---
title: Yellow-speckled Carminodoris (Carminodoris grandiflora)
scientific_name: Carminodoris grandiflora
common_name: Yellow-speckled Carminodoris
taxon: Nudibranch
published: 2026-08-27T11:01:03.298Z
updated: 2026-08-27T11:40:49.919Z
tags: Yellow-speckled Carminodoris, Carminodoris grandiflora, Nudibranch, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/yellow-speckled-carminodoris
---

# Yellow-speckled Carminodoris (*Carminodoris grandiflora*)

## Quick facts

- **Group:** Nudibranch (*Nudibranchia*)
- **Size:** up to 5 cm
- **Diet:** Spongivore
- **Activity:** Nocturnal
- **Rarity:** Uncommon
- **Habitat:** Under small rocks and dead coral blocks in the shallows by day
- **Reproduction:** Simultaneous hermaphrodite, Egg layer
- **Hazard:** Poisonous

## How to recognise it

- large rounded tubercles over the whole back, speckled with yellow
- the speckling is scattered over each tubercle, not a ring around its base
- dull brown to reddish ground color
- found underneath a rock rather than on top of one

The name means large-flowered, and it is about the tubercles.

Carminodoris carry big rounded bumps spread over the whole back, which is a texture the eye reads as botanical rather than animal, and that is most of the defense. There is no bright warning color here and no clean outline. There is a dull brown lump covered in domes, sitting on the underside of a coral block in the shallows, doing an extremely good impression of the rock it is attached to.

On this species the tubercles are the largest in the genus and each one is dusted with yellow speckling scattered across it. The other Carminodoris on this reef has tubercles ringed with yellow around the base instead, which is a different arrangement of the same pigment and the fastest way to separate them.

The habitat is unusually specific and worth using. It lives shallow, and by day it is underneath small rocks and dead coral blocks, not out on the reef. That makes it one of the few animals in this section you can go and find on purpose rather than by luck, provided you look in the right place.

And the usual request that goes with that place: if you lift a block, put it back the way it was. The community on the underside of a coral block is there because it is dark, and it does not survive being left face up.

Five centimeters (2 in), grazing sponges, out after dark.

## Also known as

- **French:** Hoplodoris-fleur
- **Japanese:** ツブツブウミウシ
- **Russian:** Карминодорис крупноцветковый

## Scientific synonyms

- *Doris grandiflora* Pease, 1860
- *Doris grandifloriger* Abraham, 1877
- *Hoplodoris grandiflora* (Pease, 1860)

## Range

Indonesia

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*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/invertebrate/molluscs/nudibranch/yellow-speckled-carminodoris)*
*Updated: August 27, 2026*