Tag: Nudibranch

One of the many reasons the snorkeling community is so great is for their unmatched enthusiasm and intrigue for sighting wildlife of any kind. The ooooos and aaaas are just as loud for a 15 meter whale shark as they are for a 5cm slug, and honestly sometimes louder. Nudibranchs are the perfect example of this. See one of these colourful fellas out on the reef, and suddenly it’s the highlight of the snorkel. Once you’ve spotted one, you can’t wait to tell your fellow snorkelers so that they can swim over to admire your prized find. So what is so special about these multicoloured sea slugs? Nudibranchs are a group of soft bodied mollusks, meaning they are a part of the extremely diverse taxonomical group that includes cuttlefish, nautilus shells, giant clams and limpets, to name a few. But unlike many of their mollusk cousins, nudibranchs lack any kind of armour or shell, they are, as their name suggests, naked. Their name derives from their anatomy as 'Nudi' comes from the Latin word ‘nudus’ meaning naked and 'branch' come from the Greek word for lungs. Their lungs, or gills, are the colourful frills decorating their backs. So if you see a tiny colourful worm with frills on its back moving rather slowly over the reef, you're likely looking at one of 3000 nudibranch species.  Why So Colourful?  Each nudibranch has its own unique flare, they combine colour, pattern and form in every imaginable way, so that flicking through a nudibranch identification guide can feel rather psychedelic. They are truly beautiful. But being tiny, slow and rainbow coloured isn't exactly the best tactic to staying alive on the reef, or is it? Nudibranchs use colour to their advantage in a number of ways.  Some  nudibranchs use colour to blend in.