Leptestheriidae Daday, 1923

Padhye, Sameer, Rabet, Nicolas & Ghate, Hemant, 2015, First faunal inventory of large branchiopods (Crustacea: Branchiopoda) of Western Maharashtra, India with taxonomical and distributional comments, Zootaxa 3904 (2), pp. 208-222 : 214-215

Family Leptestheriidae Daday, 1923

Brtek (1997) has stated that Leptestheria and Leptestheriella share similar characters and hence synonymized it. We use the latter name in this work since we characterized this species using traits given by Simhachalam and Timms (2012).

Two species of genus Leptestheriella are known from the region 1) Leptestheriella nobilis Sars, 1900 which was earlier described as L. gigas Karande & Inamdar 1960 from NWG ( Karande & Inamdar 1960) and recently synonymized to the former by Simhachalam and Timms (2012), and 2) Leptestheriella jaisalmerensis Tiwari, 1962 reported from outskirts of Pune city by Ghate et al. (2003). We also confirm species identity of Leptestheriella sp. reported from Pune city by Padhye et al. (2011b) as L. nobilis . Only L. nobilis was observed in the collections from the NWG as well. Large variation in taxonomical characters which is known in this species ( Simhachalam & Timms 2012) was also seen in our specimens ( Table 1).

Ajinkyatara Dighi Pune university pond M F M F M F

Growth lines (nos.) 18+ 14+ 16 + 14+ 16+ 14+

Antennule segment nos. 12 12 12 12 to 14 12 to 14 10

Second Antennal segment nos. 12 to 14 14 14 12 to 14 12 to 14 12 to 14

Nos. of limbs 24–25 24 24 24 to 26 24 to 26 24