Hydromedusae observed during night dives in the Gulf Stream
Author
Schuchert, Peter
Muséum d’histoire naturelle, C. P. 6434, CH- 1211 Genève 6, Switzerland
peter.schuchert@ville-ge.ch
Author
Collins, Richard
880 NE 33 rd Street, Boca Raton, Florida, USA
rc6684@icloud.com
text
Revue suisse de Zoologie
2021
2021-10-21
128
2
237
356
journal article
10.35929/RSZ.0049
172fa5c5-c0c4-4bd7-b710-d608237b8458
0035-418
5639938
Genus
Clytia
Lamouroux, 1812
Synonymy:
See
Calder (1991)
.
Diagnosis:
Medusa with normal, curved umbrella. Manubrium short, with four short perradial lips. Velum present. Normally four radial canals, but some aberrant form may have more. Marginal tentacles>16, with hollow bulbs; without many permanent, small, conical atentaculate bulbs, no excretory papillae. With many statocysts (>16), usually as many or more as tentacles, no ocelli, no cirri. Gonads on radial canals, usually short, not in contact with manubrium.
Hydroid typical for family, colonial, stolonal or erect branched, monosiphonic or polysiphonic. Hydrothecae deep, campanulate, hydrothecal rim sinuous or deeply indented true hydrothecal diaphragm, gonotheca conical.
Remarks:
Very few nominal species of
Clytia
medusae are unambiguously identifiable. Most morphological characters used to distinguish
Clytia
species
fall in the range of variation that can be expected in a single species and having little or no taxonomic value (
Lindner & Migotto, 2002
;
Bouillon
et al
., 2006
). Species identification requires usually knowledge of the entire life cycle. A recent extensive molecular phylogeny of the
Campanulariidae
(
Cunha
et al.
, 2017
) found even more taxonomic inconsistencies, and also provides an excellent framework for barcoding studies. The 16S data set of the latter study was used in a maximum likelihood phylogeny to search for relationships of the sequences obtained in this study. The tree is not shown here due to it size and the sparse results.