A marine biologist has shared a fascinating deep dive into the world of nudibranchs, including the fact that everyone who has entered the ocean may have unwittingly been close to one of these amazing critters.
“If you’ve been snorkelling or swimming in the ocean, if you’ve been to tide pools, if you’ve been scuba diving, there were nudibranchs there. I can guarantee it,” says marine biologist Jessica Goodheart, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History.
In a video, Goodheart explores the wild world of these sea slugs, which come in all shapes and sizes. Firstly, “all nudibranchs are sea slugs but not all sea slugs are nudibranchs,” explains Goodheart.
There are thousands of different species of nudibranchs, sometimes affectionately known as ‘nudis’. Around 3,000 have been described but “there could be upwards of six to 10 thousand species based on what we know about the world,” she says. “For context, that’s about how many bird species there are.”
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Main image: nudibranch in southern California. Credit: Getty
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