Leucothoe Leach 1814

• Main Authors: Krapp-Schickel, Traudl, Broyer, Claude De
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Zenodo 2014
• Subjects: Biodiversity; Taxonomy; Animalia; Arthropoda; Malacostraca; Amphipoda; Leucothoidae; Leucothoe; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Antarctica; Ross Sea; Scotia Sea; Southern Ocean
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3861077; http://treatment.plazi.org/id/4C0787DDFFA4FFD5A615FE3E0E5DF84A

Genus Leucothoe Leach, 1814 Type species Cancer articulosus Montagu, 1804. Remarks According to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), the genus Leucothoe currently comprises no less than 125 species (Horton et al. 2013). The genus itself is morphologically very characteristic and easily recognized, but the distinction of the character states in the many species is usually quite difficult, as it is hard to realize what can be attributed to allometry, sexual diversity or intraspecific variability and what constitutes a stable specific morphological trait. The first species recorded in the Southern Ocean, L. antarctica Pfeffer, 1888, was described by Pfeffer (1888) from the material collected in South Georgia, during the German International Year Expedition 1882-83. Della Valle (1893: 653) included, without comments, L. antarctica in his long list of L. spinicarpa synonyms, but Stebbing (1906: 168) kept it separate, noting that it “agrees generally with L. spinicarpa ”. Chilton (1912: 478), after checking the type-material, synonymized L. antarctica again with L. spinicarpa , regarded by Walker (1909) and subsequent workers as polymorphic and cosmopolitan (see K.H. Barnard, 1916: 148; Chilton 1921: 59, 1923: 85). On the other hand, Walker (1907) first identified L. spinicarpa from the collections of the British National Antarctic Expedition 1901-1904 made at Winter Quarters Bay, Mc Murdo Sound, Ross Sea. Since this first record, L. spinicarpa has been found more than 68 times in the Southern Ocean s.l. (see complete detailed records in De Broyer et al. 2007, and on the SCAR-MarBIN/ANTABIF dataportal: http://data. biodiversity.aq/search_engine/es_search). Analyzing in detail the material from the US Eltanin and Islas Orcadas cruises in the Scotia Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula regions, Holman & Watling (1983) – after stressing that the “cosmopolitan” L. spinicarpa and related species have long been considered “a taxonomic headache” – distinguished three morphological variants of L. spinicarpa and ...