Small White Nudibranch

[karlseith]

Last evening I came home to find this little guy crawling on my front glass. I did a little googling and have my assumptions on what it could be but wanted to get a second opinion. It is no longer than 1/8 to 1/4 inch long, extremely white in color, and very slow moving.

The last addition to the tank was a favia frag over 2 weeks ago. Prior to that I added some shrooms, montipora, GSP, and some macro algae.

The pictures are hard to see so instead of reducing them i posted them to my share folder on dropbox for a better view at the link below. Any ideas??

Dropbox - Photos - Simplify your life

-Karl

 

[karlseith]

 

[warvillian]

Looks like a nudibranch to me. I have some on my African Blue Hornet Polyps.

 

[karlseith]

Do you have any idea what kinda of Nudi it could be?? After some digging in Google I thought it might be a Berghia, but if you have something similar around your zoos that concerns me since I have some zoos in my tank.

 

[warvillian]

I am not sure about what kind, but I do know you do not want any nudibranches near your zoo's. Luckily, I have only found two but I used tweezers to pull them off. I did buy a bottle or coral-x but I have not used it yet.

 

[iDream]

Aeolid nudibranchs, if it looks similar to a google search of those guys you have a problem on your hands. They eat zoas

 

[karlseith]

I took a look at Aeolidia papillosa and while there are similarities in color, the papillosa has 25 rows of cerata covering their bodies. I don't believe the one in my tank has near that many and they are much longer than papillosa. Nudibranch - Aeolidia papillosa

The closest likeness I could find is the Favorinus blianus but it too has a lot more ceras.

 

[karlseith]

So it turns out i have montipora eating nudibranchs.

The Leading Coral Protection Dip - Coral RX

I found one crawling on one of my monti frags tonight. When i turned the frag over there were several other nudis on it and portions of the underside appeared to be scraped away

The worst part is they were doing very well and had grown about a quarter inch in the short time since i added them...the coral, not the slugs.

 

[mr_X]

you'll need to do multiple dips to remove them. coral rx does not kill the eggs.

 

[karlseith]

Yeah, from what ive read they can survive in the tank several months after all acros & montis have been removed. So ill be removing them tomorrow and donating them back to the lfs i got them from

 

[mr_X]

i would keep the montis...just dip them in coral rx once a week for 3 weeks. that should solve the issue.

 

[karlseith]

Well...i would love to, but in my attempt to save them I ended up doing the opposite When I pulled them out they fragmented into many pieces, combined with my fumbled attempt at removing what nudis I could find, I think the coral got to stressed and didn't make it...so bummed. But it's my fault for not dipping them before I added them. Lesson learned.