Hi Richard,
as Mary wrote, your worm seems clearly to be Lysidice ninneta. This was
the most currently cited species in Mediterranean waters, where often
two colour patterns were distinguished. In one of my first papers
(Martin 1987, unfortunately in Spanish), however, I was able to identify
two different species. The reddish one with a whitish collar effectively
corresponded to L. ninetta, but the pale brownish one was L. collaris
Grube, 1870. Both were equally frequent and shared simultaneously the
same habitats (in my case, calcareous algae aggregates), this being
likely the origin of the misinterpretation. There were, however, enough
morphological differences in addition to colouring allowing to easily
distinguish both species. To palliate the fact that my old paper was in
Spanish, I made the corresponding plates accessible through my personal
web page. That on Lysidice can be seen at:
http://atlantis.ceab.csic.es/~dani/Lysidice.html
More recently, L. collaris has been re-discovered for Mediterranean
waters, for instance, as a "borer" in Posidonia meadows (you have simply
search in Google schoolar). This species was also reported, among other,
for Day (1967) in south Africa. I am not sure if the species has been
reported from UK, but if not, there are some chances that it also occurs
in these waters.
If so, it would be nice to have pictures of both in your gallery, as
the colour pattern was also different in living worms.
Greetings from foggy Blanes.
Dani.
>>> _______________________________________________
> Annelida mailing list
> Post: Annelida from net.bio.net> Help/archive: http://www.bio.net/biomail/listinfo/annelida> Resources: http://www.annelida.net> The attachment named could not be scanned for viruses because it is a password protected file.
>>
--
Dr. Daniel Martin
Director
Centre d'Estudis Avancats de Blanes (CSIC)
Carrer d'acces a la Cala Sant Francesc 14
17300 Blanes (Girona), Catalunya (Spain)
Tel: 34 972 336101
Fax: 34 972 337806
WWW Institutional: http://www.ceab.csic.es
WWW Personal: http://www.ceab.csic.es/~dani/
