Abstract
The coast of northern Chile has been sparsely studied in regards to its invertebrate fauna, with just a few works reviewing the distribution of local mollusks. This work presents a survey of the shallow water heterobranch sea slugs currently occurring around the port of Caldera (27 °S), in the Región de Atacama, northern Chile. Eight species of sea slugs were found in this study: Aplysiopsis cf. brattstroemi (Marcus, 1959), Baptodoris peruviana (d’Orbigny, 1837), Diaulula variolata (d’Orbigny, 1837), Doris fontainii d’Orbigny, 1837, Onchidella marginata (Couthouy in Gould, 1852), Phidiana lottini (Lesson, 1831), Tyrinna delicata (Abraham, 1877) and the new species Berthella schroedli sp. nov., described herein. All of the species found in the area are endemic to South America, having distributions in the southeastern Pacific and South Atlantic Oceans, from Ancash, Perú to Peninsula Valdés, Argentina, and two of them represent species which are endemic to the Chilean coasts (Aplysiopsis cf. brattstroemi and Berthella schroedli). The finding of a previously undescribed species emphasizes the need of further surveys, particularly in subtidal and deeper waters, in order to improve the knowledge on this neglected fauna in Atacama.
Highlights
The present study provides records of sea slugs found in shallow waters around Caldera (27 S), Region de Atacama, northern Chile
The electronic version of this article in Portable Document Format (PDF) will represent a published work according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and the new names contained in the electronic version are effectively published under that Code from the electronic edition alone
The present work updates the knowledge on the scarcely known marine fauna of northern Chile; from the 65 species of sea slugs recorded to live in Chilean waters (Schrodl, 2003), eight species were recorded in the Region de Atacama, accounting for about 12% of the Chilean sea slug fauna
Summary
The mollusks of the Region de Atacama, in northern Chile, have been sparsely studied; most of the species commonly present in the area were described in the nineteenth century (Broderip & Sowerby, 1832; Sowerby, 1832; Sowerby, 1833; d’Orbigny, 1834–1847; Gould, 1852; Hupe, 1854; Gay, 1854, Philippi, 1860, among others), with a few works reviewing species during the past century (Dall, 1909; Gigoux, 1932; Gigoux, 1934; Rehder, 1945) and, more recently, with several works describing new species (Osorio, 2012; Araya, 2013; Araya, 2015a; Araya, 2015b; Miquel & Araya, 2013; Collado, 2015; Araya & Reid, 2016) or giving new records (Araya & Araya, 2015a). Regarding heterobranch sea slugs in particular (sensu Camacho-Garcıa et al (2014) and Padula, Wirtz & Schrodl (2014)), How to cite this article Araya and Valdes (2016), Shallow water heterobranch sea slugs (Gastropoda: Heterobranchia) from the Region de Atacama, northern Chile. Isla Blanca (09 S), Ancash, Peru to Peninsula Valdes, in the Atlantic Magellan Strait
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