Cyphocarcinus capreolus (Paul'son, 1875)

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 : 35

Cyphocarcinus capreolus ( Paul’son, 1875)

Persian Gulf. Kuwait [ Jones (1986a) as Cyphocarcinus minutus ], Saudi Arabia ( Griffin & Tranter 1986; Apel 2001), Qatar ( Apel 2001), UAE [ Nobili (1906a) and Evans et al. (1973) as Cyphocarcinus minutus ; Titgen (1982)], Iran [ Stephensen (1946) as Cyphocarcinus minutus ; present study).

Iran. Hormozgan Province: Bostano (Parsian) . Bushehr Province: Khalij-Nayband (Haleh), Bushehr (Jofreh).

General distribution. Northwestern Indian Ocean: Red Sea, Persian Gulf.

Habitat. Rocky/cobble intertidal, 0–6 m.

Remarks. Griffin & Tranter (1986) examined some specimens from the Saudi Arabian coast and re-examined the Stephensen (1946) specimens of C. minutus recorded from the Gulf. They believed that the Persian Gulf specimens must be assigned to C. capreolus , while C. Minutusis restricted to the east African coast. The single male from Khalij-Nayband is agreeing well with the description and illustration provided by Griffin & Tranter (1986) for C. capreolus . Four small specimens (two males and two females) were collected from Bushehr (Jofreh) which morphologically are very similar to C. minutum , in particular regarding the morphology of the rostrum and the elevation of the gastric region. The main character mentioned by Griffin & Tranter (1986) to differentiate these two species is the large round lobe on the anterolateral margin of basal antennal segment in C. minutum , while this lobe is small in C. capreolus (see Griffin & Tranter 1986: fig. 99a, c). Regarding this last character the present specimens are identical with C. capreolus , therefore they are tentatively assigned to this species. More specimens are needed in order to study the sex- and size-related variations of the species in the Persian Gulf. For detailed taxonomic remarks see Griffin & Tranter (1986).