Saccopsidae Lützen, 1964

Boxshall, Geoff A., O’Reilly, Myles, Sikorski, Andrey & Summerfield, Rebecca, 2019, Mesoparasitic copepods (Copepoda: Cyclopoida) associated with polychaete worms in European seas, Zootaxa 4579 (1), pp. 1-69 : 34

Family Saccopsidae Lützen, 1964

This family of highly transformed copepods was established by Lützen (1964b) to accommodate Saccopsis Levinsen, 1878 but Bresciani & Lützen (1975) later recognised that Saccopsis was a junior synonym of Melinnacheres M. Sars, 1870 . Subsequently Boxshall (1977) relegated Oestrella M’Intosh, 1885 to synonymy with Melinnacheres . Boxshall & Halsey (2004) provided a key to the four valid species of Melinnacheres . Prior to the present study the family comprised only the single genus, although a possible relationship with the genus inquirendum Flabellicola Gravier, 1918 , found on Flabelligera diplochaitus (Otto, 1820) in the Mediterranean ( Gravier 1918), was noted by Boxshall & Halsey (2004).