Schizoretepora hassi Harmelin, Bitar & Zibrowius, 2007

Boury-Esnault, Nicole, Bellan, Gerard, Bellan-Santini, Denise, Boudouresque, Charles-Francois, Chevaldonné, Pierre, Dias, Alrick, Faget, Daniel, Harmelin, Jean-Georges, Harmelin-Vivien, Mireille, Lejeusne, Christophe, Perez, Thierry, Vacelet, Jean & Verlaque, Marc, 2023, The Station Marine d’Endoume, Marseille: 150 years of natural history, Zootaxa 5249 (2), pp. 213-252 : 240

Schizoretepora hassi Harmelin, Bitar & Zibrowius, 2007 ( Fig. 13 ): a mysterious bryozoan from the East

Schizoretepora hassi is a cheilostomate bryozoan belonging to the Phidoloporidae , i.e. the family of the beautiful reteporid Reteporella grimaldii ( Jullien, 1903) , the so-called “lace coral” well-known of Mediterranean divers and which has been the first bryozoan in the world to be illustrated in the literature, by Rondelet in 1554. Among the bryozoans described from the material collected during surveys of the Station Marine d’Endoume, S. hassi is not the most spectacular and its features are only but typical of the family. It lives in shaded rocky habitats of the Lebanese littoral zone and has not yet been found anywhere else. What is surprising is that a Mediterranean species living in the shallow coastal zone with large, conspicuous colonies, had not been described before. The question of its status, steno-endemic of the Levantine Basin or Erythraean immigrant introduced in the Mediterranean, remains open. It was dedicated to Dr Hans Hass, Austrian biologist who was both a famous diving icon and a pioneer in scientific diving and underwater photography. In 1948, he also had written a thesis on the Mediterranean reteporids, collected by diving.

Figures

FIGURE 13. Schizoretepora hassi: A & B, samples from Lebanon (A: scanning electron micrograph). C: Hans Hass collecting bryozoans in the 1940s in Greece (From Hass, 1952).