Botryllus schlosseri (Pallas, 1766)

Turon, Xavier, Cañete, Juan I., Sellanes, Javier, Rocha, Rosana M. & López-Legentil, Susanna, 2016, Ascidian fauna (Tunicata, Ascidiacea) of subantarctic and temperate regions of Chile, Zootaxa 4093 (2), pp. 151-180 : 166

Botryllus schlosseri (Pallas, 1766)

References and synonymy: Botryllus schlosseri (Van Name 1945) p. 220; (Berrill 1950) p. 216.

Localities: 2N, 8N.

Remarks. the golden star tunicate is a model species for evo-devo studies and is distributed worldwide (Locke 2009). It has a marked polymorphism in chromatic patterns and colony shapes, and the long list of synonymies reported (e.g., Van Name 1945, Berrill 1950, Kott 1985) bears testimony of the convoluted taxonomical history of B. schlosseri . As in other widely distributed and polymorphic species, it has been recently shown that the taxon B. schlosseri is a complex of genetically differentiated species (Bock et al. 2012). The two mtDNA sequences obtained in this study correspond to Clade A in Bock et al. (2012), the most widespread and common but, in turn, subject to ongoing speciation processes (Griggio et al. 2014). B. schlosseri is abundant in artificial structures in the northern study zone. It has been reported in Chile by Van Name (1954) and Ben-Shlomo et al (2010).