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) .