---
title: Brown-spotted Sucking Dorid (Dendrodoris albobrunnea)
scientific_name: Dendrodoris albobrunnea
common_name: Brown-spotted Sucking Dorid
taxon: Nudibranch
published: 2026-08-27T21:09:40.954Z
updated: 2026-08-27T21:20:15.024Z
tags: Brown-spotted Sucking Dorid, Dendrodoris albobrunnea, Nudibranch, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/brown-spotted-sucking-dorid
---

# Brown-spotted Sucking Dorid (*Dendrodoris albobrunnea*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Nudibranch (*Nudibranchia*)
- **Size:** up to 7 cm
- **Diet:** Spongivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Sponge-covered rock and rubble, out after dark
- **Reproduction:** Simultaneous hermaphrodite, Egg layer
- **Hazard:** Poisonous

## How to recognise it

- cream to gray ground scattered with many small brown spots
- soft and smooth, with no hard tubercles or ridges anywhere
- mantle skirt wide and thin, lying flat against the rock
- seven centimeters, out at night

This genus has no teeth, and the interesting part is what that lets it eat.

Every other snail and slug feeds with a radula, a belt of teeth that scrapes material into the mouth. Dendrodoris lost it entirely. Instead the animal presses its mouth against a sponge, floods it with digestive fluid, and sucks back the tissue already dissolved.

A sponge is not a straightforward meal. Most of them are reinforced with a skeleton of glass needles packed through the flesh, which is exactly the problem a rasping mouth runs into: scrape the sponge and you are eating the glass with it. This method sidesteps the whole difficulty. The fluid breaks down the soft tissue, the slug drinks that, and the mineral skeleton is left standing where it was. The animal takes the food and leaves the packaging.

Which also explains the body. There is no hard structure anywhere on it, no tubercles, no ridges, nothing stiffened. It is a soft flat oval, seven centimeters (2.8 in) across, cream to gray and scattered with small brown spots, lying against the rock with its thin mantle skirt spread out. Nothing about it needs to be rigid, because nothing about how it feeds involves force.

Its protection is chemical and, unusually for this reef, homemade: this genus builds its own defensive compounds rather than sequestering them from its food. It comes out at night and spends the day under slabs.

## Also known as

- **Russian:** Дендродорис бело-бурый

## Range

North Pacific Ocean

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/brown-spotted-sucking-dorid)*
*Updated: August 27, 2026*