Arcotheres placunae Hornell & Southwell, 1909

Naderloo, Reza & Türkay, Michael, 2012, Decapod crustaceans of the littoral and shallow sublittoral Iranian coast of the Persian Gulf: Faunistics, Biodiversity and Zoogeography 3374, Zootaxa 3374 (1), pp. 1-67 : 55

Arcotheres placunae Hornell & Southwell, 1909

Persian Gulf. First Persian Gulf record.

Iran. Hormozgan Province: Bandar-Kolahi, Qeshm I. (Zeytun Park Beach, Naghasheh), Bandar-Abbas, Mahtabi.

General distribution. Northwestern Indian Ocean: Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, Pakistan, Gulf of Kutch (West India).

Habitat. Sandy/muddy-sand flat, occupying bivalves like Aminatis umbonella. (see Saeedi & Ardalan 2010).

Remarks. Arcotheres placunae was originally described by Hornell & Southwell (1909) from Kattiawar in the Gulf of Kutch along the west coast of India. Their description is imprecise in many ways. The figures do not agree with the description given in the text, e.g. walking legs in the female. While the text describes the female dactylus of the third and fourth pair of walking legs being one and a half times longer than those of the first and second, this is not represented in the drawing. Furthermore, the subhexagonal shape of the female carapace is strongly exaggerated. An examination of the type material of Arcotheres tivelae (Gordon, 1936) from Muscat in southern Gulf of Oman revealed that this species is in all respect identical with A. placunae , therefore is synonymized here with the latter. Silas & Algarswami (1967) clearly refer to our species and give a detailed account on the ecology of the species, as did Saeedi & Ardalan (2010). A detailed taxonomic study of the species and its relation to other allied species is currently being done (Naderloo & Becker, in preparation).