Abstract

A new species of poecilostomatoid copepod, Erebonaster spinulosus (Erebonasteridae), is described on the basis of a single female from a depth of 3 266 m at cold seeps near the base of the West Florida Escarpment in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. Among its distinctive features are: the large body highly ornamented with setules and spinules, the rostrum with small median teeth and lateral setules, the claw of the second maxilla with a prominent knob on the concave margin, the maxilliped ornamented with setules and its claw bearing a digitiform process near the seta, the third segment of the exopod of leg 4 with the formula II,I,4, and the highly ornamented leg 5 having on the free segment a very long seta 9 times the length of the segment. The genus Erebonaster now contains two species, the previously described Erebonaster protentipes found in 2000 m at the Guaymas Basin, Gulf of California, and the new Erebonaster spinulosus.

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