Animals were isolated from the sample under a ste-reomicroscope, washed in commercial detergent andin distilled water, and used for morphometry. The fol-lowing measurements(based on adult parthenogeneticfemales) were made, see a scheme of these meas-urements in Kotov et al. (2002a): body length (BL),height (BH) and width (BW); head length (HL) andwidth (HW); eye diameter (ED); valve length (VL);number of marginal elements (NE); number of setaein antero-ventral bunch (NB); number of setae withsingle basal spines (NS); maximal length of a setaon antero-ventral (AV) and postero-ventral valve por-tion (PV); postabdomen length (from base of claw tobase of postabdominal setae) (PL) and height (PH);anus length (AN), length of preanal part of postabdo-men (PR); number of preanal teeth (NT); number ofbig paired spines of distal part (NP); number of large(NL), medium-sized (NM) and rudimentary (NR) lat-eral setae; postabdominal claw length (CL); length ofmore distal (DS) and more basal spine (BS) on base ofclaw; number of distal denticles on claw (DD); rudi-mentary additional denticles on middle part of claw(AD); postabdominal (‘natatorial’) seta length (SN);length of the basal segment of postabdominal seta(BA); antennule length (AL), maximal diameter (DA)and its proximalsegment length(PS); length of secondantenna (without apical setae) (SL); length of exopod(EX) and its apical spine (AS), length of endopod(EN) and its apical spine (AP); length of third exo-pod segment (TH) and of spine on its second segment(SE); maximal length of apical swimming seta (SW)of second antennae, length of distal (DI) and proximal(PX) lateral swimming seta on antennal exopod. Afterthat, some relativeparameterswere calculatedforeachanimal, as applied in a series of previous publications(Kotov, 1999; Kotov et al., 2002a).Two specimenswere placedon slides in a glycerol-formaldehyde mixture, and dissected under a ste-reoscopic microscope for the study of appendagesand postabdomen. Two specimens were critical pointdried, glued on aluminium stubs, sputtered with gold,