Larval development of the pea crab Afropinnotheres monodi Manning, 1993 (Decapoda, Pinnotheridae) using plankton-collected and laboratory-reared specimens: effects of temperature

ABSTRACT

The aim of this study was to assess the effect of temperature on the survival and duration of larval development in the African pea crab Afropinnotheres monodi, as well as to describe its larval stages. We studied larvae reared in the laboratory and also specimens collected from plankton from the Gulf of Cádiz at two different temperatures. According to the results of this study, larval development of A. monodi involves four zoea stages and one megalopa and lasts around 25 days at 25°C, and longer than 40 days at 19°C. Such a temperature-related duration of this dispersive phase may be causing a higher recruitment to parental populations during the summer, but a higher dispersal to new locations during the rest of the year, a seasonal pattern of dispersion which could favour the successful expansion of this non-native species into European waters. The identification of both larval phases from plankton samples and adult specimens was carried out using morphological characters and molecular techniques. Both the 16S mtDNA sequences of this species, now available in GenBank, and the larval descriptions provided by this study could help to establish an early alert for the detection of this African species in its northward expansion.

KEYWORDS:

• Afropinnotheres monodi
• megalopa
• morphology
• Pinnotheridae
• temperature effects
• zoea
• 16Smt DNA

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the ‘Real Club Nautico’ of Puerto Santa María (Cádiz, Spain) for kindly allowing us to use their facilities. We are especially grateful to Reyes Sánchez García and Ainhoa Olaguer-Feliú, who helped in collecting the larvae, and Carlos Sánchez Nieto for his assistance in the laboratory work. Thanks are due to the Translations group and especially to Alicia Moguilevsky for revision and correction of English. Three anonymous reviewers, the subject editor Matz Berggren and the editor Franz Uiblein provided useful comments and corrections that clearly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The research was carried out within the framework of the projects MEGALOPADN [CGL2009-11225], ‘Transporte y reclutamiento larvario de crustáceos bentónicos litorales: importancia de los agentes forzadores costeros y regimen mareal’ [CTM2005-00024/MAR] and AFROBIV [CGL2014-53557-P], co-financed by the ‘Ministerio de Economía y Competividad (MINECO)’ Spanish Plan R+D+I and ERDF, European Union. Elena Marco-Herrero acknowledges a pre-doctoral FPI Fellowship supported by MINECO [BES-2010-033297].