New Mediterranean Biodiversity Records (November 2020)
This article includes 23 new records of alien and cryptogenic species in the Mediterranean Sea, belonging to 4 Phyla (Chordata, Echinodermata, Arthropoda and Mollusca), distributed from the Alboran to the Levantine Sea. Records are reported from eight countries listed from West to East as follows: Algeria : new records of the Atlantic blue crab Callinectes sapidus ; Spain : further spread and establishment of the sea slug Lamprohaminoea ovalis in continental shores; Tunisia : first record of the Atlantic Blue Crab Callinectes sapidus in the Gulf of Gabes; Italy : a new occurrence of the pufferfish Lagocephalus sceleratus in Northern Ionian waters; first record of Cephalopholis taeniops in t…
DNA barcoding of marine fishes from Saudi Arabian waters of the Gulf
We used the cytochrome oxidase subunit I (coI) gene DNA to barcode 117 endemic Gulf and cosmopolitan Indo-West Pacific fish species belonging to 54 families and 13 orders. Novel DNA barcodes were provided for 18 fish species (Trachinocephalus sp., Nematalosa sp., Herklotsichthys lossei, Upeneus doriae, Trachurus indicus, Apogonichthyoides taeniatus, Verulux cypselurus, Favonigobius sp., Suezichthus gracilis, Sillago sp., Brachirus orientalis, Pegusa sp., Lepidotrigla bispinosa, Lepidotrigla sp., Grammoplites suppositus, Hippichthys sp., Paramonacanthus sp. and Triacanthus sp.). The species delimitation analysis, conducted with Poisson tree processes- Bayesian PTP (PTP-bPTP) and nucleotide-d…
Occurrence of the lessepsian species Portunus segnis (Crustacea: Decapoda) in the Gulf of Gabes (Tunisia): First record and new information on its biology and ecology
The alien blue swimming crab, Portunus segnis (Forskal, 1775), an Indo-Pacific species has been recorded in the Southern Mediterranean Sea since decades, even if its occurrence along the Tunisian coasts was not recorded yet. This paper reports the first record of P. segnis in the Gulf of Gabes, south-eastern Tunisia, with few observations on its biology and ecology. Twenty-four females of P. segnis were accidentally caught by local fishermen in October 2014 in shallow sandy areas covered mostly by seagrass and algal beds. Among these 24 individuals, 14 specimens (58.33%) were ovigerous. The mean carapace length (CL) and width (CW) of ovigerous females were 143.0 +/- 5.8 mm and 67.8 +/- 3.6 …