A first phylogenetic study on stoloniferous octocorals off the coast of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia, with the description of two new genera and five new species

Abstract

Sabah, Malaysia, is well known for its extensive and diverse coral reefs. It is located on the northwestern edge of the Coral Triangle, the region with the highest marine biodiversity. Much of the marine fauna here is still unknown, especially inconspicuous animals, such as small stoloniferous octocorals, which are common on coral reefs. Here, we describe two new monospecific genera of the family Arulidae found off the coast of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, East Malaysia; Bunga payunggen. nov. et sp. nov. and Laeta waheedaegen. nov. et sp. nov. As well, the stoloniferan genus Phenganax Alderslade & McFadden, 2011 belonging to the family Clavulariidae is expanded with three new species, P. marumisp. nov., P. subtilissp. nov., and P. stokvisisp. nov., which are all sclerite-free. Additionally, we report a possibly undescribed species, closely related to the clavulariid genera Azoriella Lopez-Gonzalez & Gili, 2001 and Cervera Lopez-Gonzalez et al., 1995. As this and other recent studies have shown, discoveries of small stoloniferous octocorals are helping to fill gaps in our knowledge of the overall systematics of Octocorallia.

Zooxanthellate, Sclerite-Free, and Pseudopinnuled Octocoral Hadaka nudidomus gen. nov. et sp. nov. (Anthozoa, Octocorallia) from Mesophotic Reefs of the Southern Ryukyus Islands

“…Nonetheless, the genera Acrossota and Phenganax are phylogenetically closely related. In a recent study, the phylogenetic topology for these genera was different from that generated in the current study [33], in which Acrossota is placed basally to all Phenganax species. As a result of the unresolved phylogenetic location of Acrossota within Clavulariidae, while it is clear these three genera are distinct, it remains unclear how Hadaka and Phenganax are related to Acrossota.…”

“…It is clear that more species diversity data from many marine regions are needed before we can state with certainty that the southern Ryukyus harbor high levels of stoloniferous octocoral diversity and endemism, but at least it can be said that this region potentially harbors many undiscovered species, not only in shallow coral reefs [33,34], but also among the many unexplored MCEs in this region.…”

“…Multiple sequence alignments were performed using MAFFT 7 [43] and coding markers were aligned using MACSE [44] under default parameters. The phylogenetic position of the collected specimens (n = 2) was determined by aligning the consensus sequences for markers 28S rDNA, COI, and mtMutS to a reference dataset of 124 octocoral genera, including Cornularia pabloi and Cornularia cornucopiae as outgroup (total n = 144), as used in Lau and Reimer [33]. This resulted in alignments of 887 bp for 28S rDNA, 717 bp for COI, and 714 bp for mtMutS, and a total concatenated three-marker dataset of 2318 bp.…”

“…The most speciose as well as the most studied family is Clavulariidae, which comprises approximately 30 genera and over 60 species. Until recently, all other families are all either monospecific or monogeneric, with no more than a few described species; recent studies have additionally introduced new genera and species for Arulidae [32,33], which is the most recently erected family.…”

“…Stoloniferous octocorals often have inconspicuous small colonies and polyps, which makes them hard to detect [32][33][34]. There are critical gaps that remain in the understanding of the functional and ecological significance of octocoral-zooxanthellae symbioses [35].…”