Revision of some coastal species of bitentaculate Cirratulidae (Annelida, Cirratulida) from the North-East Atlantic
Abstract
The family Cirratulidae is a diverse group of benthic polychaetes with about 400 species described worldwide. Fifty-eight nominal species are recorded in Europe, but recent DNA analyses have revealed that between 83 and 96 additional species inhabit European benthic environments and probably most of them are still undescribed. In this paper, two historical species are re-described due to the lack of details about some relevant morphological characters in the original descriptions: Aphelochaeta marioni (Saint-Joseph, 1894) and Aphelochaeta mcintoshi (Southern, 1914) comb. nov. Following these redescriptions, three new species of the genera Aphelochaeta and Tharyx are described: Aphelochaeta annae sp. nov., Aphelochaeta elinorae sp. nov. and Tharyx emmae sp. nov. Finally, new records of Tharyx maryae Blake & Göransson, 2015, Tharyx robustus Blake & Göransson, 2015 and Kirkegaardia serrata (Eliason, 1962) are presented along with a description of the material examined.
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