Acesta H. and A. Adams 1853

• Main Author: Hickman, Carole S.
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2023
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Taxonomy; Animalia; Mollusca; Bivalvia; Limida; Limidae; Acesta; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11505147; http://treatment.plazi.org/id/C23987DDFFDE291BFE89F88CEBCCB870

ACESTA H. AND A. ADAMS, 1853 Type species — By monotypy, Ostrea excavata Fabricius (1779). Holocene, Northeastern Atlantic continental margin, Azores, Canaries; Pleistocene, widespread in Mediterranean. The oldest reported occurrence is from Upper Jurassic rocks in India (Kanjilal 1990). The Mesozoic record is largely confined to the margins of the southern continents,with a continuous record across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary in Antarctica (Stilwell and Zinsmeister 1992) and Cretaceous records from Australia (Darragh and Kendrick 1991, Stilwell and Mckenzie 1999) and New Zealand (Beu 1973, Beu and Maxwell 1990). By the end of the Paleogene, the genus had achieved a cosmopolitan distribution, expanding its latitudinal and bathymetric range as global cooling became increasingly pronounced. The type species (Fig. 24A, B) represents an additional trend toward exploiting hard substrates at the shelf-slope break on continental margins in addition to occupying soft substrates at greater depths. The shell of Acesta s.s . is typically thin and fragile despite its large size. Knowledge of the basic biology and life habits of the living species has been limited by their occurrence on vertical rock walls and overhangs in submarine canyons and on seamounts as prominent members of communities of attached suspension feeders. These communities have been difficult to sample and have gone undetected until the advent of ROV video observation. Observations of walls of submarine canyons, seamounts, and escarpments on the Eastern Pacific margin of North America have revealed dense populations (e.g., Clague et al. 2012) that show a remarkable degree of genetic connectivity in spite of their disjunct occurrences. The type species is slow-growing, long-lived (5–80 years), and one of the dominant species in deep, cold-water coral reef communities (Schleinkofer et al. 2021). The remarkable ability of these large bivalves to detach and swim (Kohl and Vokes 1994) may account for the preservation of their thin fragile shells in the ...