Liriope tetraphylla (Chamisso and Eysenhardt, 1821)

Gravili, Cinzia, Vito, Doris De, Camillo, Cristina Gioia Di, Martell, Luis, Piraino, Stefano & Boero, Ferdinando, 2015, The non-Siphonophoran Hydrozoa (Cnidaria) of Salento, Italy with notes on their life-cycles: an illustrated guide, Zootaxa 3908 (1), pp. 1-187 : 162-163

Liriope tetraphylla (Chamisso and Eysenhardt, 1821)

Fig. 115 A, B

Material examined. HCUS-S 121 (Hydrozoa Collection, University of Salento—fauna of the Salento Peninsula).

Description (after Mayer 1910 as L. exigua ; Kramp 1959; Pagès et al. 1992):

Medusa. Umbrella hemispherical, 10–30 mm wide, apex somewhat flattened, mesoglea thick, rigid; manubrium small, on long, cylindrical gastric peduncle, longer than umbrella diameter; mouth with 4 simple lips boarded with cnidocysts; with normally 4 radial canals (sometimes more) and 1–7 centripetal canals between each pair of adjacent radial canals; gonads variable in shape and size, generally heart-shaped, on either side of the middle of radial canals; velum broad; with marginal cnidocyst ring; typically 4 long hollow perradial tentacles with cnidocyst rings and 4 small solid interradial tentacles with adaxial cnidocyst clusters; 8 statocysts. Colorless.

Cnidome Atrichous haplonemes and microbasic euryteles.

Seasonality January–December (see Bouillon et al. 2004); May–June ( Benović et al. 2005); January ( Touzri et al. 2010) in several localities of the Mediterranean Sea.

Reproductive period. From January to December (see Russell 1953).

Distribution. Common in temperate regions in all oceans, and in the Mediterranean Sea ( Russell 1953; Kramp 1959, 1961; Medel & López-González 1996; Bouillon et al. 2004).

Records in Salento. Common in the Gulf of Taranto ( Belmonte et al. 2001).

References. Mayer (1910) as L. exigua ; Neppi (1912), Neppi & Stiasny (1913), Pell (1918), Babnik (1948) all as L. eurybia ; Trégouboff & Rose (1957), Kramp (1957, 1961), Goy (1973), Castello i Tortella (1986), Gili (1986), Benović & Bender (1987), Brinckmann-Voss (1987), Benović & Lučić (1996), de Souza et al. (1996), Medel & López-González (1996), Mills et al. (1996), Goy (1997), Buecher & Gibbons (1999), Belmonte et al. (2001), Batistić et al. (2004, 2007), Bouillon et al. (2004), Zakaria (2004), Benović et al. (2005), Touzri et al. (2010).

Figures

FIGURE 115. Liriope tetraphylla: A, general view of adult medusa; B, terminal portion of a hollow perradial tentacle (redrawn and modified: A after Trègouboff & Rose 1957, B after Russell 1953 by A. Gennari). Scale bars: 1.0 cm. See Kramp (1961) for a complete synonymy.