Caligus

Ho, Ju-Shey, Lin, Ching-Long & Liu, Wei-Cheng, 2016, High diversity of Caligus species (Copepoda: Siphonostomatoida: Caligidae) in Taiwanese waters, Zootaxa 4174 (1), pp. 114-121 : 115

Diversity of Caligus in the Far East

The Far East is an area of Asia comprising seven countries, namely, China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, Philippines, South Korea , and Taiwan . Two of these seven countries, Mongolia and North Korea , are not dealt with in this report because the former is a land-locked country and the latter has so far produced no records of parasitic copepods. As listed in Table 1 , currently 81 species of Caligus are known from the Far East. This figure shows that close to one-third (31.76 %, or 81/255) of the known species of Caligus in the world are found from the western North Pacific Ocean. In other words, The Far East shows a high diversity of Caligus .

The data given in Table 1 were compiled from an illustrated booklet by Song & Kuang (1980) for China; from a checklist produced by Nagasawa et al. (2010) for Japan; from an FAO’s Document Repository ( Arthur & Lumanlan-Mayo 1997) and two papers by Cressey & Cressey (1980) and Ho et al. (2004), respectively, for the Philippines; from eight publications by Choi et al. (1995), Kim (1998a), Venmathi Maran & Ohtsuka (2008), Choe & Kim (2010), Moon & Kim (2012), and Venmathi Maran et al. (2012) for South Korea; and from eight reports by Ho & Lin (2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2010a, 2010b), and Ho et al. (2007, 2008a, 2008b) for Taiwan. The Philippines consists of 7,107 islands and collectively have the longest coastline (33,900 km) among the seven countries in the Far East. However in terms of the number of records of Caligus species, it is one of the least known countries in this region (see Table 1 ). The coastline of China (30,017 km) also is long, but the number of documented records of the genus Caligus is just as poor as that for Philippines. The situation in Japan, which has a marginally shorter coastline (29,020 km) yet many more recorded species of Caligus (see Table 1 ), indicates that good surveys of sea lice are badly needed for both the Philippines and China.