Lifts and ripples an unusually broad mantle skirt as it crawls.
A chromodorid to about 6 cm with a mantle skirt that is thin, very broad, and carried well clear of the foot. The centre of the back is cream to white, surrounded by a wide grey-brown to purple-brown band, with a pale opaque margin outside that. The rhinophores and gill plume are cream to white. The skirt is the character worth using: it is wider in proportion to the body than in the other chromodorids on the same ground, and the animal raises and ripples its edge as it moves rather than holding it flat. Doriprismatica atromarginata has the same loose rippling skirt but is cream with a single black edge, and Glossodoris rufomarginata is smaller with a maroon border and no broad dark band.
Feeds on sponges, as the genus does, though which sponge is not well recorded in this part of the range. The defensive compounds taken from the food are held in glands around the mantle rim, which is the part of the animal presented to a disturbance and the reason the skirt is worth so much surface area. Spawn is a white ribbon laid in a low coil against the substrate.
Recorded from about 5 to 35 m on sponge-covered rubble, rock and structure. Regular rather than common, and more often found on the harder ground at the edge of a muck site than out on open 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.
