Beautiful Tiny Creature of the Sea

     This little guy is called Glaucus Atlanticus. It is a species of sea slug that grows to around 35 mm. They float partially by means of an air bubble, which they swallow and store in their gastric cavity. They also have a rather unique defence mechanism - they store the nematocysts produced by jellyfish (their prey) in their own tissues to protect against predators. 

       They are rarely seen except during periods of on-shore winds which bring them (and their prey) into coastal waters. Then, they can be found in numbers floating on the surface and, sometimes, even washed up on beaches. They are holoplanktonic, spending their entire lives drifting with the foot oriented toward the surface.  

 Distribution:  Big Island, Maui, Oahu and Kauai: cosmopolitan.

Taxonomic notes:   The genus name means "bluish gray" and the species name refers to the ocean from which it was first named. It is referred to as the "man-of-war nudibranch" in Hoover, 1998 & 2006. It was first reported from Hawaii in Edmondson (1946)