ZS Issue

Pontopolycope orientalis sp. nov. (Crustacea: Ostracoda: Polycopidae), the First Report of a Living Species of the Genus from the Indo-Pacific Region

Hayato Tanaka^*, Yusuke Kondo, Susumu Ohtsuka

Hayato Tanaka

Tokyo Sea Life Park, 6-2-3 Rinkai-cho, Edogawa-ku, Tokyo 134-8587, Japan.

cladocopina@gmail.com

Yusuke Kondo

Takehara Station, Setouchi Field Science Center, Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life, Hiroshima University, 5-8-1 Minato-machi, Takehara, Hiroshima 725-0024, Japan.

ykondo@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

Susumu Ohtsuka

Takehara Station, Setouchi Field Science Center, Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Life, Hiroshima University, 5-8-1 Minato-machi, Takehara, Hiroshima 725-0024, Japan.

ohtsuka@hiroshima-u.ac.jp

Communicated by Ryuji Machida

The present study describes Pontopolycope orientalis sp. nov. (Polycopidae), which was collected from the shallow sandy bottom off of Nagannu Island, Okinawa Prefecture, southwestern Japan. This new species is the first living representative of Pontopolycope from the Indo-Pacific region. We also provided a key to identifying five living congeners throughout the world’s oceans. Since Pontopolycope is defined by the morphological characteristics of the carapace, the following five fossil and subfossil (empty valve) species of Polycope (Polycopidae) are moved to Pontopolycope: Pontopolycope luxuriosa (Herrig, 1964) comb. nov., P. sanctacatherinae (Whatley and Downing, 1983) comb. nov., P. krauseae (Herrig, 1994) comb. nov., P. proboscidea (Herrig, 1994) comb. nov., and P. isolata (Whatley, Jones and Wouters, 2000) comb. nov. Finally, the nucleotide sequence data of three genes (18S rRNA, 28S rRNA, and mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1) of the new species are provided for future systematic and phylogenetic studies.

Keywords

Pontopolycope, Myodocopa, new species, new combination, southwestern Japan, Indo-Pacific, molecular data.