Abstract
A new species of marine interstitial wormshrimp, Ingolfiella maldivensis, is described from coral sand on the inner and outer reef off Magoodhoo island, Faafu atoll, Maldives. Six females were found and compared to other species from the Maldives and those bordering the Indian Ocean and beyond. Morphological resemblance ties it to a species from the Caribbean island of Curaçao. Both species are found in shallow sublittoral interstitial spaces.
Highlights
The Maldive Islands (Central Indian Ocean) consist of a 800-km long string of 22 atolls containing an extensive coral reef system topped by over a thousand islands (Coleman 2000; Spalding et al 2001)
In other cases populations of the same species are spread over different islands. This was encountered in the Canary islands for the widely separated islands Hierro and Tenerife (Vonk and Sánchez 1991; Vonk and Jaume 2014)
In the small Indonesian Gura Ici island group in the Molucca Sea two species appear in syntopy in the same beach groundwater spot (Vonk and Jaume 2014)
Summary
The Maldive Islands (Central Indian Ocean) consist of a 800-km long string of 22 atolls containing an extensive coral reef system topped by over a thousand islands (Coleman 2000; Spalding et al 2001). Only two other specimens of representatives of the family had been reported from the Maldives (Ruffo 1966). Their numbers are mostly low, the presence of vermiform and interstitial ingolfiellids or wormshrimps (Vonk and Nijman 2006) is expected for all tropical reef sand environments. As they have no free-swimming larvae in the water column and a low egg production (Siewing 1963) their capacity for long distance dispersal is presumably quite limited. In this paper we describe Ingolfiella maldivensis sp. n. and discuss relations to other species
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