The More You Search, the More You Find: A New Mediterranean Endemism of the Genus Ocenebra Gray, 1847 (Mollusca: Gastropoda: Muricidae) from a Submarine Cave of the Messina Strait Area (Italy)

Fabio Crocetta,Roland Houart,Giuseppe Bonomolo

doi:10.3390/jmse8060443

Abstract

Three hundred years of study on the Mediterranean molluscan fauna led the scientific community to consider it as the best ever known. However, the rate at which new taxa are discovered and described every year is still remarkably high, even in key predators such as Muricidae Rafinesque, 1815. Within this family, the genus Ocenebra Gray, 1847 comprises species widely distributed in the northeastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea that were already the target of a decadal nomenclatural, morphological, and molecular combined research. Notwithstanding, we hereby describe an additional ocenebrid endemism from the Mediterranean Sea, whose distribution appears to be restricted to a circalittoral submarine cave of the Messina Strait area (Italy). The new species Ocenebra vazzanai is compared with the recent Atlanto-Mediterranean congeneric taxa on the basis of the known type materials, and a table summarizing the main diagnostic features of the species is offered to facilitate future identifications. The high biodiversity highlighted in the genus Ocenebra reveals a wide adaptive radiation and suggests the necessity of further studies aiming to tackle biodiversity issues even in popular groups, such as molluscs, and in widely studied biogeographic areas, such as Italy, and the Mediterranean basin in general.

Highlights

The Mediterranean Sea has a long history of scientific exploration and is commonly considered a biodiversity hotspot, hosting about 17,000 marine species [1,2]
The genus Ocenebra Gray, 1847 comprises species widely distributed in the northeastern Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea that were already the target of a decadal nomenclatural, morphological, and molecular combined research
The high biodiversity highlighted in the genus Ocenebra reveals a wide adaptive radiation and suggests the necessity of further studies aiming to tackle biodiversity issues even in popular groups, such as molluscs, and in widely studied biogeographic areas, such as Italy, and the Mediterranean basin in general

Summary

Introduction

The Mediterranean Sea has a long history of scientific exploration and is commonly considered a biodiversity hotspot, hosting about 17,000 marine species [1,2]. The Mediterranean Mollusca, in particular, have been the subject of a plethora of studies over the last three centuries, with malacologists producing an extensive bibliography aiming to clarify taxonomical and nomenclatural issues and to discover, as much as possible, the real magnitude of the molluscan biodiversity in the Mediterranean Sea [3,4]. Despite the general crisis of taxonomic studies in recent decades and the increasingly reduced recognition of the importance of taxonomy, which in turn resulted in diminished funding, lower interest from journals in publishing taxonomic research, and a reduced number of young scientists entering the field [5,6], Mollusca always remained a popular, and frequently investigated group by both professional and amateur malacologists, with more than 2000 recent taxa recorded in or described from the Mediterranean Sea to date [1,4]. The taxonomy and the phylogenetic position of several species was reviewed by additional authors [26,27,28,29,30,31,32], who mostly investigated the subfamily Ocenebrinae Cossmann, 1903 and clarified the phylogenetic position of the species formerly ascribed to the genera Ocenebra Gray, 1847 and Ocinebrina Jousseaume, 1880 and described several species new to science and synonymised other ones

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