that time the cave was 6.4 km long including some extensive pools. From 2002 members of Grup Espeleo Llubí and Secció d'Espeleologia de l'ANEM faced the challenge of investigating a slight draught of air at one remote chamber. In 2004 Grup Espeleo Llubí achieved a major breakthrough when a draughting slot was discovered, leading the explorers into the biggest known chamber in the cave so far. The discovery fueled the fires and the cavers begun the exploration of a maze of passageways and chambers. Along the way, cavers from Secció d'espeleologia de Voltors and Grup Espeleològic EST joined the team that is still exploring, surveying and studying this impressive and complex cave; important underwater extensions are currently being explored and surveyed by cave divers from Grup Nord de Mallorca and lately also Grup Espeleo Llubí. The cave is located in the Llucmajor municipality in southern Mallorca, being developed in the natural area of Migjorn (coordinates UTM/WGS84, 489120; 4.357.510). A great deal of galleries and chambers lies beneath the Vallgornera housing estate (east of Cala The Cova des Pas de Vallgornera lies in the Llucmajor municipality, in southern Mallorca, and is the longest cave in the Balearic Islands. Currently its surveyed length is over 74,000 m, including more than 17,000 m of underwater extensions. The cave was discovered accidentally in 1968, but it was in 2004 when a major breakthrough shed light on its real extension and importance. The cave roughly shows two tiers of passages, apart from the underwater extensions, the first one is between 7 and 11 m above the mean sea level, the second one is about at the water table level. The importance of the cave is not only related to its extension, but also to the presence of a wide variety of speleothems and outstanding solutional morphologies that evidence a complex evolution. The cave is under the protection of Conselleria de Medi Ambient, Govern de les Illes Balears (the Regional Environmental Authority) and was declared Site of Community Importance, within the Natura 2000 Network.

A new species of the calanoid copepod genus Stephos is described from an anchialine cave on Majorca (Balearic Islands). It occurs in sympatry with S. margalefi, another Balearic endemic differing markedly in body size as well as in the morphology of the fifth legs of both sexes. The new species is extraordinary within its family, theStephidae, and even within the entire superfamily Clausocalanoidea in displaying a paired arrangement of the reproductive system in the female genital double-somite.No other member of this cluster of 10 families displays such a primitive condition, all exhibiting different degrees of coalescence or reduction of the genital opercula, pores and ducts. We interpret the condition found in Stephos vivesi sp. nov. as secondary, perhaps derived by loss of the operculum concealing the paired apertures and their subsequent migration and separation on the ventral surface. We take advantage of this discovery to amend the diagnosis of S. margalefi, which was inaccurately described and of which the type material has been lost. This species is unique in the genus in expressing the basal exite seta on the maxillule and in having a 4segmented (vs. 5-segmented) male left fifth leg; the latter condition is the result of the failure to express the inter-segmental articulation between ancestral segments 3 and 4. In addition, it is the only Stephos with the segment 3 of the male left leg 5 (fused to fourth segment) displaying any armature, viz. a tiny spine on the lateral margin, and a pointed process on the medial margin. We tentatively consider S.balearensis, a third cavernicolous species apparently endemic to Minorca, to be a junior synonym of S. margalefi. The disjunct distribution of this apparently stygobiont species, embracing three different islands of the Balearic archipelago, does not pose any biogeographical problem since all three comprised a single island as recently as 17000 yr BP, at the time of the last glacial maximum when a global marine regression of up to 140 m took place.

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