Unidentified Nudibranch

Well… sometimes even with my ID books, I just can’t manage to identify some nudibranchs. This particular one seems like it would be very unique and easy to ID, but I just simply can’t find it in any of the books, and any of the species I find that look even remotely similar are all from other parts of the world, so they are unlikely candidates.

The way it has its cerrata curled in like that is something I have not seen before, and I found this little guy quite beautiful.

I remember this dive quite distinctly – it was my last night dive on this particular trip, I was fighting a cold and was coughing pretty much every third breath (yeah – coughing underwater is doable but about a thousand times more annoying than coughing on land), and to top it all off we were getting swarmed by some sort of mysid shrimp that liked to follow my dive lights around and photo bomb me…

As a result, I spent a decent amount of time on this dive swimming around with my lights off to try and get away from the shrimp swarm so I could get a couple photos in before they arrived. I also remember that shortly after taking these photos of this nudibranch, I called it a night and signaled to head back to shore.