Prorocentrum cf. cassubicum (Nava-Ruiz and Valadez-Cruz, 2012)

Ramos-Santiago, Research Article Ana Emilia, Villa-Arce, Gema V., Leyva-Valencia, Ignacio, Okolodkov, Yuri & Band-Schmidt, Christine J., 2025, Identification and growth of Prorocentrum cf. cassubicum (Dinoflagellata: Prorocentraceae) from Bahía de La Paz: first record for the Gulf of California, Botanica Marina (Warsaw, Poland) 68 (4), pp. 375-388 : 385-386

Prorocentrum cf. cassubicum grows slowly under the culture conditions tested, taking more than 30 days to reach its maximum biomass. No significant differences in maximum biomass ( 69,722 – 74,312 cells ml −1), nor in growth rate (0.43 – 0.46 divisions day −1) were observed when cultivating strain

PCCETMAR- 1 in f/2 and GSe media at 24 °C. No growth data are available for other strains of P. cassubicum and P. norrisianum . In general, epibenthic dinoflagellate species exhibit slow growth. Because of its toxicity, one of the most studied species is the P. lima complex (Grigoriyan et al. 2024).

Numerous experiments have been carried out in the laboratory with various strains under different conditions where it has been determined that temperature is the main factor affecting their growth, registering growth rates between 0.30 and 0.75 divisions day −1 and maximum biomasses of 600 to 70,000 cells ml −1 (Grigoriyan et al. 2024). Several species of

Prorocentrum meet the characteristics of being halotolerant and euryhaline ( Glibert 2020). More knowledge of epibenthic species is needed to understand their physiology, life cycles,

nutrition, and the environmental factors that regulate their growth.

Acknowledgments: The authors thank L.E. Gómez-Lizárraga for the SEM service at UNAM and D.A. Huerta-Quintanilla (CINVESTAV-IPN) for obtaining SEM micrographs, E. Mendez (University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, USA) and M.M. Gowing (Seattle, WA, USA) for language edition support, and A.F. Krakhmalnyi (Institute for Evolutionary Ecology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kiev, Ukraine) for translation from Polish.

Research ethics: Not applicable.

Informed consent: Not applicable.

Author contributions: A.E. Ramos-Santiago: conceptualization; research; methodology; data curation; formal analysis; writing – original draft preparation; writing – review & editing. G.V. Villa-Arce: methodology; data curation; formal analysis. I. Leyva-Valencia: funding acquisition; methodology; supervision; review & editing. Y.B. Okolodkov: conceptualization; research; methodology; writing – review & editing; supervision. C.J. Band-Schmidt: conceptualization; funding acquisition; methodology; supervision; writing – review & editing. All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

Use of Large Language Models, AI and Machine Learning Tools: None declared.

Conflict of interest: The authors state no conflict of interest. Research funding: This study was financed with the projects CONAHCyT FOMIX-Yucatán No. 2008-108160 and CONAHCyT LAB-2009-01 No. 123913 (P. Quintana-Owen from CINVESTAV-IPN), CONAHCyT PRONAII, PRONACES SSyS No. 319104, and the institutional project SIP-2024-0544, SIP 2025-1372 and SIP 2189. A.E.R.S. was recipient to the scholarship 1151607 from CONAHCyT and A240310 from BEIFI. C.J.B.S. is a COFAA and EDI recipient.

Data availability: DNA sequences, GenBank accessions. Strain PNCETMAR-1: PQ182180 (28S), PQ182182 (ITS). Strain PNCETMAR-2: PQ182181 (28S).