Dendronotus lacteus is a species of sea slug, a dendronotid nudibranch, a shell-less marine gastropod mollusc in the family Dendronotidae.Bouchet, P.; Gofas, S. (2015). Dendronotus lacteus. In: MolluscaBase (2015). Accessed through: World Register of Marine Species on 2016-02-06.
Distribution This species was described from a specimen collected at the entrance to Strangford Lough, Northern Ireland, Irish Sea. It was long considered to be a synonym of Dendronotus frondosus but separated by Thollesson in 2000 using the technique of allozyme electrophoresis.Thollesson, Mikael. 1998. Discrimination of two Dendronotus species by allozyme electrophoresis and the reinstatement of Dendronotus lacteus (Thompson, 1840) (Nudibranchia, Dendronotoidea). Zoologica Scripta 27(3):189-195. This was confirmed with DNA sequencing in 2015.Ekimova, I.; Korshunova, T.; Schepetov, D.; Neretina, T.; Sanamyan, N.; Martynov, A. (2015). Integrative systematics of northern and Arctic nudibranchs of the genus Dendronotus (Mollusca, Gastropoda), with descriptions of three new species. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. 173(4): 841-886. The species is known from the Irish Sea north to Spitsbergen, Franz Josef Land, and the Barents Sea.
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