Nototanaidae Sieg, 1976 sensu Bird & Larsen, 2009

Bird, Graham J., 2012, Stachyops, a new nototanaid genus (Crustacea: Peracarida: Tanaidacea) from New Zealand, with remarks on nototanaid and tanaissuid phylogeny, Zootaxa 3572, pp. 1-10 : 2

Family Nototanaidae Sieg, 1976 sensu Bird & Larsen, 2009

Remarks. The concept of the family Nototanaidae has been contentious since the first real attempt at constructing a computer-based phylogeny of the paratanaoids ( Larsen & Wilson 2002). Briefly, in that analysis the family Typhlotanaidae Sieg was subsumed into the Nototanaidae but subsequently Błażewicz-Paszkowycz (2007) restored the former to family level although retaining two genera ( Meromonakantha Sieg and Paratyphlotanais Kudinova- Pasternak & Pasternak) as nototanaids. In a later attempt at a phylogeny of some of the paratanaoids ( Bird & Larsen 2009) the nototanaids were split into two clades, with the pseudotanaids as a sister group to one of them that was established as the family Tanaissuidae ; Meromonakantha and Paratyphlotanais were returned to the Typhlotanaidae . This arrangement was almost paralleled in a contemporary analysis by Błażewicz-Paszkowycz & Poore (2008).

The Nototanaidae as defined by Bird & Larsen (2009) is made up of Nesotanais Shiino , Nototanais , Paranesotanais Larsen & Shimomura , and Nototanoides Sieg & Heard, with the recent additions of the Macaronesian Gamboa Bamber, 2012 and the Nesotanais -like Birdotanais Kakui & Angsupanich, 2012 from Thailand; the Tanaissuidae groups the genera Bathytanaissus Bird & Holdich , Protanaissus Sieg , and Tanaissus Norman & Scott. However , it was recognised by Bird & Larsen that Protanaissus was probably not monophyletic and was treated as individual taxa in their analyses. A key to the genera of these two families was given by Kakui & Angsupanich (2012).

In some respects the character list and matrix used in the Bird & Larsen analysis are now obsolete as a result of continuing work on assessing homologies and with improvements in scoring character ‘states’. A more refined and focussed approach is therefore needed to evaluate the relationships of their ‘nototanaid-pseudotanaid-tanaissuid clade’ along the lines of that given in Bird (2012) and at the resolution of individual species, but is beyond the scope of this paper. However, a preliminary analysis of the phylogenetic position of the new genus described here is given below.