STYRACOTHORACIDAE (COPEPODA: HARPACTICOIDA), A NEW FAMILY FROM THE PHILIPPINE DEEP SEA

Abstract

The present work arises from a study of the bathyal and mainly abyssal harpacticoids collected during the second leg of the French ESTASE Expedition in 1984. Copepods were collected on board the RV Jean Charcot during its cruise off the Philippine west coast from Manila to Surabaya in Indonesia. The harpacticoid copepod fauna of Philippine deep waters has received relatively little attention, despite the fact that extensive surveys have been carried out in the Philippine Trench during the Danish Galathea Expedition and the various cruises of the Russian research vessel Vityaz (Belyaev, 1972). Virtually all our knowledge of Philippine deep-sea harpacticoids is contained in Ito's excellent papers (1982, 1983) on Cerviniidae, Thalestridae, and Ameiridae from an abyssal locality southeast of Mindanao. The description by Ito of highly distinctive harpacticoid taxa such as Tonpostratiotes tenuipedalis, Abyssameira reducta, and Parameiropsis magnus, gives an indication that this area might reveal other unsuspected discoveries. The only other deepwater harpacticoid described from the Philippine Sea is Pontostratiotes horrida (Cerviniidae) from 4,300 meters depth in the northeastern sector near the Bonin Islands (Izu-Bonin Trench) (Brotskaya, 1959), but this locality is quite remote from the Philippine waters proper. This paper reports on the first deep-water harpacticoid to be described from off the west coast of the Philippines. The single female collected represents the type of a new family and was found to be infested by an as yet unknown developmental stage oftan