Morphological description of <i>Pentalcheles laevis</i> postlarva collected from Suruga Bay, Japan (Crustacea, Decapoda, Polychelidae)

The bathypelagic postlarva of <i>Stereomastis panglao</i> collected from Suruga Bay, Japan (Crustacea, Decapoda, Polychelidae)

“…Identification of the wild-caught larvae has been mainly inferred from the adult species distributed in the area where the larvae were collected (Calman, 1925;Barnard, 1950;Bernard, 1953;Quintana & Retamal, 1984;Fredj & Laubier, 1985;Boyko, 2006). Currently, among the 38 species of the family (Chan, 2010;WoRMS, 2023), only two species, Polycheles typhlops and Pentacheles laevis, have a direct correspondence between larva and adult, based on laboratory hatching and/or DNA barcoding (Guerao & Abelló, 1996;Torres et al, 2014;Konishi et al, 2021). The present description is the third example of wild-caught larvae of polychelids with certain parentage by molecular techniques, and the first one in the genus Stereomastis.…”

“…Since his description, 140 years have passed, but details of the life history of polychelids remain unknown, largely due to difficulty in obtaining and rearing these deep-sea animals. Modern DNA barcoding technique has been applied to polychelid Polycheles and Pentacheles species to confront this difficulty in recent years (Torres et al, 2014;Konishi et al, 2021), but not to Stereomastis, which constitutes 45% of the total species in the family, yet.…”