Halgerda punctata
Farran, 1905
Order: NUDIBRANCHIA
Suborder: DORIDINA
Superfamily: EUDORIDOIDEA
Family: Dorididae
DISTRIBUTION
Indian Ocean
PHOTO
UPPER: Phi Phi Islands, Thailand, divesite "Koh Bida Nok", depth 22m, size 49mm, 7 January 2001. Photo: Erwin Koehler.
LOWER: Drawing of preserved animal [Pl 3, fig 4] from Farran, 1905.
Farran (1905) described this species from a specimen collected in the Gulf Of Manaar, Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. Short colour notes accompanying the preserved specimen available to him described the colour as "pale whitish-gray, rather translucent with yellow papillae on mantle and purple spots on foot and few also on mantle".
He also described the shape of the preserved specimen as having "numerous large blunt tubercles arranged in more or less diagonal lines connected by ridges which form an irregular triangular network". I have scanned a copy of his original plate of the preserved specimen above. Such brief descriptions are always going to cause problems for later workers. I identified a specimen from Zanzibar with H. punctata, but it differed externally in having distinct ridges on the mantle (Rudman, 1978). This animal of Erwin's is a much better match with Farran's species in having a row of tubercles along the ridges. His use of 'purple' to describe the spots is to me not a problem. Often these dark blackish spots appear purplish or dark brown.
References:
• Farran, G.P. (1905) Report on the opistobranchiate Mollusca collected by Professor Herdman, at Ceylon, in 1902. Report to the Government of Ceylon on the pearl oyster fisheries of the Gulf Of Manaar. Supplementary Report No. 21: 329-364. (Pls. 1-6).
• Rudman, W.B. (1978) The dorid opisthobranch genera Halgerda and Sclerodoris from the Indo-West Pacific. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 62: 59-88.
Rudman, W.B., 2001 (February 21) Halgerda punctata Farran, 1905. [In] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet/halgpunc
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