Morphological and molecular reassessment of three species of the genus Besa (Phyllophoraceae, Rhodophyta) from the Northwest Pacific

ABSTRACT

We investigated species referred to as ‘Ahnfeltiopsis flabelliformis’ from the Far Eastern seas of Russia as well as Besa catenata (Yendo) M.S.Calderon & S.M.Boo from Mie Prefecture (Shima Peninsula, Japan, near to its type locality) morphologically and by analysis of sequences of plastid rbcL and mitochondrial COI-5P genes. Morphological and phylogenetic analyses showed that Ahnfeltiopsis flabelliformis does not occur in the Far Eastern seas. All algae previously identified as ‘A. flabelliformis’ from Russian waters belong to two morphologically and genetically distinct species that should be referred to the genus Besa as B. divaricata (Holmes) M.S.Calderon & S.M.Boo and B. japonica (Suringar) A.V. Skriptsova & S.Y.Shibneva, comb. nov. We found an unattached form of B. divaricata and named it as B. divaricata f. ahnfeltioides A.V.Skriptsova & S.Y.Shibneva based on its morphological and ecological features.

KEYWORDS:

• Ahnfeltiopsis
• Besa
• Besa catenata
• Besa japonica
• Besa divaricata
• Besa divaricata f. ahnfeltioides
• rbcL
• COI-5P
• phylogeny
• phenotypic systematics
• taxonomy

Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to Dr Taiju Kitayama, phycological curator of the Department of Botany of National Museum of Nature and Science, Tsukuba, Japan for his assistance with sending herbarium specimens of B. catenata. We also thank Prof. Sung Min Boo for his valuable recommendations, and Prof. Michael D. Guiry for nomenclatural advice.

Disclosure statement

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

Supplementary information

The following supplementary material is accessible via the Supplementary Content tab on the article’s online page at: https://doi.org/10.1080/09670262.2020.1765025

Supplementary Table 1. List of the species used in DNA analysis: voucher, location, date, collector, and accession numbers in GenBank.

Supplementary Table 2. Comparison of Besa japonica, B. divaricata and B. catenata with their first descriptions (as Gymnogongrus japonicus, G. divaricatus, G. catenatus, and G. flabelliformis).

Author contributions

S.Y. Shibneva: analysis of molecular data, original concept, manuscript preparation; A.V. Skriptsova: seaweed collection, light microscopy, manuscript preparation; A.A. Semenchenko: analysis of molecular data, manuscript preparation; M. Suzuki: seaweeds collection, analysis of molecular data.