SCYLLARINAE Latreille, 1825

Holthuis, Lipke B., 2002, The Indo-Pacific scyllarine lobsters (Crustacea, Decapoda, Scyllaridae), Zoosystema 24 (3), pp. 499-683 : 501-502

Subfamily SCYLLARINAE Latreille, 1825

Scyllarides Latreille, 1825: 278 .

Scyllarinae – Holthuis 1985: 3, 10, 12.

The family Scyllaridae is such a well-defined and homogeneous entity that only as late as 1985 a proposal was published to subdivide it into subfamilies. The subfamily Scyllarinae was then considered to consist of a single genus Scyllarus Fabricius, 1775 , and only the study of the present very extensive material showed that the old genus can be subdivided. Suggestions that groups of species can be recognized within the old genus Scyllarus have already been made by previous authors like Ortmann (1897: 270) and Bouvier (1917: 105, 106), but the outlines of these groups were not very sharp and no names were suggested for them. Bouvier’s remarks did not incite later authors to further explore the possibilities for subdividing the genus. In studying the present very extensive material, I believed to be able to recognize sharply delimited natural groups, and have treated these as full genera.

As all the synonyms published so far of the generic name Scyllarus s.l. are objective synonyms of that name, none of these can be used for a subdivision of the old genus and all the genera introduced here have to have a new name. In order to show the close affinity of these genera, I have used for all new names the suffix - arctus to indicate this relation. I chose this suffix as the name Arctus is the best known of the synonyms of Scyllarus and lends itself much better for such a use than the generic name Scyllarus itself.

Until now the history of the subfamily Scyllarinae has been practically the same as that of the genus Scyllarus . Scyllarus was proposed by Fabricius (1775) with Cancer arctus Linnaeus, 1758 as its type species by monotypy. The names Scyllarus arctus (Linnaeus, 1758) or Cancer arctus at that time were used for practically all scyllarid species. By the end of the 18 th century, several new species of scyllarids had been recognised: Scyllarus aequinoctialis Lund, 1793 (now in Scyllarides ), Scyllarus antarcticus Lund, 1793 (now in Parribacus ), Scyllarus orientalis Lund, 1793 (now in Thenus ), and Scyllarus guineensis Spengler, 1799 (now in Arctides ). In the early 19 th century, Latreille (1803) added the new species Scyllarus latus (now in Scyllarides ) to the genus. The first new Scyllarid genera were introduced by Leach (1815), namely Thenus (for Scyllarus orientalis ) and Ibacus (for his new species Ibacus peronii ). In his fundamental monograph of the Crustacea, H. Milne Edwards (1837) recognized three genera of Scyllaridae : Scyllarus (containing the species of Scyllarus s.l. and Scyllarides ), Ibacus (containing the species of Ibacus and Parribacus of modern authors) and Thenus (with only the type species). A new change in the generic status of Scyllarus was introduced by De Haan (1849). He adopted the general system of H. Milne Edwards, but divided the genus Scyllarus into two genera: Scyllarus and Arctus . In Scyllarus he placed the species of Scyllarides of modern authors, and in Arctus the species of Scyllarus s.l. He divided Ibacus into Ibacus A (= Parribacus ) and Ibacus B (= Ibacus ). Dana (1852) followed De Haan, but gave the new name Parribacus to Ibacus A. Most subsequent authors followed Dana, even to such an extent that Arctus De Haan, 1849 usually was indicated as Arctus Dana, 1852 . De Haan and most of the subsequent authors made the error that they used the name Scyllarus for the wrong genus, namely for one that does not contain the type species Cancer arctus . It was the ichthyologist Theodore Gill (1898) who recognized this error and corrected it. He synonymized Arctus with Scyllarus and proposed the new name Scyllarides for the genus that at that time had been incorrectly named Scyllarus . This correct nomenclature then became generally accepted. After 1852 numerous new species of Scyllaridae were described, but only two new genera: in 1869 the new genus Evibacus S. I. Smith (subfamily Ibacinae ) was established and in 1960 the genus Arctides Holthuis (subfamily Arctidinae ).

In the following key the genus Scyllarus , although so far not known from the Indo-Pacific region, has been included to show its position among the other genera recognized here.