Nudibranchia Diet!

[Trintha]

So... I had an impulse buy today and purchased a nudibranchia that looked too amazing to pass up. I realized that I didn't ask whether the thing was reef safe or not, so I've been reading a bit and I've been seeing that some say yes and others say they will feast on soft corals, etc...

Please Help!

 

[greenbean36191]

Well it depends on which nudibranch you got. There are a few thousand of them. All of them are predators, and most of them are specialists that only feed on one or two species of prey item. The brightly colored ones that are usually sold, the dorids, are mostly specialists on sponges. Most of them would be reef safe, but like almost all nudibranchs, they're almost impossible to feed.

 

[Trintha]

Yes it is a Dorid. Should I buy sponge to feed it?

 

[singold]

This is a good site for you on this subject:

www.seaslugforum.net

 

[greenbean36191]

You can try, but it's just likely to be a waste of money. Unless you know specifically which dorid you have there's no way of knowing which sponge to try to feed it. If you did know which slug you had, the specific species of prey usually isn't known. Even in the event that you can figure out which slug you have and what sponge it eats, sponge ID is nearly impossible even for experts. That means that chances of being able to locate the correct species at an LFS and getting a reliable supply of that species is virtually nil.