Amphipholis squamata ( Delle Chiaje, 1828 )

Fatemi, Yaser & Stöhr, Sabine, 2019, Annotated species list of Ophiuroidea (Echinodermata) from the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, with new records, Zootaxa 4711 (1), pp. 77-106 : 99

Amphipholis squamata ( Delle Chiaje, 1828)

Asterias squamata Delle Chiaje, 1828: 74 , pl. 34, fig. 1.

Amphipholis squamata — Ljungman 1872: 633 .

Material examined: Gulf of Oman, Iran, Tis, intertidal, hand collected, January 2019, collector Yaser Fatemi, 1 spm [not kept].

Habitat: Intertidal shell and gravel bed, under a stone (present study), grass bed and subtidal sand, 10–34 m ( Price 1981; present study) ( Fig. 2E ).

Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman: Tarut Bay (25), Jinna Island (21), Tis (16), Bahrain (ibid.).

Indian Ocean: Southern Africa ( Clark & Courtman-Stock 1976), West Indian Ocean ( Clark & Rowe 1971), Gulf of Mannar ( James 1985), Pakistan ( Kazmi & Tahera 2003), Mascarene Isl. ( Boissin et al. 2016), Scattered Isl. ( Conand et al. 2016).

Remarks: A record from Chabahar Bay by Attaran-Fariman & Beygmoradi (2016) is an error and omitted here. Their images show an animal with narrow, sunken in radial shields ( Amphipholis has short, half-circle shaped ones), bell-shaped overlapping dorsal arm plates (separated in A. squamata ), small narrow tentacle scales (larger oval in A. squamata ), widely separated infradental papillae (close together in A. squamata ), and the distal oral papilla is only slightly widened, not as wide as in A. squamata . In addition, according to the scale bar on the images, the animal had a disc diameter of 8 mm, which is larger than A. squamata (maximum 5 mm), and they reported the arms to be 6 cm long, whereas A. squamata has about 2 cm long arms. The characters fit with Amphiodia , but the images do not show the necessary details for species identification. Consequently, the material found by the present study is the first record of A. squamata from the Gulf of Oman. Amphipholis squamata has a circumtropical distribution, but it is most likely a species complex ( Sponer & Roy 2002; Boissin et al. 2015).

Figures

FIGURE 2. Habitats at the sites where brittle stars were collected by the present study (see Table 1). A, Bandar Lengeh, B, Bustaneh, C, Chabahar Bay (Hotel Lipar), D, Chabahar Bay (University coast), E, Chabahar Bay (Tis), F, Qeshm Island.