Triphyllozoon philippinense (Busk, 1884)

Venkatraman, C., Padmanaban, P., Louis, Soja & Shrinivaasu, S., 2018, Marine bryozoans of Gujarat and Maharashtra, Records of the Zoological Survey of India 118 (4), pp. 389-404 : 396

18. Triphyllozoon philippinense (Busk, 1884) (Plate 5c)

Locality: Malvan fish landing centre, Maharashtra, 16° 05’

44.0 N

Substratum: Coral rubble

Description: Large Zoarium and tubular. Orifices are placed on the outer surface of the tubes. Spines present and placed one on each side of the orifice. Infra fenestral avicularia more or less slanting, oval in shape, placed on slightly raised calcareous thickenings.The labial avicularia not noticed. Small rounded frontal avicularia are found along with ovicells. Ovicells are large and are distinct normally placed in the regions where the bifurcation takes place. Characteristic trifoliate stigma present, the arm of stigma ending in minute rounded pores ( Menon and Menon, 2006).

Remarks: Recorded for the first time in India. Even though this species has been reported by Tripathy et al., (2016) in Andaman and Nicobar Islands, it has not been mentioned as new record to India in his research paper. Also, the photograph provided by the authors is not clear and does not bearing clear taxonomic characters which can be seen only by SEM photographs.

Distribution: Sulu Archipelago and Philippines