Dotilla blanfordi Alcock, 1900

Naderloo, Reza & Türkay, Michael, 2012, Decapod crustaceans of the littoral and shallow sublittoral Iranian coast of the Persian Gulf: Faunistics, Biodiversity and Zoogeography 3374, Zootaxa 3374 (1), pp. 1-67 : 50

Dotilla blanfordi Alcock, 1900

Persian Gulf. Kuwait ( Jones 1986 a, 1986b), Iran [ Stephensen (1946) as Dotilla wichmanni De Man, 1892 ; present study).

Iran. Hormozgan Province: Qeshm I., Bandar-Abbas, Mahtabi, Bandar-Lengeh . Bushehr Province: Bushehr (Jofreh), Chah-Shur.

General distribution. Northwestern Indian Ocean: Persian Gulf, Pakistan, India ( Bombay).

Habitat. Intertidal sandy flat.

Remarks. Stephensen (1946) tentatively recorded Dotilla wichmanni De Man, 1892 from the Iranian coast of the Persian Gulf. Apel (2001) examined Stephensen’s (1946) material and identified it as D. blanfordi . Stephensen (1946) himself mentioned the differences between the Persian Gulf specimens and D. wichmanni , in particular, the missing two posterolateral teeth of carapace and the absence of tympana on the sternal segments. His drawing of the male abdomen of the real D. wichmanni from Thailand is clearly different from that of the Persian Gulf specimens ( Stephensen 1946: 190, fig. 57 A-E). Apel (2001) stated that the records of D. blanfordi from the south coast of the Persian Gulf by Hornby (1997) and that from the Gulf of Oman by Ismail & Ahmad (1994) are misidentification of D. sulcata . Dotilla sulcata occurs in the southern Gulf of Oman and the southern Persian Gulf, while D. blanfordi is distributed along the western ( Iran) and northern ( Kuwait) coast of the Persian Gulf. Recently, Fatemi et al. (2011) recorded this species from the Iranian coast of the Gulf of Oman.