mystery aeolid...

[Triple One]

Aloha!
Have enjoyed RC for a while; decided it was time to start contributing.
This guy was a stowaway on a coral frag (which one is still unknown; as yet this is the only specimen I have found...) but I am pretty sure it was eating a zoanthid polyp so I pipetted it out of the tank. It's most likely an Aeolid nudibranch but that's all I can surmise with real confidence. It is so tiny (note the straight razor for size comparison) that this is the best picture I could get...
Anybody know its name?

[dzhuo]

Anybody know its name?

Well, the problem is lots of aeolid have not been properly identified.

[pagojoe]

Well, the problem is lots of aeolid have not been properly identified.

Right. Probably including this one, even though it's fairly common. It would likely take a massive multi-year project with a lot of different researchers working on it to sort out any kind of revision of the family. It would be a lot easier if they had shells like the gastropods or bivalves. Preserved slugs tend to lose their diagnostic colors, and hand-colored drawings may be difficult to correlate to the correct species, especially considering the number of similar species and the variability between adults, subadults, and juveniles.

Cheers,



Don

[Triple One]

thanx for your responses guys. that was pretty much the conclusion i had come to as well, especially after going through every pic :fun5: of the aeolids listed on Bill Rudman's sea slug forum. it's essentially a moot point now anyway since i just let the little guy go in my refugium. if he can eat xenia, there's plenty growing down there. if not, well, so it goes. i just didn't feel right about killing it outright (since risking its slow starvation is clearly the highly moral choice...)

[mndfreeze]

You just need to find some massive DNA cataloging program you can submit it to. :D

[pagojoe]

Yeah, the trick to the DNA thing vs. traditional taxonomy is that when these animals were named, nobody knew what DNA was...so even if you had the entire genome mapped out, you'd still have to try to determine which 18th or 19th century description and name should be applied to your DNA string, probably using a written description and maybe a hand-drawn sketch. :) I'm not expecting the aeolids to be all sorted out anytime soon, but ya never know...

Cheers,



Don