Dear colleagues,
Although I have not information on the reproduction of the species
mentioned by people from Wormlab, I wrote a few words on the oweniids
from the Spanish coasts, i.e. Owenia fusiformis and Galathowenia oculata,
a few years ago (Scientia Marina 53(1): 47-52, 1989).
The message by Jim Blake remembers me the controversial synonymy of
Galathowenia/Myriochele which gave rise to some notes on the B.Z.N.
In the Spanish coasts ( both Mediterranean and Atlantic), there was a lot
of citations of the species Myriochele heeri, prior my above cited paper.
However, I examined most of the Spanish Mediterranean material and, in
all cases, the individuals clearly belonged to G. oculata. My colleagues
from the Atlantic also checked their collections and confirmed my
observations.
To my knowledge, there is only one citation of both G. oculata and M. heeri
coexisting in the same locality, the Tyrrhenian Sea (Cognetti Varriale ,
Atti. Soc. Tosc. Sci. Nat., Mem., ser. B, Suppl., 263-267, 1979).
Unfortunately, the original collections were not available. However, Dr.
Claudio Lardicci, who was replacing these collections using material from
the original localities, also confirmed my results. He did not found
specimens of M. heeri, neither in the Tyrrhenian localities nor on his own
collections from other Italian sites.
The last information I had on the synonymy was the paper by Mackie and
Pleijel (BZN, 47(2), 1990) which include also comments by Susan Chambers on
the conservation of the the names Myriochele Malmgrem and oculata Zask.
Since then, I could not pay attention to this problem, although individuals
of G. oculata are still frequent in our samples. I like to know that the
species "oculata" should be referred to the genus Galathowenia. Probably,
there are some more recent papers on this subject. Thus, it would be
helpful to our research group if somebody can explain us where the synonymy
was definitively stated.
Daniel.
Dr. Daniel Martin
Centre d'Estudis Avancats de Blanes (C.S.I.C.)
Cami de Sta. Barbara s/n
17300 Blanes, Girona
Spain
FAX: 34 72 337806
Phone: 34 72 336101
WWW page: http://www.ceab.es
