Read this animal from the outside in, because the margin is where everything happens.
The rim carries four zones in sequence: a black outer edge, a sky blue band inside it, then a wide diffuse yellow one, then the cream back with its fine brown network. That is not decoration and it is not camouflage. Chromodorid slugs concentrate the chemistry they take from sponges in glands packed along the mantle edge, so the most strongly defended part of the animal is the part a fish reaches first, and the banding is the label on it.
Which explains the behavior. An animal built this way has no reason to hide and every reason to be seen clearly, so it feeds on open rock in daylight and moves slowly enough to photograph with no technique at all. Bright color on a slow soft animal almost always means the same thing.
The name is a description rather than a person: kyano for blue, marginata for the margin. It was described in 2018 from 🌊 Red Sea material, one of a set of species pulled out of older catch-all names during a revision of the group, and so far it is known from this sea alone, on the Egyptian and Saudi coasts.
Four centimeters, on sponge-covered rock, and easier to name than most of its relatives because that band sequence is unmistakable once you have seen it once.
- four bands at the mantle edge: cream center, diffuse yellow, sky blue, then black at the rim
- cream back covered in a fine brown network
- found in the Red Sea and nowhere else
- up to 4 cm
