Colour-matched to the Dendronephthya it feeds on, with a fringed veil and tufted gills.
A tritoniid nudibranch to about 7 cm, translucent white through pink to orange, taking its colour from the soft coral it is sitting on. The front of the animal carries an oral veil fringed with a row of branched processes, and a row of short branched gills runs along each side of the back; the rhinophores stand in sheaths whose rims are branched in the same way. The general form, a soft tapering body with tufted appendages down both sides, separates it from the dorids and from Bornella, whose processes are fewer, larger and arched. Within the tritoniids the soft-coral species are separated on the number and branching of the veil processes and the gills, which a field photograph often does not resolve, and a record left at the genus is sometimes the honest one.
It lives and feeds on Dendronephthya soft corals, which are themselves brightly coloured, so it is found by working over the coral rather than by scanning the ground around it; a colony with polyps stripped along one branch usually has the slug at the end of the damage. Egg masses are laid on the host as a coiled white ribbon.
Because Dendronephthya grows where current runs rather than where light is good, this is a slug of slopes, walls and standing structure rather than of flat silt. Recorded from about 8 to 40 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.
