Ammothella appendiculata ( Dohrn, 1881 )

Sabroux, Romain, Hassanin, Alexandre & Corbari, Laure, 2022, Sea spiders (Arthropoda: Pycnogonida) collected during the Madibenthos Expedition from Martinique shallow waters, European Journal of Taxonomy 851 (1), pp. 1-141 : 11-12

Ammothella appendiculata ( Dohrn, 1881)

Ammothea appendiculata Dohrn, 1881: 7 , 15, 18, 22, 24, 49, 51, 135 (text, key), 152–155, 159, 165, pl. 7 figs 1–5.

Ammothella appendiculata – Cole 1904a: 323. — Marcus 1940: 89–91, pl. 11 fig. 11a–e. — Hedgpeth 1948: 247 (key). — Stock 1954a: 116; 1954b: 116–118, 120 (key), fig. 56a–b; 1955: 250–252, fig. 18; 1975a: 973; 1979: 8; 1986: 400; 1992a: 116; 1994: 18, 27. — Child 1974: 497; 1979: 9; 1982a: 357–358; 1992b: 8 (key), 12–15, 76, fig. 4; 2004: 149 (key); 2009: 818 (list). — Birkeland et al. 1976: 133. — Arnaud 1987: 39–40.— Munilla 1993: 452, tabs 2, 4. — Varoli 1996: tabs 1–2. — Bamber 1997: 144–145, fig. 1a; 2000: 621–622; 2004: 2–3, tab. 2; 2007: 256 (list). — Chimenz Gusso & Lattanzi 2003: tab. 1. — Montoya Bravo et al. 2006: 88–89; 2009: 22 . — Arango & Wheeler 2007: appendix 1, tab. 1, figs 1–4 (phylogeny), figs 5g, 8 (phylogeny). — Dunlop et al. 2007: 47, fig. 4. — Fahrenbach & Arango 2007: 919–920, fig. 1e (anatomy). — Krapp et al. 2008: 58–59 , 61. — Müller & Krapp 2009: 10–13 , 21 (key), 21–24, 132 (phenology), 137 (list), tab. 1, fig. 6. — Arabi et al. 2010: 448, tab. 2, figs 1–3 (phylogeny). — Bartolino & Chimenz 2010: 396 (list). — Gul & Ghani 2012: 201, fig. 1. — Koçak & Alan 2013: 367, 369–371, figs 8–9. — Lehmann et al. 2014: 165 (list), 166, figs 3, 13–14; 2017: figs 1f, 5f, 8k, 9c (biology). — Munilla & Soler-Membrives 2014: 95 (key), 96–97, fig. 49. — Koçak 2015: 190, tab. 1; 2019: 49 (list); 2020: 375. — Soler-Membrives & Munilla 2015: tab. 2. — Dietz et al. 2018: figs 1e, 2f. — Lucena & Christoffersen 2018a: 105. — Lucena et al. 2019: 6, 8, 21. — Sabroux et al. 2019b: 1531, tab. 1, figs 3, 5. — Wang et al. 2020: tab. 1. — Ramírez-Tello et al. 2022: 165, tab. 3.

Ammothea appendiculata – Norman 1908: 226. — Loman 1912: 8.

Ammothea (Ammothella) appendiculata – Bouvier 1917: 39; 1923a: 52. — Giltay 1934b: 4.

Type material

Syntypes (?) (see Stock 1955; Dunlop et al. 2007): ZMB _Pyc_46 (not examined). Type locality: Santa Lucia, Naples Bay, Italy .

Material examined

MARTINIQUE • 1 juv.; Canal de Ste Lucie ; 14°23.9ʹ N, 60°52.6ʹ W; depth 0–2 m; 12 Sep. 2016; st. AM012; MNHN-IU-2016-1278/ MK411096 • 1 juv.; same collection data as for preceding; MNHN- IU-2016-1310/ MK411098 • 1 ♂ ov.; same collection data as for preceding; MNHN-IU-2016-1573 • 1 ♀; Baie de Sans-Souci ; 14°34.7ʹ N, 60°50.7ʹ W; depth 0–1 m; 9 Oct. 2016; st. AM325; MNHN- IU-2016-1279 • 1 ♀; Le Prêcheur ; 14°47.2ʹ N, 61°13.1ʹ W; depth 10–17 m; 3 Oct. 2016; st. AR383; MNHN-IU-2017-220 .

Remarks

This species was already recorded in Martinique by Bourdillon (1955) from the Petite Anse du Diamant, and was sampled during Madibenthos from both the Atlantic and Caribbean coasts. It is commonly sampled in the Atlantic, and available illustrations (e.g., Dohrn 1881; Stock 1955; Child 1982a; Müller & Krapp 2009) show significant morphological variations. Stock (1955) considered that a slender form and a stout form co-exist, which he suspected to correspond to two adult stages separated by a moult, though this theory was proven invalid by observations of Child (1982a) on Belize material. Madibenthos material corresponds to the stout form and strongly resembles the drawing of Child (1992b); this stout form is the one represented by the type material according to the drawings in Stock (1955) (although the type status of this material is not totally clear). The slender form mentioned by Stock (1955) may correspond to one of the hereafter newly described species, Ammothella dirbergi sp. nov. or A. krappi sp. nov., or to A. aff. krappi , most likely the first given Stock’s drawing. Species delimitation based on CO1 data support the distinction of these three species from A. appendiculata ( Sabroux et al. 2019b) . The p-distances between A. appendiculata and these species are very high and vary between 0.172 and 0.197 (see Appendix).

Another harsh debate regarding this species is the possible synonymy of Ammothella appendiculata and A. rugulosa . Lucena et al. (2019) suggested that the two species can be differenciated by the length of their appendages.

Distribution

Rather cosmopolitan, with records in the West and East Mediterranean, West Atlantic (Florida, Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean, French Guiana, Brazil) and Indo-Pacific ( Pakistan, Indonesia, Hong-Kong, New Caledonia).

Depth range

0– 76 m.