Casts a net with its head, closes it on a shrimp, and has no teeth at all.
A large, soft, translucent sea slug to about 15 cm, olive to grey-green with a network of darker veins, carrying a row of broad flattened cerata along each side and, at the front, an oral hood — a circular expandable structure fringed with two rows of sensory tentacles. The body is loose and gelatinous, and a disturbed animal will swim by flexing violently from side to side.
The hood is a net. The slug sweeps it open over the sediment, drops it onto a small crustacean and closes it, and the prey is passed to the mouth; the family has lost its radula entirely, which almost no other sea slug has done. The whole sequence takes a second or two and is one of the more remarkable things to watch on a night dive. It also sheds cerata readily when handled, and gives off a strong fruity smell out of water. Melibe colemani, on this list as the ghost melibe, is the smaller and almost entirely transparent relative. 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.
