First report of Loricifera from the North East Pacific Region, with the description of two new species

North American Condyloderes (Kinorhyncha: Cyclorhagida: Kentrorhagata): Female dimorphism suggests moulting among adult Condyloderes

“…More details on the cruise, and analyses of the general meiofauna abundance, are provided by Rohal et al (2014). This cruise also yielded the loriciferans described by Neves et al (2019) and several new and known kinorhynch species of the family Echinoderidae, reported by . Details on stations relevant for the present study are listed in Table 1, and their locations are plotted in Fig.…”

“…1. For the sake of consistency, the present study uses the same station numbering as Neves et al (2019) and . Samples were collected from eight stations along the continental rise off southern Oregon and California, but only stations Cal-4 to Cal-7, off California, had specimens of Condyloderes.…”

Loricifera inhabiting spherical agglutinated structures in the abyssal eastern equatorial Pacific nodule fields

“…Except in the hypersaline, permanently anoxic, sulphidic environment of the l'Atalante Basin in the deep Mediterranean (3363-3600 m water depth), where they are the only living metazoans (Danovaro et al, 2010, loriciferans are usually an occasional element of deep-sea meiofaunal assemblages, for example, representing only 0.10% of meiofaunal animals in the case of abyssal samples from the Angola Basin (SW Atlantic) (Gad, 2005a). Shallow-water loriciferans typically live interstitially in sandy substrates and shell gravel, whereas lower bathyal and abyssal species usually inhabit fine-grained, often muddy sediments Neves et al, 2018). Little is known about their biology, although like their relatives in coastal waters (Kristensen, 1991b), deep-sea species are probably bacterivores.…”

“…The phylum Loricifera was described in 1983 from coarse sand at low water in Roscoff, France (Kristensen, 1983). Since then, 36 loriciferan species have been established (Neves et al, 2018). However, there have been relatively few records of loriciferans from the deep Pacific Ocean.…”

“…In the eastern Pacific, a new genus (Spinoloricus Heiner and Neuhaus, 2007) was described by Heiner and Neuhaus (2007) and a new species of this genus by , in both cases from the equatorial Galapagos Spreading Center. Recently, Neves et al (2018) established two new species of Rugiloricus Higgins andKristensen, 1986 andUrnaloricus Heiner andKristensen, 2009 from the Oregon and Californian margins. However, little attention has been paid to these meiofaunal metazoans in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ).…”