page_title: Flamingo tongue snail
section_title: Ecology
hierarchical_section_title: Flamingo tongue snail / Ecology
caption_attribution_description: Cyphoma gibbosum on sea rods
context_page_description: The flamingo tongue snail is a species of small but brightly colored sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Ovulidae, the cowry allies.
context_section_description: The minimum recorded depth is at the surface, and the maximum recorded depth is 29 m.
  The flamingo tongue snail feeds by browsing on the living tissues of the soft corals on which it lives. Common prey include Briareum spp., Gorgonia spp., Plexaura spp., and Plexaurella spp. Adult females of  C. gibbosum attach eggs to coral which they have recently fed upon. After roughly 10 days, the larvae hatch. They are planktonic and eventually settle onto other gorgonian corals. Juveniles tend to remain on the underside of coral branches, while adults are far more visible and mobile. An adult scrapes the polyps off the coral with its radula, leaving an easily visible feeding scar on the coral. However, the corals can regrow the polyps, so predation by C. gibbosum is generally not lethal.
caption: Flamingo tongue on a sea rod
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (20060914.r.77)  Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:04:23 22:38:30", "Image ExifOffset": "188", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "326", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9233", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2098", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1399"}