DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA FEB 2025 ISSUE 410

Blink and you miss it John Magee

The Solar nudibranch

The solar nudibranch, an animal at the cutting edge of working with alternative energy sources. Sea slugs or nudibranchs, unlike the mostly disliked and frankly, a little gross land based slugs, are amongst the most spectacular and morphologically diverse animals on Earth. There are around 3000 species that have already been described, with new ones being found all the time. Over a hundred of those are found just on the Great Barrier Reef, and, even more impressively, 300 alone have been found just on Heron Island in the southern Great Barrier Reef! Nudibranchs are molluscs that are closely related to clams, oysters and cephalopods and can be found in almost every habitat imaginable on a reef. The solar nudibranch is incredibly well camouflaged to look like its preferred environment, a soft coral, even though it doesn’t eat this. It actually eats the algae found on the reef and it is from this that it gets it chloroplasts which allow it to photosynthesise. The photosynthesis converts the sunlight that it gets from the beautiful conditions on a reef, into food. Many animals on the reef have this symbiosis with photosynthetic algae but these nudibranchs take things to a whole new level. Blink and you will miss it.

57

www.divelog.net.au

Dive Log Australasia #410 February 25