We’ve talked about hitchhiking coral crabs before, which are common on wild aquacultured corals, but boy were we surprised when we found the tiniest “Sea Bunny” hitchhiker crawling around our tank.
A while back the internet kicked into overdrive when this video of a Sea Bunny from Japan went viral. The Sea Bunny in the video is a type of Nudibranch (sea slug) no bigger than 2.5 cm and is found throughout the Indo-Pacific Ocean from South Africa to the central Pacific.
The Sea Slug Bunny we found has the same fuzzy black rhinophores (antennas) and a cute little bunny tail (which is actually the nudibraches gills), while the body has a beautiful detailed iridescent outline. Since we found our own sea bunny, we wanted to share these photos with you, simply for your weekly fix of reef tank cuteness.
As there are over 3000 described species of nudibrach, and we can’t say for certain where this nudibrach came from it is a bit more difficult to identify. However by look alone our guess would be that it falls into the Doridoidea superfamily of shell less sea slugs, within which it most closely resembles Goniobranchus fidelis.
Nudibranch have a foot which they use to move around and use slime trails to follow flatworms and other tiny invertebrates. Nudibraches have poor vision so they use their rhinophores to sense their surroundings.
There are a few nudibranch species available for the home aquarium, however unless you have a large establish systems or an exploding population of flatworms we wouldn’t recommend them for your home tank and they will quickly die without a food source. Nudibranch are also a short lived species some living up to one year and others only a few weeks. [NAT GEO]
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