving a shallow trench behind it. The wide head and the long oral tentacles are the tools for finding prey below the surface. Aeolids store stinging cells from their cnidarian food in the tips of the cerata; in this genus the food is anemones rather than hydroids. Recorded from about 5 to 30 m on silt, and one of the more satisfying finds on a night dive over apparently empty sand.
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.
