Beroe Mueller , 1776

Verhaegen, Gerlien, Cimoli, Emiliano & Lindsay, Dhugal, 2021, Life beneath the ice: jellyfish and ctenophores from the Ross Sea, Antarctica, with an image-based training set for machine learning, Biodiversity Data Journal 9, pp. 69374-69374 : 69374

Beroe Mueller, 1776

Notes

Description of the genus Beroe : sac-like bodies without tentacles or tentacle sheaths, very large mouth and stomodaeum, eight meridional canals, connected orally and a row of branched papillae in a figure of eight at the aboral pole ( Licandro and Lindsay 2017). The identification of Beroe species can be very difficult, as of the current 27 described species ( WoRMS Editorial Board 2020), many have only been superficially described and the number of synonyms is likely very high ( Harbison et al. 1978). We, therefore, only report the morphological characteristics of the three Beroe species reported for the Southern Ocean (Table 1 ), namely: Beroe compacta Moser, 1909 from Gauss Station (e.g. Moser 1909) (Fig. 10 D) and Eastern Antarctica (e.g. Grossmann 2010), " Beroe cucumis " from the Antarctic Peninsula (e.g. Friedlander et al. 2020) and Gauss Station (e.g. Moser 1909) and " B. ovale " in the northern Ross Sea (e.g. Ocean Survey 20/20 2013). O'Sullivan (1986) also mentioned that B. forskalii was recorded from the Antarctic Peninsula in Chun (1880), within his monograph on ctenophores from the Gulf of Naples and surrounding waters, but we were unable to find such a geographical record in that manuscript. A photograph of a 64 mm-long Beroe species from the Danco coast of the Antarctic Peninsula (64.65˚S, 61.916˚W) appears in Figure 3 of Whelan et al. (2017). It is whitish, but appears to have yellowish-brown pigment around the mouth and in the distal halves of the meridional canals, with the diverticula not anastomosing. Only a single photograph is presented, without notes on morphology, but the nuclear 18S ribosomal RNA sequence (MF599315) should allow subsequent authors to characterise it. In any case, the comb rows are too short and too long, respectively, for it to be assignable to the present Beroe sp. A or B. Regarding " B. ovale " (Fig. 10 a), apparently the Match Taxa tool in the World Register of Marine Species ( WoRMS Editorial Board 2020) at that time was used to finalise the species assignment, but the rationale for identification has not been recorded. We consider it most likely that the recorded species resembled either B. ovata sensu Mayer, 1912 (Fig. 10 c) = B. ovata Chamisso & Eysenhardt, 1821 = B. ovatus Bosc, 1802 or B. ovata sensu Chun, 1880 (Fig. 10 b) = B. ovata Eschscholtz, 1829 = B. ovata Bruguière, 1789 [two different species - see Mills et al. 1996]. The WoRMS taxonomy for B. ovale Bosc, 1802 has been updated to the correct species epiphet (i.e. B. ovatus Bosc, 1802).