Description of Megastygarctides sezginii sp. nov. (Tardigrada: Arthrotardigrada: Stygarctidae) from the Turkish Black Sea coast and a key to the genus Megastygarctides

ABSTRACT

In this paper, Megastygarctides sezginii sp. nov., a new marine species from the Black Sea (Turkey), is described. Morphological and morphometric studies have revealed that M. sezginii sp. nov. is most similar to M. setoloso Morgan & O’Reilly, 1988, but differs from it through the presence of two types of fibrils, a lack of cuticle granulation, the presence of three lateral projections with fibrils, leg fibrils arranged in transverse stripes and the presence of clumps of fibrils near the clavae. In the studied environment, the new species is frequently found in summer and almost absent in winter. Additionally, a taxonomic key for all Megastygarctides species is presented.

http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:53AA1D57-8700-4A18-9099-1CDDBAEB4D3A

SUBJECT EDITOR:

• Tomas Cedhagen

KEYWORDS:

• Europe
• Heterotardigrada
• marine tardigrades
• meiofauna
• new species
• Tardigrada
• Turkey

Acknowledgements

The project team of Sinop University (Turkey) is acknowledged for their efforts in collecting and sorting the material and performing water and sediment analyses. We also want to thank Fiona Ware from National Museums of Scotland who lent us the holotype of M. setoloso. Studies have been conducted in the framework of the activities of BARg (Biodiversity and Astrobiology Research group). Special thanks go to Daniel Stec (Jagiellonian University), who tried to isolate DNA from analysed individuals, unfortunately without success.

This paper is dedicated to the memory of a brilliant Turkish scientist, Professor Dr Murat Sezgin, who suddenly passed away at age 43 on 28 July 2017, in a traffic accident. He was the dean of the Fisheries Faculty (Sinop University, Turkey), an active team leader of the benthos ecology group who made significant contributions to the study of meiobenthos ecology in Turkey, and the coordinator of this meiobenthos project; he was also the PhD supervisor and a great friend to the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Derya Ürkmez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9572-9886

Milena Roszkowska http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1640-8142

Krzysztof Zawierucha http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0754-1411

Reinhardt Møbjerg Kristensen http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9549-1188

Łukasz Kaczmarek http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5260-6253

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially supported by the project ‘Meiofauna as Environmental Indicators in Marine Ecosystems of Turkey and Montenegro’, funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) with the project number 114Y376 under research programme 2541. Krzysztof Zawierucha is a beneficiary of a National Science Center scholarship for PhD No. 2015/16/T/NZ8/00017.