Two new asterocherid species (Siphonostomatoida: Asterocheridae) from Madeira and the Canary Islands (eastern Atlantic)

Abstract

The siphonostomatoid family Asterocheridae Giesbrecht, 1899 uses a wide range of host phyla, mainly due to the host diversity of two genera – Asterocheres Boeck, 1859 and Orecturus Humes, 1992. In the present paper, two new asterocherid species from the eastern Atlantic are described and compared with their congeners. One of these species belongs to the genus Asterocheres, A. madeirensis, and was found associated with the sponge Petrosia ficiformis (Poiret, 1789) in Madeira Island. This sponge occurs both in the Mediterranean and on nearby Atlantic coasts, although currently there are no records of the presence of symbiotic asterocherids for its Mediterranean populations. The second new species, Orecturus canariensis, is the first record of the genus on the eastern Atlantic coasts and was found in association with the gorgonian Villogorgia bebrycoides (Koch, 1887) in the Canary Islands. The diagnosis of the genus Orecturus is slightly modified to include some features shown by this new species and some of its plesimorphic and derived characteristics compared with the remaining asterocherid genera. Although the gorgonian Paramuricea grayi (Johnson, 1861) occurs in the same ecological assemblages as the infested colonies of V. bebrycoides, no specimens of asterocherid copepods were found on Paramuricea colonies. Therefore, O. canariensis may be a monoxenous symbiont.

Keywords:

• Asterocheres
• Asterocheridae
• Canary Islands
• Orecturus
• Madeira

Published in collaboration with the University of Bergen and the Institute of Marine Research, Norway, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Published in collaboration with the University of Bergen and the Institute of Marine Research, Norway, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Rodrigo Riera (Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain) who provided the copepod specimens from the Canary Islands. Special thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped improve this paper.

Notes

Published in collaboration with the University of Bergen and the Institute of Marine Research, Norway, and the Marine Biological Laboratory, University of Copenhagen, Denmark