Anostraca Sars, 1867

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 : 210

Order Anostraca Sars, 1867

Family Artemiidae Grochowski, 1896 . Three localities on the north-western coast have been reported to support Artemia populations. One locality (Bhayander) amongst the three is known to harbor parthenogenetic Artemia (John et al. 2004 and references therein) ( Fig.1 ‘red hollow square’). Kulkarni (1953) reported finding mostly females in the population of Artemia observed from Bhayander. Recently, Vikas et al. (2012) reported absence Artemia from two of the three localities ( Fig.1 ‘red filled squares’) previously known to harbor them.

Family Streptocephalidae Daday, 1910 . This is the most common fairy shrimp family reported within the study area. From the literature, Streptocephalus dichotomus Baird, 1860 was the only species reported from Western Ghats ( Pai 1958; Ghate & Shetty 1997). Streptocephalus simplex Gurney, 1906 has been reported from Marathwada region on the Deccan plateau ( Velu & Munsuwamy 2003) ( Fig.1 ‘red triangle’) and is the only report of this species in the state of Maharashtra. S. dichotomus was seen in the collections from the onset of monsoon till just after the end of the season in a variety of habitats ranging from small pools to big ponds. A new species Streptocephalus sahyadriensis was recently described from few rocky outcrops from the studied region ( Rogers & Padhye 2014).

Figures

FIGURE 1. Map showing the study region and the localities (The gray shaded region is part of Maharashtra state considered for study; Green shaded region represents the Western Ghats. Red colored symbols represent localities from literature sources of which ‘ red squares’ - hollow & filled- represent localities of parthenogenetic Artemia species and ‘ red triangle’ represents locality from where Streptocephalus simplex was reported; ‘ red circle’ represents the area from where E. orientalis was reported. Black circular dots represent freshly sampled localities).