A new, disjunct species of Speleonectes (Remipedia, Crustacea) from the Canary Islands
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ORIGINAL PAPER
A new, disjunct species of Speleonectes (Remipedia, Crustacea) from the Canary Islands Stefan Koenemann & Armin Bloechl & Alejandro Martínez & Thomas M. Iliffe & Mario Hoenemann & Pedro Oromí
Received: 1 April 2009 / Revised: 7 July 2009 / Accepted: 9 July 2009 / Published online: 18 August 2009 # Senckenberg, Gesellschaft für Naturforschung and Springer 2009
Abstract We describe Speleonectes atlantida n. sp. as the third species of Remipedia that was found outside the main distribution area of this group in the Caribbean region. S. atlantida was collected by cave divers equipped with closed circuit rebreathers from the far interior of the Túnel de la Atlántida, an anchialine volcanic lava tube, on the Canarian island of Lanzarote. The new species occurs in sympatry with S. ondinae, to which it is morphologically closely related. S. atlantida can be distinguished from S. ondinae by a more slender habitus and smaller pleurotergites in the posterior trunk. The valid status of S. atlantida as a new species of Remipedia could be corroborated by intra- and interspecific comparisons of 16S rDNA and CO1 sequence data. Keywords Marine biogeography . Anchialine cave . Sub-seafloor cave . Lava tube
Introduction One of the central objectives of the Atlántida 2008 Cave Diving Expedition on the Canarian island Lanzarote was the collection of a few specimens of the remipede crustacean S. Koenemann (*) : A. Bloechl : M. Hoenemann Institute for Animal Ecology and Cell Biology, University of Veterinary Medicine Hannover, Bünteweg 17d, 30559 Hannover, Germany e-mail: [email protected] T. M. Iliffe Department of Marine Biology, Texas A&M University at Galveston, Galveston, TX 77553-1675, USA A. Martínez : P. Oromí Departamento de Biología Animal, Universidad de La Laguna, 38206 La Laguna, Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain
Speleonectes ondinae (García-Valdecasas, 1984). The specimens were crucially important for an ongoing comprehensive phylogenetic and phylogeographic analysis of the Remipedia based on DNA sequence data. S. ondinae was, until now, one of the two known remipede species that are separated by long geographic distances from the main distribution area of this group. The second disjunct species, Lasionectes exleyi Yager and Humphreys, 1996, was collected from a cave on the Cape Range Peninsula in Western Australia, while all remaining remipedes inhabit insular or coastal anchialine cave systems in the Caribbean Sea. The discovery of a second remipede species in the submerged part of the Túnel de la Atlántida came as a complete surprise. Since the mid-1980s (Iliffe et al. 1984), S. ondinae has been the sole representative of the Remipedia in the eastern Atlantic, and it is now protected as an endemic species of the Canary Islands. First indications of the presence of a second species emerged, when team members managed to collect three living adult individuals during a single dive. Two of the three specimens, each kept in a separate container, showed an almost identical swimming behavior, whil
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