Ophiocoma schoenleinii Müller & Troschel, 1842

Fatemi, Yaser & Stöhr, Sabine, 2019, Annotated species list of Ophiuroidea (Echinodermata) from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, with new records, Zootaxa 4711 (1), pp. 77-106 : 83

Ophiocoma schoenleinii Müller & Troschel, 1842

Ophiocoma schoenleinii Müller & Troschel, 1842: 99 ; Benavides-Serrato & O’Hara 2008: 54.

Ophiocoma erinaceus — Fatemi et al. 2010 , non O. erinaceus Müller & Troschel, 1842 .

Habitat: Rocky intertidal ( Fatemi et al. 2010).

Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman: Qeshm Island (10) (ibid.).

Indian Ocean: Distribution is unclear, because O. schoenleinii has been treated as a junior synonym of O. erinaceus for a long time. OBIS (2019) includes records in the Mozambique Channel and in the eastern tropical Indian Ocean.

Remarks. Fatemi et al. (2010) described that their specimens had two tentacle scales only on the proximal arms and only a shallow v-shaped wedge of granules on the ventral disc, which are distinguishing characters of O. schoenleinii , but they treated them as O. erinaceus , with which it had been synonymized before ( Devaney 1970), probably unaware that Benavides-Serrato & O’Hara (2008) had shown that both are separate species. There is thus no record of O. erinaceus in the studied area so far. Live O. erinaceus are easy to identify by their bright red tube feet, which turn white in alcohol. It also has two tentacle scales throughout the arm and the ventral disc granules reach to the oral shield ( Benavides-Serrato & O’Hara 2008). Tracing the distribution of O. schoenleini is complicated by the fact that most studies do not provide morphological characters of the identified material. Studies with detailed descriptions have not reported this species from South Africa ( Olbers et al. 2019), nor from Madagascar ( Cherbonnier & Guille 1978). It has been documented from the Indo-Pacific and Pacific Oceans ( Clark & Rowe 1971).