Plumularia bathyalis, Plumularia contraria, and Plumularia pseudocontraria—these are the names of the three new hydrozoan species described by ECIMAT researchers, specifically from the Deep-Water Marine Fauna Group of the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology at the University of Vigo. This work was conducted in collaboration with the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands, for the study of fauna in the Western Pacific, particularly in the region of New Caledonia and nearby seas.
“The three species,” which were collected during campaigns carried out in the 1980s in New Caledonia and the Philippines, “are colonies of polyps that resemble feathers, hence the name of the family, Plumulariidae, and also of the genus, Plumularia. They belong to the phylum Cnidaria, which also includes jellyfish, corals, and anemones,” explains researcher and lecturer Fran Ramil.
While Plumularia bathyalis and Plumularia contraria were collected in New Caledonia in 1987 and 1985, respectively, Plumularia pseudocontraria comes from the waters of the Philippines, where it was found in 1985. It is now, nearly three decades after their collection, that these three species have been formally described for science, on December 26 in Zoosystema, the journal of the National Museum of Natural History of France.
“The description of these species confirms that hydrozoans, like other previously studied groups, show high diversity in the deep waters of this region, as well as a certain degree of endemism,” notes Fran Ramil regarding the three new species, which join a genus and four other new species previously described by the group.
One genus and three other new species on the way to being described
It was in the 1990s when researcher Fran Ramil began collaborating with the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands, initially to study deep-water hydrozoans collected during French and Dutch expeditions in the northeastern Atlantic. After these projects were completed, in 2000, Professor Vervoort from the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden—one of the world’s most recognized specialists in hydrozoans—proposed that Ramil’s group continue working together, this time with material from French research campaigns in the Western Pacific.
In this work, in addition to describing these three new species for science, the Zoology Group studied material collected in Japan and Indonesia in the early 20th century, which is currently deposited in various European natural history museums. During this process, besides splitting what had previously been considered a single species into two, the researchers from the University also provided new data on species that had not been found since their original description in 1913, and they reviewed and discussed the geographic distribution of the species studied in the work.
“This is the marine region that hosts the highest known species diversity of all the world’s oceans, so it is expected that as research progresses, new species will continue to be described. In our case, we are working on the description of a new genus, which includes three new species as well, and we hope to publish it toward the end of this year,” says Fran Ramil.
New campaign within the framework of the ECOAFRIK project
Ramil, together with Marta Gil, is currently in the South Atlantic, in the SEAFO (South East Atlantic Fisheries Organisation) area, with the aim of assessing fishery resources and also locating and mapping potential VMEs, Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems. The data obtained during this campaign, which is being carried out within the framework of cooperation between SEAFO, the EAF-Nansen Project (Norway), and the FAO Deep Sea Programme—and to which the Vigo-based ECOAFRIK group was invited to participate by the FAO—will be used to implement protection of marine resources and improve fisheries management measures in the deep-sea areas of SEAFO.
This campaign will be followed at the end of February by a second one in the exclusive economic zone of Equatorial Guinea, in which two researchers from Vigo are expected to participate. They will be responsible for studying benthic invertebrates, as well as taking part in training tasks for Equatorial Guinean scientists in the fields of fishery resource assessment and benthic ecosystem studies.
