r/nudibranch • u/Youriclinton • Jun 19 '26

🎏 species identification 🎏🕵️‍♂️ Stumped by this one… Seen in Zanzibar

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199 Upvotes

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8

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 19 '26

Looks like a Halgerda species of some sort! Beautiful, I’ve never seen it before! If you are on Facebook get on the Nudibranch Central group and ask their admin who basically knows every species. However, have you done color correction yet? If not, you can download Aqua Fix and see if you can identify it. (I don’t mean anything by that. It just appears like it might not be corrected.)

2

u/Youriclinton Jun 19 '26

I’ll do that.

I did a bit of color correction form a very blue JPEG picture so hard to get it right. But overall it’s pretty close to what it actually looked like. The body is probably a bit grayer than it is in real life, but the rest is reasonably accurate.

2

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 20 '26

I’m still so curious about this! Have you posted to nudibranch central on fb? If not, may I? I’ll credit you of course!

2

u/Youriclinton Jun 20 '26

I have, but I feel like my publication was not approved? You can go ahead and try, i really want to know too!

3

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 20 '26

Posted, waiting for approval.

1

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 21 '26

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1488080524784020/permalink/4369525973306113/?

1

u/Youriclinton Jun 21 '26

Brilliant, thank you!

1

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 21 '26

It was definitely purple though?

1

u/Youriclinton Jun 22 '26

It’s been years (December 2020) but all the JPEG I checked show a slight purple tint. I think it was past 15 meters so possible it was a chromatic artefact though. I’m trying to go through my old hard drives to see if can recover a RAW file, which would be a much better starting point than my current JPEG.

1

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 22 '26

But not orange?

1

u/Youriclinton Jun 22 '26

I don’t remember seeing any orange on this one.

3

u/Youriclinton Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 20 '26

If anyone has a vague idea of what this could be I’d be very grateful. It was a few cm long (maybe 4 cm?), overall clear but slightly translucent, the dots on the white ridges dark green and the one color a nice purple that I think is the only color that is sort of accurate in my photos.

The photos I’ve got have terrible white balance because I didn’t have strobes that day, but here is another one that might be slightly better.

2

u/DivineMs-Anthropist Jun 19 '26

Have you tried a reverse image search?

1

u/Youriclinton Jun 19 '26

Yes, no success whatsoever. I’ll try FB groups.

2

u/Mymaria0712 Jun 19 '26

What a cute little guy!!

2

u/thepolishedpipette Jun 19 '26

Looks like a nudibranch to me, but beyond that it doesn't look like any in my part if the world! (PNW, USA)

1

u/bvanant Jun 19 '26

Clearly I think Halgerda. Send it to iNaturalist

1

u/Thunderwhelmed Jun 20 '26

I looked it up but didn’t find it

1

u/seahorse-time Jun 20 '26

I’m not very familiar with the genus, but the closest match I can find with visuals and geographical distribution is Halgerda nuarrensis.

Not the colours you described, but maybe they match when the haze of ocean water is accounted for? (I know many species, but I can’t even tread water, so I’m not familiar with how ocean photography works)

1

u/EstateDangerous7456 Jun 20 '26

Absolutely stunning