Folioquinpes chathamensis (Sars, 1905)

Huys, Rony & Lee, Jimin, 2018, Philippiphonteaspidosoma gen. et sp. n., a radically divergent member of the Laophontidae from shell gravel in the East Sea, South Korea, including a review of Folioquinpes Fiers & Rutledge, 1990 (Copepoda, Harpacticoida), ZooKeys 775, pp. 15-46 : 15

Folioquinpes chathamensis (Sars, 1905)

Laophonte chathamensis Sars, 1905

Folioquinpes chathamensis (Sars, 1905) Fiers and Rutledge (1990)

Onychocamptus spec. sensu Mielke (1981): Fiers and Rutledge (1990)

Original description.

Sars (1905): 391-393; Plate 17 (figs 103-118).

Additional description.

Mielke (1981 as Onychocamptus spec.): 52; Abb. 28.

Type locality.

New Zealand, Chatham Islands, Wharekauri (= Chatham Island), Te Whanga Lagoon; shallow brackish water.

Body length.

480 μm (♀), slightly smaller (♂) [ Sars 1905]; 430-450 μm (♀) [ Mielke 1981].

Remarks.

Fiers and Rutledge (1990) stated that armature and shape of the male P5 differed between F. chathamensis and F. mangalis . Sars’s (1905) text description is not informative with regard to the number and position of armature elements. His figure (figure 118) suggests that the P5 is distinctly bilobate, having one endopodal and three exopodal setae. However, the accompanying figure legend states that the left member is illustrated, implying that Sars had figured it in dorsal aspect. The “endopodal” seta is therefore the outer basal arising from a setophore (and not an endopodal lobe). Comparison with F. mangalis also suggests that there are only two exopodal elements, the third one representing the sensilla originating from a lateral tubercle. Based on this reinterpretation there is probably no difference in male P5 morphology between both species. The absence of the typical baseoendopodal incision in the female P5, separating the endopodal lobe and the pedestal bearing the exopod, is also attributable to an observational error by Sars (1905: Taf. 17, fig. 116).

Folioquinpes chathamensis resembles F. indicus sp. n. in the absence of spinules along the anterior margin of the rostrum, the 5-segmented condition of the female antennule, the presence of three inner setae on the distal endopodal segment of leg 3, and of the inner seta on the middle exopodal segment of legs 3-4. The alternative states, including the 4-segmented female antennule, are displayed in the other two species of the genus (Table 1).

Hamond (in Hicks 1977a: 457) collected F. chathamensis near Sydney and Melbourne while Newton and Mitchell (1999) obtained it in mud samples from the Hopkins River estuary in south-western Victoria. It remains unclear whether Lewis’s (1984) single record from an estuarine lagoon in New Zealand is new or refers to Sars’s (1905) type locality. Fiers (1995) recorded the species from the ‘aufwuchs’ covering submerged mangrove pneumatophores in the Celestún Lagoon, northwest of the Yucatán Peninsula (Mexico). Gómez and Morales-Serna (2013) erroneously cited Suárez-Morales et al. (2009) as the source for the Gulf of Mexico record but their checklist only refers to Fiers and Rutledge’s (1990) record of F. mangalis from Louisiana. The latter authors also examined material from Guadeloupe, Papua New Guinea and Taal ( Bombón) Lake, a freshwater lake on the island of Luzon in the Philippines (Fiers, unpubl. data). Mielke (1981, 2003) found the species in a sandy beach in Bahía Academy (Santa Cruz), Galápagos. A single African outlier has been reported from the brackish coastal Ebrié Lagoon in Ivory Coast ( Dumont and Maas 1988). The records by Rühe (1914) and Sewell (1924) refer to other species (see below).

Newton and Mitchell (1999) observed during estuarine mud incubation experiments that F. chathamensis developed to egg-bearing female stage in only six days at 20°C, suggesting that dormancy occurred at an advanced copepodid stage rather than the egg.