Abstract
Investigation of bryozoan faunas collected in two submarine caves in Lesvos Island, Aegean Sea revealed a great number of colonies of three species currently assigned to the cheilostome family Onychocellidae: Onychocella marioni Jullien, 1882, O. vibraculifera Neviani, 1895, and Smittipora disjuncta Canu & Bassler, 1930. All species were first described and subsequently recorded on several occasions, from the Mediterranean Sea, particularly from the Aegean Sea. The availability of this material provided the basis for more detailed observations and first scanning electron microscopy (SEM) study of some diagnostic characters, including ovicells and ancestrulae, for the well-known species, as well as a few colonies of a species left in open nomenclature (i.e., Onychocellidae sp. 1) in previous works. In this paper we (i) update the descriptions of these four species; (ii) resurrect the species Floridinella arculifera Canu & Bassler, 1927, which was previously synonymised with Caleschara minuta (Maplestone, 1909), suggesting for it the new combination Tretosina arculifera; (iii) and introduce the new genus Bryobifallax for S. disjuncta.
Highlights
The Mediterranean Sea is one of the best studied marine areas in the world
Investigation of bryozoan faunas collected in two submarine caves in Lesvos Island, Aegean Sea revealed a great number of colonies of three species currently assigned to the cheilostome family Onychocellidae: Onychocella marioni Jullien, 1882, O. vibraculifera Neviani, 1895, and Smittipora disjuncta Canu & Bassler, 1930
This paper aims to describe and illustrate these four Mediterranean “onychocellid” species from new material collected in two submarine caves of Lesvos Island (Greece), and we here suggest a new combination for two of these species which are displaced from the family Onychocellidae and introduce a new genus for one of them
Summary
The Mediterranean Sea is one of the best studied marine areas in the world. The first, pioneering investigation started at the end of the 16th century with naturalists, such as Ferrante Imperato, describing some bryozoan species [1]. Large sectors (mostly in the eastern and southern Mediterranean) and several habitats (e.g., remote and hardly accessible dark habitats) remain understudied, as recently demonstrated [4,5,6,7,8] In this context, the availability of samples from submarine caves of Lesvos Island, located in the northeastern sector of the Aegean Sea in the NE Mediterranean, was twofold relevant because they yielded colonies of both rare and undescribed taxa (e.g., [6]). The family presently includes 33 genera [10] but only two (with four species in total) are currently recorded in the Mediterranean [3,11,12,13] These are: Onychocella with three species, i.e., O. marioni Jullien, 1882, O. angulosa (Reuss, 1848), and O. vibraculifera Neviani, 1895; and Smittipora Jullien, 1882, i.e., S. disjuncta Canu & Bassler, 1930, a problematic species sometimes attributed to Rectonychocella Canu & Bassler, 1917, another onychocellid genus, long considered as a synonym of Smittipora
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