Cyerce edmundsi T.E. Thompson, 1977

Moreno, Karina, Rico, Diane M., Middlebrooks, Michael, Medrano, Sabrina, Valdés, Ángel A. & Krug, Patrick J., 2024, A cryptic radiation of Caribbean sea slugs revealed by integrative analysis: Cyerce ‘ antillensis’ (Sacoglossa: Caliphyllidae) is six distinct species, Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 200 (4), pp. 940-979 : 972-973

Cyerce edmundsi T.E. Thompson, 1977

Cyerce edmundsi Thompson 1977: 136–137 , figs 22i, j, 24d.

Type material

Holotype: Discovery Bay , Jamaica, Caribbean Sea ( NHMUK 19776 ), February 1976, 5–8 mm in length, not examined.

Range

Jamaica ( Thompson 1977).

Ecology

Diet unknown. Remarks

Thompson (1977) described C. edmundsi from the Caribbean as having ‘flattened, oval’ cerata containing branches of the digestive gland, with ‘pearl-like’ glands along the margin. Cyerce edmundsi was covered with ‘white pigment specks’, ‘white’ bifurcated rhinophores, and oral tentacles ( Thompson 1977). Radular tooth morphology was described as ‘elongated’ and ‘spoon-like’, with trifid and bifid denticles, and the penis lacked a stylet. No transverse groove across the foot was noted. The lack of a transverse groove ventrally along the foot, the presence of digestive gland tubules in the cerata, and the shape of the denticles along the tooth described for C. edmundsi indicate this specimen does not belong to Cyerce . Marcus (1982) and Hamatani (1994) suggested that C. edmundsi was a synonym of Mourgona germainae Marcus & Marcus, 1970 . A previous molecular study ( Händeler and Wägele 2007) included a specimen as Cyerce cf. edmundsi , but our phylogenetic analyses recovered this specimen within C. antillensis ( Fig. 2 ).

Figures

Figure 2. Consensus phylogenetic tree for Cyerce and Sohgenia based on maximum likelihood (ML) analysis of three concatenated loci. Percentages corresponding to significant bootstrap support are given below branches, and posterior probabilities from Bayesian inference (BI) analysis are shown in bold above branches. Capital letters label three key supported nodes. Haplotypes are coded by date–location–specimen number on terminals. Results of four species delimitation analyses are indicated by vertical bars; horizontal shaded bars enclose specimens grouped as species entities by all methods.