Researchers from the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo, Fran Ramil and Marta Gil, describe four new species of Hydrozoans.
Leonisa González never understood that her granddaughter, Marta Gil, liked Marine Sciences and much less that she devoted herself, with great devotion, to the study of hydrozoans, however, she always supported her. As a result of that work, Marta, together with the teacher and researcher from the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology of the University of Vigo Fran Ramil, described four new species of hydrozoans, which are part of the phylum Cnidaria, which also includes anemones, corals and jellyfish, among others. Diphasia leonisae is the name of the first new species described by Marta Gil, who did not miss the opportunity to dedicate the find to her grandmother Leonisa, “who continues to support her in everything she does”, Ramil points out. But Leonisa is not the only woman who gives a name to one of the new species described by researchers from the University of Vigo, who also decided to dedicate another of their findings, Diphasia anaramosae, to her colleague from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, IEO, Ana Ramos, “in recognition of her enormous contribution to the study of the fauna and benthic communities of northwest Africa, where she has been working for almost 30 years”, they explain.
The names of the other two described species are related, in turn, to the places where they were found and their geographical distribution. Thus, Diphasia saharica was first located on the coast of Western Sahara, while Diphasia africana refers to the geographical distribution of the species, which extends across northwest Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to Guinea-Bissau.
Colonial animals of a very diverse genus
The new species described are animals that form colonies of polyps, which live fixed on the seabed on any type of substrate, although due to their external appearance they resemble shrubs or even algae, to the point that, for a long time, they were called zoophytes or plant-animals. “The description of the new species, which appears in an article published in December 2017 in the journal Zootaxa, was made under the auspices of the EcoAfrik project to study the benthic fauna of deep waters off the coast of Africa, which we have been developing in collaboration with the IEO since 2004”, explain Ramil and Gil, who highlight that the article, which is part of Marta’s doctoral thesis, addresses the revision of the genus Diphasia, off the coast of Africa. “In it we study the nine species known so far in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean, we describe four new ones for science and, in addition, we present a guide for the identification of the species”, detail the researchers.
The study developed by the University of Vigo and the IEO also shows, according to its authors, that the diversity of the genus Diphasia in the eastern Atlantic seems to be much higher than previously thought, “especially on the African coast, where the number of known species is higher than on the European coasts, despite being a much less studied area”, detail Fran Ramil and Marta Gil.
Almost a dozen campaigns in eight years
The material studied by the researchers was mainly collected in 11 oceanographic campaigns carried out in northwest Africa, from the Strait of Gibraltar to the southern border of Guinea-Conakry, between 2004 and 2012, of which eight were organized by the IEO aboard the oceanographic ship Vizconde de Eza and the other three were led by FAO, aboard the Norwegian ship Dr. Fridtjof Nansen and in which samples were collected throughout the entire study area, including the Cape Verde Islands. “We also studied material collected by the French campaign Seamount 1 in the seamounts that are located west of the Strait of Gibraltar and by the German campaign Meteor 42/3 in the Great Meteor Bank, near the mid-Atlantic ridge”, conclude the researchers from the Department of Ecology and Animal Biology of the University of Vigo.
Source DUVI
