Ovabunda, , Alderslade, 2001

Reinicke Heike Wägele Ralph Tollrian Florian Leese, Kristina Stemmer Ingo Burghardt Christoph Mayer Götz B., 2013, Morphological and genetic analyses of xeniid soft coral diversity (Octocorallia; Alcyonacea), Organisms Diversity & Evolution (New York, N. Y.) 13 (2), pp. 135-150 : 143

Ovabunda

The two identified morphospecies of the genus Ovabunda , ( O. faraunensis and O. macrospiculata ) form one well-supported monophyletic group (clade 1) in both genes analysed. However, the two morphospecies are not recovered. This is interesting, since both taxa could be well distinguished according to the morphological descriptions in Reinicke (1995) and Alderslade (2001): O. faraunensis appeared in big branching upright colonies connected by stolons. Each clavate colony was only up to 2 cm high and polyps showed a random arrangement on the upper surface of the coenenchyme. The monomorphic polyps were not pulsating and showed only one or two rows of pinnules ( Figure S1 A, B ). O. macrospiculata could be distinguished from O. faraunensis by the pulsating and feathery polyps. The specimens were also found in aggregations, often in the vicinity of O. faraunensis ( Figure S1 E ). Instead of the greywhite colour exhibited by O. faraunensis , the colonies of O. macrospiculata were characterised by a more yellowish appearance and a noticeably dense sclerite aggregation around the oral opening of the autozooids forming a white star around the mouth of the autozooid ( Figure S1 C, D ). The sclerites of both morphospecies had the same size of about 30×20 μm and showed “closely packed, round and flattened corpusculars” ( Benayahu 1990) at the surface (Fig. 2a–c). The form of these corpusculars also distinguished the two species. O. macrospiculata exhibited deep pits in these corpusculars, whereas O. faraunensis showed spherically shaped corpusculars without these pits. The incongruence between morphology and both independent genetic markers may be due to a very recent divergence of O. faraunensis and O. macrospiculata that has not been manifested in the two markers yet (incomplete lineage sorting and the presence of ancestral polymorphisms). We consider the range of morphological characters that distinguish these two species as sufficiently distinctive and do not doubt their validity at the moment.

Figures

Fig. 1 Colony morphology of Xeniidae: a Heteroxenia and Bayerxenia (here Bayerxenia sp.1). Siphonozooids are seen as white rings between the polyps. b Ovabunda and Xenia (here Xenia sp. 5). These genera lack siphonozooids