The Purple Flabelline

Description: Purple flabellin is a small mollusk and more precisely a 3 to 5 cm nudibranch. In less scientific language, it is also called a sea slug. Its elongated, thick body has a pointed but short tail. Its head has two long, smooth mouth tentacles that serve as olfactory organs as well as growths called rhiniphores. The rhiniphores are the taste organs of flabellin. It also has dorsal cerates gathered in groups of 3 to 9, emerging from short lateral appendages and which undulate with the current. These growths constitute the gills of the flabellin allowing it to breathe.

Habitat:This nudibranch is found in the Mediterranean Sea but also in the eastern waters of the Atlantic Ocean. We will find it between 5 and 50 m on rocky bottoms rich in hydraires.

Food :Flabelline feeds on cnidarians such as hydroids. Hydrose colonies are small shrubs with numerous filaments. Flabelline will graze and swallow the stinging cells, it will neutralize thanks to its digestive mucus and then stoker in small bags at the end of his taste buds. The cnidocysts (urticating substances of the cnidarians) will become active again and will ensure the defense of the nudibranch.

Reproduction: Flabelline is hermaphrodite, that is, the same individual is capable of being both male and female. The female lays her pink-purple eggs by wrapping them all around the branches of hydraires especially of the kind ofEudendrium. Five to eight days later the eggs hatch to give birth to small larvae. The rhinophores are arranged in rings and the spawning is pink in color, in the shape of a twist most often wound around the hydras.