Novel Diatoms (Bacillariophyta) from tropical and temperate marine littoral habitats with the description of Catenulopsis gen. nov., and two Catenula species

Abstract

Regions with high levels of biodiversity, which mostly correspond to tropical regions, can be treated as treasuries of endemism, even for single-celled life forms. Learning about these areas, and the species present in them, is key to understanding the processes that govern their emergence and sustainability. This paper is a contribution towards revealing the biodiversity of marine benthic diatom species of the world. The samples used in this paper were taken from East Java (Indonesia), Nosy Be (north-west Madagascar) and the Tagus River estuary (Portugal). We describe a new diatom genus, Catenulopsis, and propose the first species of the genus from Nosy Be, named Catenulopsis catenulafalsa. We also describe two new Catenula species, one from Java (Catenula javanica) and the other from Portugal (Catenula brotasiae). The paper also discusses the characteristics of Catenula adhaerens and variations in the species across geographic space. We characterize the morphological variation of C. adhaerens in samples from equatorial West Africa, South Africa, Portugal, Japan, Madagascar and Indonesia.

Keywords:

• Catenula adhaerens
• Catenulopsis
• marine diatoms biodiversity
• Nosy Be
• Tagus estuary
• Indonesia

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ministere de L’enseignement Superieur et de la Reserche Scientifique, Antananrivo, Madagascar for the necessary sampling permit of Nosy Be samples. Diomaye Yatte is acknowledged for making samples from the Atlantic Ocean coast of Senegal available for the purpose of this paper. Manfred Ruppel (Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany) and Łukasz Peszek (University of Rzeszów, Poland) are acknowledged for their assistance in obtaining SEM documentation. The authors also thank the two anonymous reviewers and editor whose comments helped improve and clarify this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission (Horizon 2020), Project GHaNA, no. 734708/GHANA/H2020-MSCA-RISE-2016, the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT), Portugal, via UIDB/04292/2020 and The Ministry of Education and Science in Warsaw, Poland under the topical subsidy and the implementation of co-financed international research projects of 2017–2022.