Snorkeling to find nudibranchs in Raja Ampat

Setting up marine life ‘themes’ on our snorkeling tours is something we’ve been doing for many years. Whether it would be butterflyfish, scorpionfish, or shells the goal for us and the guests is to find and identify as many as we can during our snorkeling expedition. We then collect all of the photos and present them to everyone in a poster format. Raja Ampat has always been one of the best places for snorkelers to see nudibranchs. Many nudibranchs feed on tunicates, sponges, and cnidarians and in Raja Ampat many of these organisms can be found in high abundance in usually less than 0.5m of water! The poster was set up with 24 slots to be filled by the species that we find and photograph, and admittedly, in the beginning of the trip, 24 slots might have been a bit ambitious. I say this because the last time we did this poster, we found a total of 17 species of nudibranch and ended up including sea slugs to ‘beef up’ the number of sightings. At the end of this trip, however, 24 slots proved to not be enough! We saw a total of 31 different species of nudibranchs (true nudibranchs, so the number goes much higher if we include sap-sucking slugs, head-shield slugs, etc…). Raja Ampat always amazes us and never fails to raise the bar on so many levels. Here is the fruits of our labor, a full size poster of some of the more colorful and engaging nudibranchs found on shallow tropical reefs…

We visit Raja Ampat again in Jan 2019!