---
title: Dappled Pump Dorid (Trapania euryeia)
scientific_name: Trapania euryeia
common_name: Dappled Pump Dorid
taxon: Nudibranch
published: 2026-08-25T21:57:47.768Z
updated: 2026-08-25T23:55:50.612Z
tags: Dappled Pump Dorid, Trapania euryeia, Nudibranch, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/dappled-pump-dorid
---

# Dappled Pump Dorid (*Trapania euryeia*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Nudibranch (*Nudibranchia*)
- **Size:** up to 1 cm
- **Diet:** Carnivore
- **Activity:** Cathemeral
- **Rarity:** Rare
- **Habitat:** Sponges and hydroid stems carrying colonies of entoprocts
- **Reproduction:** Simultaneous hermaphrodite, Egg layer

## How to recognise it

- a long process on each side beside the gills, and another pair beside the rhinophores
- those four extra processes identify the genus and nothing else here has them
- pale yellow with large brown patches speckled with tiny yellow dots
- one centimeter, which is the real reason it goes unrecorded

Everything about this animal follows from what it eats, and what it eats is a group of animals most divers have never heard of.

Entoprocts are minute stalked creatures that grow in colonies on sponges, hydroids and worm tubes. Each one is a goblet on a stem with a ring of tentacles around the rim, and it feeds by driving a water current through that ring and pulling out particles. They are ancient, they are everywhere on a reef once you know to look, and almost nothing eats them. Trapania is the exception. The whole genus lives on entoprocts, which is why a slug this small has a stable place in the world at all.

That diet sets the search. You will not find one by scanning the reef; you find one by finding the fuzz of entoprocts on a sponge and then examining it. At one centimeter (0.4 in), pale yellow with brown patches and a dusting of yellow dots, the slug is barely a mark on the surface it lives on.

The genus is easy once you have the animal in frame. Beside the gill plume, one long process sticks out on each side, and there is a second pair beside the rhinophores at the front. Four extra appendages, arranged in two pairs, and no other dorid on this reef carries them.

It was described in 2008 from material collected in the western Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Small, specialized, tied to a food source nobody photographs: it is the kind of species that gets named late and stays poorly known afterwards.

## Also known as

- **English:** Dappled Pump Dorid
- **Russian:** Трапания пятнистая

## Range

Bismarck Sea, Mozambique, New Caledonia, South Africa

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/dappled-pump-dorid)*
*Updated: August 25, 2026*