Chelidonura sandrana - feeding in lab

January 15, 2003
From: Nils Anthes

Dear collegues,
We currently start a project that is aimed at describing mating behaviour and understanding mating conflicts in Opisthobranch sea slugs. For that purpose, we intend to do an array of behavioural observations in the lab, which means that we have to keep animals of the familiy Aglajidae in the lab for a while, and release them after observations to the place of collection. We just happened to find a suitable species, Chelidonura sandrana, that appears to be reasonably common at Lizard Island (North Queensland, Australia). The crucial point at the moment is how to keep the slugs 'happy', thus how to provide suitable food. Does anybody know what C. sandrana feeds on in its natural habitat? We found some comments that they might feed on flatworms, but that didn't seem to be proven, yet. For us it would be even more convenient to find a commercially available food source. People keeping sea slugs in aquaria might know, could anybody give us a hint whom we could contact for that purpose?

Any information is valuable, also if you know other places where you found the species in high abundance.
Kind regards
Nils

anthes@uni-muenster.de

Dear Nils,
As I said in response to your earlier message, the little species, such as C. sandrana are often very abundant, but unfortunately their presence is unreliable. If you are planning a trip to the Australian Museum's research station at Lizard Island, I hope the Chelidonura will be obliging. Concerning feeding in Chelidonura. Most of the discussion of feeding in Chelidonura is on the C. varians page. You will need to scroll down the page and look at the earlier messages. Basically we don't have direct observations of feeding in most species but from the few observations we do have it is probable that they all feed on flatworms. Whenever I have found large numbers of these 'small' species on sand flats they are accompanied by populations of similarly sized flatworms so you would be able to collect them together. I am not sure how easy it is to keep the flatworms in captivity so if you are planning to do your experiments at the lab, it might be better to regularly collect fresh flatworms from the field during the course of your experiments.

I will be intersted to hear of anyone else's comments on the topic.
Good luck with your project,
Bill Rudman

Rudman, W.B., 2003 (Jan 15). Comment on Chelidonura sandrana - feeding in lab by Nils Anthes. [Message in] Sea Slug Forum. Australian Museum, Sydney. Available from http://www.seaslugforum.net/find/8915

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Chelidonura sandrana

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