Conus (Stephanoconus) Mörch, 1852

Psarras, Christos, Merle, Didier & Koskeridou, Efterpi, 2022, Late Miocene Conidae (Mollusca: Gastropoda) of Crete (Greece). Part 2, European Journal of Taxonomy 816, pp. 1-70 : 35

Subgenus Conus (Stephanoconus) Mörch, 1852

Type species

Conus leucostictus Gmelin, 1791 accepted as Conus regius Gmelin, 1791 (type by subsequent designation Wenz 1943: 1469). Recent, tropical West Atlantic.

Descriptive comments

The nodules on the spire whorls occur on most extant species, except on Conus (Stephanoconus) genuanus Linnaeus, 1758 and can either fade out or persist in later spire whorls. Some species also have spiral ribs on the body whorl. The protoconch is multispiral. The colour pattern consists of spiral bands (two to three), axial blotches, spiral rows of small to large dots and dashes, in colours of shades brown, cream and white. All Conus (Stephanoconus) feed on Polychaeta have a similar radular morphology ( Tucker & Tenorio 2009).

Remarks

According to Puillandre et al. (2015), the subgenus occurs in all tropical seas. The phylogenetic trees of Lin et al. (2021: fig. 2) and Torres et al. (2021: fig. 5), recently found Conus genuanus Linnaeus, 1758 in a clade of Stephanoconus. This species shares a similar colour pattern with the other species of the subgenus, but lacks nodules on the spire. Tucker & Tenorio (2009) noted that nodules are an important morphological element of this genus and, thus, did not find the connection of Conus genuanus to other species of this group plausible. Here, we follow Lin et al. (2021) and Torres et al. (2021) in including Conus genuanus in Conus (Stephanoconus) .

Another point to investigate is the close phylogenetic relationship between Conus (Stephanoconus) genuanus Linnaeus, 1758 and Conus (Stephanoconus) chiangi Azuma, 1972 , an Indo-Pacific species ( Lin et al. 2021: fig. 2). Their phylogenetic proximity evidently points towards the closure of the Tethys Ocean, acting as a barrier and isolating the populations.

In Psarras et al. (2021), we considered that Conus (Kalloconus) asterousiaensis Psarras, Koskeridou & Merle, 2021 is very similar to Conus genuanus , both in morphology and colour pattern variations. The characters used to assign Conus asterousiaensis to Conus (Kalloconus) were the morphology of the conical smooth spire and the multispiral protoconch. This subgeneric attribution was done, but before the phylogenetic works of Lin et al. (2021) and Torres et al. (2021) became available, and Conus (Stephanoconus) genuanus has previously been included in other subgenera (e.g., in Kalloconus da Motta, 1991 by da Motta (1991) and in Genuanoconus Tucker & Tenorio, 2009 by Tucker & Tenorio (2009)). The colour pattern of Conus asterousiaensis is similar to that of most species of Conus (Stephanoconus) , prompting us to consider it as a member of Conus (Stephanoconus) .