The red soft dorid, separable from the black one only when both are typically coloured.
A soft dorid to about 7 cm, orange-red through brick to brown, the mantle smooth to slightly wrinkled with a soft undulating margin and a gill plume of the same colour at the rear. Colour is not a safe character in this genus. This species also occurs dark brown to nearly black, and Dendrodoris nigra occurs with a red cast, so animals at the ends of both ranges are separated on internal anatomy rather than on anything visible. Typical animals — plain red here, plain black with a red marginal line there — can be named with reasonable confidence, and the rest are more honestly left at Dendrodoris sp.
Like the rest of the genus it lacks a radula and feeds by external digestion, dissolving sponge tissue and drawing it up, and it holds sponge-derived terpenes in the mantle. Found on sponge-covered rubble and dead coral, often tucked under ledges by day. Recorded from about 1 to 20 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.
