Byblis Boeck, 1871

Poore, Gary C. B. & Lowry, James K., 2023, New Australian Species of Ampeliscidae (Crustacea: Amphipoda) from the Great Barrier Reef and Eastern Australia with a Key to Australian Species, Records of the Australian Museum (Rec. Aust. Mus.) 75 (4), pp. 519-533 : 528

Byblis Boeck, 1871

Type species. Byblis gaimardii (Krøyer, 1846) .

Remarks. Species of Byblis are distinguished by the presence of setae on the anterior margin of the basis and the spine-like dactylus of pereopod 7. Species number 76 world-wide ( Horton et al., 2023). Lowry & Poore (1989) described the only four species known fromAustralia, largely from extensive collections made by environmental benthic surveys undertaken during the 1970s. Here two more are added from the Great Barrier Reef and another from the continental slope of Queensland.

“ Byblis species are rather uniform in design, with character states being found in myriad combinations. This makes it difficult to assign Byblis species to groups and therefore difficult to compare a new species with existing species, since each species shares a different suite of characters with different species” ( Myers, 2012: 5). For this reason, the new species are compared only with those from Australia and from the Indo-West Pacific.