Clavularia frankliniana

McClintock, J. B., Baker, B. J., Slattery, M., Heine, J. N., Bryan, P. J., Yoshida, W., Davies-Coleman, M. T., and Faulkner, D. J., Chemical defense of common Antarctic shallow-water nudibranch Tri-toniella belli Eliot (Molluscs Tritonidae) and its prey Clavularia frankliniana Rouel (Cnidaria Octocorallia), J. Chem. Ecol., 20, 3361, 1994. 

Bathydoris hodgsoni can be found in the deep waters of the Weddell Sea. This nudibranch elaborates the drimane sesquiterpene hodgsonal (Structure 7.78) and sequesters it in its mantle tissues.50 164The nudibranch Tritoniella belli collected from McMurdo Sound is the only documented example of an Antarctic mollusc sequestering defensive chemistry from its diet.44 Among the glyceride esters (Structures 7.79-7.81) isolated from this species, chimyl alcohol (Structure 7.79) can also be found in one of its prey items, the stoloniferan coral Clavularia frankliniana. Sequestration of these defensive chemicals is opportunistic, however, and other, still undescribed metabolites are more commonly associated with defense in this mollusc.49... 

Only one report of Antarctic soft coral secondary metabolite chemistry has appeared in the literature. As described above, the stoloniferan coral Clavularia frankliniana has been demonstrated to produce fatty glyceride esters, chimyl alcohol (Structure 7.79) in particular, that are also found in its predator, the nudibranch Tritoniella belli.44 Chimyl alcohol has been investigated in ecological bioassays and has been implicated in deterring predation by the omnivorous sea star Odontaster validus.44... 

A similar assay was used to examine the effects of extracts from three soft corals Alcyonium paessleri, Clavularia frankliniana, and Gersemia antarctica, against three species of marine bacteria (Slattery et al. 1995). In this assay, replicate 20-g soft coral samples were extracted in 200 ml of solvent and then diluted to tissue level concentrations. Twenty-five microliters of each soft coral extract or a solvent control were then spotted onto glass microscope slide cover-slips. The coverslips were placed into individual wells of tissue culture plates that contained 2 ml of sterile-filtered seawater seeded with 50 Lil of a bacterial suspension (7.5 x 10 cells/ml). Following a 48-h incubation, the coverslips were washed with sterile-filtered seawater to remove unattached cells and stained with DAPI (4,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole). The number of cells in each of five replicate microscope fields per coverslip were counted using epifluorescence microscopy. Bacterial attachment was found in this study to be inhibited by the chloroform extracts of both A. paessleri and G. antarctica and the methanol extract of G. antarctica. The active chloroform extracts did not display antimicro-... 

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