Range extensions of three species of the family Caryophylliidae (Scleractinia) in the eastern Pacific Ocean

Abstract

The Family Caryophylliidae Gray, 1847 (Cnidaria: Scleractinia), has almost 300 species in 42 genera (Cairns,1999); these corals occurs in all world oceans and at depths from less than 10 m to over 5000 m (Cairns, 2004). In this paper we report the finding of three species of this family from the southern California abyssal plain (off San Diego, California, USA) and in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, all of which represents new distribution records. Two colonies of the coral Caryophyllia diomedeae Marenzeller, 1904 (Figure 1) were collected in February 2006 by the ROV ‘Tiburon’ of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) off California, at San Marcos Seamount (32.637923°N 121.505619°W; station T669 [sample A13 and A14]) in a depth of 2133 m. This is a cosmopolitan species present in the Mediterranean, the north-east Atlantic, Australia, New Zealand, and around Antarctica, at depths from 35 to 2500 m (Zibrowius, 1980; Cairns, 1982, 1995, 2004). In the eastern Pacific, C. diomedeae previously has been reported from the following localities: Panama, Costa Rica (Cocos Island), Ecuador (Galapagos Islands) at 245 to 1043 m (Cairns, 1991), Chile at 1760 m (Cairns et al., 2005), and Mexico (at Los Angeles Bay, northern Gulf of California) at 396 to 612 m, and 2034 to 2086 m (south of Ensenada, western Baja California; Parker, 1963; Reyes-Bonilla & Cruz-Pinon, 2000; ReyesBonilla et al., 2005, Reyes-Bonilla et al., 2008). The record from the San Marcos Seamount is the first of the presence of this species in the United States, as well as a new depth record off the western coast of the Americas. During the same ROV ‘Tiburon’ expedition, the abyssal species Caryophyllia quadragenaria, Alcock, 1902 (Figure 2) was found on San Juan Seamount (33.133973°N 120.900608°W; station T664, sample R28), at a depth 1669, and in Rodriguez Seamount (33.991677°N 121.116952°W; station T670, sample, R21), at a depth of 986 m. This is the second documentation of this coral in the eastern Pacific, following that of Cairns et al. (2005) from Chile at 705 to 730 m deep, and extends the bathymetric and latitudinal range of the species about 1000 m and 65 latitude degrees in this region. Worldwide, C. quadragenaria is known from western Pacific (Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Western Australia and New Zealand) at depths of 54 to 430 m (Cairns, 1995, 1998, 2004).