Charybdis (Charybdis) feriata (Linnaeus, 1758)

(Figure 14E, preserved)

Material examined. M07, Stn. 74, 138m, ♂ 26× 16.8mm (IEO-CD-MZ07/1902), COI (MZ 434821) .

Habitat and distribution. Widely distributed in the IWP from South and East Africa through the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Gulf, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka to Indonesia, Singapore, Australia, Vietnam, China, and Japan (Apel & Spiridonov 1998). Crosnier (1962) described the distribution of the synonym species Charybdis cruciate (Herbst) in shallow waters of South Africa, Australia, and Japan, at 5-15m (rarely 30m). Not being recorded in Mozambique since the fifties of last century (Barnard 1950), it has been recently reported by personal observations of IIP-Mozambique.

Results and remarks. The single specimen agrees well with the description and figures in Crosnier (1962) and Apel & Spiridonov (1998). It was collected in March 2007 (M07) at 138m depth, increasing the previously reported bathymetric distribution of the species.

Colouration observed. No pictures of the fresh specimen are available.

DNA barcodes. Only the COI sequence could be obtained from this specimen, which represents a new haplotype for this species. The closer haplotype is a COI sequence of a specimen from Australia (MN 184690), with differences in two positions (99.68% similarity), ranging between 98.65 to 97.30% of similarity (seven to 14 mutations) with respect to the rest of 60 haplotypes for this species in Genbank.