Striate Bubble

• Its shell has no projecting spire: the final whorl wraps the earlier ones completely and leaves a small pit at the apex.
• Its shell is a fragile, globular bubble into which the animal barely fits: the mantle partly envelops it, and the foot is too big to retract fully inside.
• It is an opisthobranch, the group that includes the sea hares and the nudibranchs, and it represents an intermediate step in the evolutionary reduction of the shell which in those groups ended in its total disappearance.
• It has no operculum, unlike snails with a complete shell.
• It grinds algae with a gizzard fitted with calcareous plates, an internal mill that makes up for the lack of powerful jaws.
• It is a hermaphrodite and lays its eggs in gelatinous strings tangled in the vegetation.
• By day it buries itself in the sand and only betrays its presence by the furrow it leaves as it moves.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - external calcareous shell (mollusc)

Habitat and environment

Shallow sandy bottoms and seagrass meadows of the warm Atlantic

Sources consulted: Rudman, Sea Slug Forum; Marine Life Information Network; Malaquias y Reid, revisiones de Bullidae

The pins mark the dive sites where its presence is documented.