Condyloderes paradoxus Higgins, 1969

Sørensen, Martin V., Gąsiorowski, Ludwik, Randsø, Phillip V., Sánchez, Nuria & Neves, Ricardo C., 2016, First report of kinorhynchs from Singapore, with the description of three new species, Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 64, pp. 3-27 : 12

Condyloderes paradoxus Higgins, 1969

( Fig. 6 )

Material examined. Three adult specimens, two from station SI-03 and one from SI-04 ( Fig. 1 , Table 1). One specimen from SI-03 was mounted for LM, and subsequently deposited at the Natural History Museum of Denmark, under catalogue number ZMUC KIN- 848. The remaining two specimens were mounted for SEM, but due to the dirt covering, they only contributed with very little information.

Notes on taxonomy and distribution. Condyloderes paradoxus ( Fig. 6A ) and its four congeners can be discriminated by the segmental distributions of minute cuspidate spines in the lateroventral positions. In C. paradoxus , lateroventral cuspidate spines are present on segments 2, 4, 5, 8 and 9 ( Higgins, 1969a). This distribution corresponds to the cuspidate spine distribution in the recorded specimens from Singapore ( Fig. 6B, C ). Other characters in the examined specimens from Singapore, including the general spine distribution and dimensions, correspond with the data in the original description provided by Higgins (1969a), hence, we feel confident to identify the recorded species as C. paradoxus .

Condyloderes paradoxus was originally described from two localities in the Bay of Bengal, off the Indian coast near Visakhapatnam ( Higgins, 1969a). Collecting the species in Singapore also suggests that C. paradoxus might be distributed throughout the coastal waters of the Bay of Bengal, Andaman Sea and Malacca Strait. Besides the occurrence of this species at its type locality in India, and its presence in Singapore, no other records of C. paradoxus appear in the literature. However, during the extensive work on the kinorhynch fauna of the Korean Peninsula and the East China Sea, carried out by the first author and Dr H. S. Rho (see Sørensen et al., 2010a–c, 2012a, b, 2013; Lundbye et al., 2011; Thomsen et al., 2013; Sánchez et al., 2013; Altenburger et al., 2015) some specimens were actually identified as Condyloderes cf. paradoxus (Sørensen, unpubl.). The specimens occurred in samples taken at 132 m depth in the Korea Strait and between 79–103 m depth in the central part of the East China Sea, but by the time of the examinations, the identity of the specimens were considered doubtful, due to the distance between these sampling localities and the Bay of Bengal. However, with the current record of C. paradoxus from Singapore, which represents a biogeographic transitional point between the Indian Ocean and the West Pacific, it becomes more likely that the species has a wide distribution that ranges from the Bay of Bengal to the Korean Peninsula.

Figures

Fig. 6. Light micrographs showing overviews and details of trunk morphology in Condyloderes paradoxus, KIN-848. A, lateral overview. B, lateroventral spines on segments 1–6. C, terminal spines, and lateroventral spines on segments 8–11. Abbreviations: cu, cuspidate spine; lts, lateral terminal spine; lv, lateroventral acicular spine; md, middorsal acicular spine. All spines labels are followed by respective segment number.

Fig. 1. Map showing the sampling localities south of Singapore Island. Inset to the lower right shows the Malaya Peninsula and Indonesian Archipelago, with Singapore indicated in the square.