This large and beautiful species greeted me as I hit the bottom on my very first California dive on the back side of Santa Cruz Island in August of 1979. I did not see another for 38 years. Apparently common in southern California at one time, sometime in the 1980s this species became very hard to find. There are references to its population crash on a couple of Slug Site pages as well as on the Sea Slug Forum (see links below). Divers started to see it again in the early 2000s at Catalina Island and since then it has been showing up at least as far north as the Channel Islands. We have seen six specimens since August, 2017.
Below are the specimens I saw in 1979.
For more information, see:
Slug Site
(plus here,
here, here
and here)
Sea Slug
Forum
Created 15 November 2008
Updated 25 March 2019
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