Chelidonura ? sp

This cool critter was found at The Nursery, Bowen Island, Jervis Bay (Australia) in 15m.

He sure has the nose hair for a Chelidonura!

cheers

Leander

Those nose hairs are probably all gone now, singed off when you fired your stribes 1 mm from his face! I'd guess another variant, this one of Chelidonura fulvipunctata. The name means yellow spots and it has the yellow W on the head which Rudman says is characteristic of the species. http://seaslugforum.net/showall.cfm?base=chelfulv

LOL ... like the eyelashes on the pygmy seahorses

The second shot is just a crop of the first ... so I wasn't quite up his nose

Looking again I would pick up on it having a very similar head pattern to Bill's sp 2 http://seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=chelsp2, though sulawesi is a long long way too!!! Also would have said the spots weren't that visible, though it could have been a size thing rather than anything else.

It might be interesting to not that it was found on a bommie a few weeks after the two animals pictured in this post, which I have been calling Chelidonura hirundinina (mainly from the description is Sea Slugs of Western Australia than the pics on the SSF).

Matt also found another Chelidonura which we called hirundinina, it was quite different again but ID on the basis of the blue T-bar marking. I will ask him to post it here.

cheers

Leander

Did you look at Ian Hutton's pic of C. fulvipunctata from Lord Howe Island? Even has the yellow spots above the ends of the W (well, it looks like a W to me in your pics).

Most of these Chelidonura are soooo variable it makes my head ache!

Here was the other Chelidonura pic I meant to post before.

Had to rush to a meeting (don't you hate it when work gets in the way of life )

Did you look at Ian Hutton's pic of C. fulvipunctata from Lord Howe Island?  Even has the yellow spots above the ends of the W (well, it looks like a W to me in your pics). 

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That example is definitely more like it ... I could be convinced

Most of these Chelidonura are soooo variable it makes my head ache!

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for sure, to me some of the C. fulvipunctata on that post are more like other species than each other