Checklist of the marine Bryozoa from Uruguay (Southwest Atlantic)

Abstract

Knowledge of the marine bryozoan fauna of Uruguay is mostly based on scattered records found in local faunistic surveys and the taxonomic results of two oceanographic cruises to the Southwest Atlantic, but a comprehensive study has not yet been published for this area. This paper aims to compile an updated checklist, bringing together all the published information about the Uruguayan bryozoan fauna. Of the 73 recorded taxa, 30 (41%) are known only from deep waters off the Río de la Plata. Even considering undetermined species, these results show the high degree of endemism as it was already shown for several other benthic groups such as Bivalvia, Ascidiacea and Pycnogonida. The absence of local taxonomists on bryozoans has resulted in the unprecedented situation that the deep-sea bryozoan fauna of Uruguay is better known than the coastal and shelf representatives of the phylum. The main conclusion of this faunal compilation is that efforts should be made to coordinate the gathering and taxonomic study of shallow and shelf bryozoan collections to bridge the present knowledge gap about the biodiversity of this important group of marine benthic invertebrates.

Species of the Genus Melicerita Milne Edwards (Bryozoa, Cheilostomatida) in the Early Miocene of Patagonia (Argentina)

“…ortmanni Canu, 1908. The Recent South American species of this genus comprise M. blancoae López Gappa, 1981 and M. temaukeli Moyano, 1997 from the Magellanic region (López Gappa, 1981;Hayward & Thorpe, 1989;Hayward, 1995;Moyano, 1997a), M. atlantica Busk, 1884 from the continental slope off Argentina and Uruguay (Busk, 1884;Figuerola et al, 2018;Ramalho et al, 2022), and M. brasiliensis Vieira, Gordon, Souza & Haddad, 2010 from the Brazilian continental shelf and upper slope (Vieira et al, 2010). Melicerita has a rich fossil history in the Palaeogene and Neogene of Australasia (Waters, 1882a(Waters, , 1882b(Waters, , 1883MacGillivray, 1895;Brown, 1952Brown, , 1954Brown, , 1958Powell, 1969), and today it reaches maximum diversity in the southern hemisphere (Hayward, 1995).…”