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There are many pictures of a similar species from Japan as Dermatobranchus sp. 1 at Jun Imamoto's web site www.umiushi.info. This species seems to be very variable, some of these specimens have only one brownish transverse band, many have two brownish transverse bands/patches, which make them look very similar to Dermatobranchus fasciatus Gosliner & Fahey, 2011, for which Gosliner & Fahey, (2011) mention a pink band at the margin of the oral veil, they do not mention a pink band with brown spots at the mantle margin. Gosliner & Fahey, (2011) mention for the notum and oral veil "...a yellowish margin, which may contain fine punctations of brown" in their decription of Dermatobranchus rodmani Gosliner & Fahey, 2011, which has also also "one or two transverse brown patches", let me quote: "There are three low, distinct longitudinal ridges in the larger specimen from Malaysia and no ridges are evident in the material from Madagascar." Are there ridges or not? Some of the specimens from Japan have noumerous ridges. I will keep it for now as Dermatobranchus sp. 11 separate, because the pink mantle margin with the brown spots is pretty distinctive. It was posted at these websites before as Dermatobranchus sp 03 Genus: van Hasselt, 1824., which is now Dermatobranchus fasciatus |