Black lines broken into dashes, and a fine yellow edge the rest of the group lacks.
A chromodorid to about 5 cm, the mantle white to pale blue-grey with black longitudinal lines that characteristically break up into dashes and short marks rather than running unbroken from end to end, and with a narrow yellow to yellow-orange band around the margin. The gill plume and rhinophores are translucent white to pale orange. The comparisons are all within the same group: Chromodoris lochi has three unbroken lines and no yellow edge, C. willani carries opaque white speckles on its gills and rhinophores, and C. annae has a broad orange skirt rather than a fine yellow line. Where the lines are unusually continuous, the margin colour is the more reliable check.
It was described in 1998, so it is missing from older guidebooks, where animals of this pattern were filed under C. lochi or C. elisabethina. Photographs labelled with those names from before then are worth looking at again.
Feeds on sponges, carries their chemistry in the mantle rim, and is one of the blue-and-black mimicry ring in which several genuinely unpalatable species share one warning signal. Common on rubble and rock from about 3 to 30 m, active by day as well as at night. Pairs and white spiral egg ribbons are found on the food sponge.
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.
