Arabella (Arabella) iricolor (Montagu, 1804)

Ribeiro, Rannyele Passos, Alves, Paulo Ricardo, Almeida, Zafira da Silva de & Ruta, Christine, 2018, A new species of Paraonis and an annotated checklist of polychaetes from mangroves of the Brazilian Amazon Coast (Annelida, Paraonidae), ZooKeys 740, pp. 1-34 : 3-4

Arabella (Arabella) iricolor (Montagu, 1804) Fig. 2

Type locality.

Devonshire, England, United Kingdom (50°34'N, 3°34'W; estimated geolocation).

Material examined.

São Luís, 02°35'56"S, 44°211'1.8"W: two specimens, 18 March 2012 (NPM-Pol 115); one specimen, 1 June 2012 (NPM-Pol 090); one specimen, 18 November 2011 (NPM-Pol 886); complete and incomplete specimens.

Distribution.

Pacific Ocean: New Zealand, Philippines, USA, Peru. Indian Ocean: Red Sea. Atlantic Ocean: Ireland, UK, France, Mediterranean Sea, Marmara Sea (Turkey), Mauritania, South Africa, USA, Mexico, Caribbean Sea, Brazil (states of Maranhão, Bahia, São Paulo and Paraná, see Suppl. material 1).

Remarks.

Arabella (Arabella) iricolor was described to the south coast of Devonshire (UK) as Nereis iricolor (Montagu, 1804). The description of specimens from the Caribbean Sea ( Augener 1927) closely reSEMbles specimens in this study, which were identified as this species due to the characteristics: ventralmost chaeta tapering gradually to guards in median and posterior chaetigers, the absence of hooded acicular chaetae, maxilla MxI unidentate and posterior post-chaetal lobe shorter than chaetae. Body surface whitish was observed in small fixed individuals, probably juveniles (Fig. 2 A–C). ( Montagu 1804). The species was recorded in ecological studies of the continental shelf, intertidal zone, coral reefs, estuaries, and mangroves ( Paiva 1993, Santa-Isabel et al. 2000), but apparently, the material was not deposited in any collection and was not available for comparison. Previous record from Maranhão reports specimens found in mangroves ( Oliveira and Mochel 1999). This species has been described with worldwide distribution and is probably a complex of species ( Colbath 1989; Zanol and Ruta 2015). Studies on the variation of the symmetry in maxillae and modified ventral chaetae should be conducted to know the polymorphism in species of the genus Arabella ( Steiner and Amaral 2009). That would be a challenge to species identification and new descriptions, once Oenonidae species are usually collected in low densities ( Zanol 2010, Zanol and Ruta 2015).