Carybdea Péron & Lesueur, 1810

Acevedo, Melissa J., Straehler-Pohl, Ilka, Morandini, André C., Stampar, Sergio N., Bentlage, Bastian, Matsumoto, George I., Yanagihara, Angel, Toshino, Sho, Bordehore, César & Fuentes, Verónica L., 2019, Revision of the genus Carybdea (Cnidaria: Cubozoa: Carybdeidae): clarifying the identity of its type species Carybdea marsupialis, Zootaxa 4543 (4), pp. 515-548 : 518-520

Genus Carybdea Péron & Lesueur, 1810

Carybdea Péron & Lesueur, 1810: 332 .

Charybdea L. Agassiz, 1846: 174 (synonyms, nomenclature)

Several authors between Milne-Edwards (1833) and Mayer (1910) used a variant spelling, Charybdea , which was later rejected. The usage of Carybdea was re-established and unified in Kramp (1961).

Diagnosis: Medusae of Carybdea Péron & Lesueur (1810) , the only genus within Carybdeidae ( Lesson 1843) , can be differentiated from all other families in the order Carybdeida by their possession of a heart-shaped rhopaliar niche ostium with a single, upper covering scale and no lower scales ( Gershwin 2005a; Bentlage et al. 2010; Bentlage & Lewis 2012). To date there are 8 accepted species of Carybdea , with Carybdea marsupialis being the type species.

Type species: Carybdea marsupialis ( Linnaeus 1758) , by subsequent description and designation by Claus (1878) and Haeckel (1880; 1882).

Remarks: Carybdea is the first described cubozoan genus, and numerous cubozoan species were assigned to this genus prior to recent taxonomic revisions (reviewed in Bentlage & Lewis 2012).

Recent classification of the 8 carybdeid species considered for this study (following Mayer 1910; Kramp 1961; Mianzan & Cornelius 1999; Gershwin 2005a; Calder 2009; Straehler-Pohl & Jarms 2011, World Register of Marine Species — WoRMS, present study):

Phylum Cnidaria Verrill, 1865 Subphylum Medusozoa Petersen, 1979 Class Cubozoa Werner, 1973 Order Carybdeida Gegenbaur, 1857 Family Carybdeidae Gegenbaur, 1857 Genus Carybdea Péron & Lesueur, 1810

Carybdea arborifera Maas, 1897

Carybdea branchi Gershwin & Gibbons, 2009

Carybdea brevipedalia Kishinouye, 1891

Carybdea confusa Straehler-Pohl, Matsumoto & Acevedo, 2017 Carybdea marsupialis ( Linnaeus, 1758)

Carybdea murrayana Haeckel, 1880 *

Carybdea rastonii Haacke, 1886

Carybdea xaymacana Conant, 1897

(*) Samples were not available for inspection. Therefore, the taxonomic literature served as the basis for all comparisons.

Note that Carybdea morandinii was not considered in this revision of Carybdea , as it was recently reassigned to the family Alatinidae as Alatina morandinii ( Straehler-Pohl & Toshino 2015) .