Phyllodicolidae Delamare Deboutteville & Laubier, 1961

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 : 27

Family Phyllodicolidae Delamare Deboutteville & Laubier, 1961

The family name is a replacement for Phyllocolidae Delamare Deboutteville & Laubier, 1960 which was based on a preoccupied generic name, Phyllocola Delamare Deboutteville & Laubier, 1960 . The family Phyllodicolidae comprises two genera and three species are currently known; all are mesoparasites of phyllodocid polychaetes ( O’Reilly 2000). The endosoma of the adult female has the form of paired buccal rhizoids that penetrate the host's coelom. Various developmental stages of females have been reported ( Laubier 1961; Gotto & Leahy 1988), but no males, and the family has thus far been recorded only from the North Atlantic and Mediterranean. The family currently comprises two genera, Phyllodicola Delamare Deboutteville & Laubier, 1961 and Cyclorhiza Heegaard, 1942, but it is difficult to identify robust characters to separate these genera. Their validity as distinct genera is in need of re-assessment but the lack of any information concerning males in this family is a significant obstacle to such a revision.