Aglaja hummelincki or Chelidonura africana?

August 29, 2005
From: Anne DuPont


Hello Bill,
I found these in the southern Bahamas in the sand during the day. Are they Aglaja hummelincki or Chelidonura africana? There are no blue dots on the parapodia that I usually see when photographing them.

Location: Monument Beach, Stocking Island, Exumas, Bahamas. Size: Larger specimen appx 8 mm, smaller specimen appx 5 mm. March 9, 2005. Depth: 5-6 feet

Thank you,
Anne DuPont
Delray Beach, FL

akdupont@bellsouth.net

DuPont, A., 2005 (Aug 29) Aglaja hummelincki or Chelidonura africana?. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/14644

Dear Anne,
These are an extreme colour form of an animal I identified for you in an earlier message as C. berolina [see #9573], a species which I later decided was a Caribbean population of C. africana [see #11810; #12457]. One of the animals in your earlier message had the same yellow bands, but also had white mottling all over the body as well. As I discussed earlier, Aglaja hummelincki was described from preserved animals which were said to be 'black and have small pigment free blotches on back and parapodia' which is not very helpful in identifying living animals.

I could of course be quite wrong, but all the evidence I have seen, and much of it is from you, suggests that this is C. africana, a species with a very variable colour pattern. If we look only at the two extremes of the colour range it certainly looks as though there are two distinct 'species' but we now have a wide variety of intermediate forms which link the white mottled animals with no yellow, to the yellow banded forms with no white.
Best wishes,
Bill Rudman

Rudman, W.B., 2005 (Aug 29). Comment on Aglaja hummelincki or Chelidonura africana? by Anne DuPont. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/14644

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