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When we look at the overall diversity of diaxonocyclodaie, there are about 16 species that are known throughout the world.

Then we go to Chromodorididae which have these mantle glands. This is what a chromodorid looks like. All of them have bright colors. They have these glands that are situated all along the edges of their mantle. If a fish comes and takes a bite out of that the first thing that it is going to encounter is the distasteful substance. Well, how does the diversity of Actinocyclidae with under twenty species compare with Chromodorididae? There are more than 600 species of chromodorids in that family.

So, that allows us to look at comparable diversity between the two members, these two sister taxa. In this case, the Chromodorididae has certainly adopted a completely different evolutionary strategy of having bright color patterns and has shown great diversification. The only thing that is fundamentally different in terms of a unique characteristic that relates to that is the presence of these mantle glands. This would strongly suggest that this is an adaptation that has permitted this group of organisms to undergo great diversification, to utilize the aposomatic warning coloration strategy versus being cryptic and being far more successful at doing that. So that's another really valuable attribute of having a phylogenetic hypothesis because you can compare equivalent evolutionary units and see what happens within those sister taxa.


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