Dear everyone,
I would like to first like to thank all of you who responded to my
inquiry on polychaete ecology. Once again, my email was down for about
three weeks, so if you wrote me and I didn't respond, I didn't get the
message. My e-mail was down for another few days recently (right after
my second post, of course) and I lost those messages also.
We are now full into the taxonomic portion of our study. It is hard, as
the keys we have are for Washington state, British Columbia, Eastern
USSR, and Pt. Barrow Alaska. Most everything is keying out fine, but I
realize that we may be dealing with species that are not in the keys we
are using. I am using "cf" in between a great number of our species
names. I thought I might throw out a few of the anomolies to you all to
see if someone might know.
One kind of important species we are getting is Chaetozone cf. setosa.
It agrees with the keys fine, except that in Hobson & Banse it says that
this species has only acicular setae nearly encircling the posterior
segments. I don't know if that meant that only the acicular seate
actually nearly encircle the segment, or that there are no other seate
present but acicular (I hope that made sense). Ours has both
long capillary and acicular setae that seem to alternate on the lateral
margins, but seem to be only acicular setae that actually nearly make it
to the center of the dorsal and ventral region. Is this still C. setosa?
Or are there others that should be expected in Southeast Alaska?
I have many more questions, but am out of time. Real quick though, are
there any keys to the Goniadae that rely on feature besides the pharynx?
About one in fifty of ours have the pharynx out at all. I have wrecked a
vast number through dissection, mashing, etc. trying to find teeth.
Thanks - Aaron
Aaron Baldwin <jscat1 at ptialaska.net>
