Snorkelling the house reef at Milaidhoo is always rewarding, even more so if you have eagle eyes to spot the small stuff. Spotted by Marc from our Ocean Stories Aquatic Centre was this beautiful nudibranch (Gymnodoris ceylonic) in the sand. Needless to say, we were excited as we don’t often see these little creatures.
We noted the location and several visits to the site over a few days revealed about 20-30 exemplars, as well as yellow egg ribbons everywhere. No doubt they all came together to mate.
In this video you can see them mating, the resulting egg ribbons and the hunting of tiny sea hares – which escapes the nudibranch in our video. The Gymnodoris family are known to be quite ruthless hunters, even hunting other nudibranchs.
Sadly, nudibranchs don’t have a long life span – some live only a few weeks. We were so happy to see these.