The name means of the 🌊 Red Sea, and the animal turned out to live rather further afield than that.
Species described from one place often carry that place in their name forever, which is useful until somebody finds the animal somewhere else. This one was described from here in 1912 and is now recorded across the Indo-West Pacific, so the label has become a historical note about where the first specimen came from rather than a statement about the range. The same thing has happened repeatedly in this catalogue: a squirrelfish, a coralgrouper and a stargazer all carry names built on this sea while occurring, or not occurring, on quite different terms.
The animal is a small cream dorid, three centimeters, with low tubercles covering the back and opaque white markings on their tips, which is the mark to look for. It is a granular, unremarkable slug of exactly the kind that gets overlooked, and its closest relative here is anything but: the impostor dorid in the same genus spends its life imitating a toxic wart slug.
Like the rest of the family it eats sponges and works shaded rock at night. Records for it are thin, which for an animal this size and this color probably says more about attention than about abundance.
- cream body with opaque white markings on the tubercles
- low tubercles over the whole back, giving a granular look
- small, up to 3 cm
- gills small and pale, retracted at a touch
