Leptothecata: Campanulariidae

Campanularia spinulosa Bale, 1888, originally described without its gonosome and also sterile in the material at hand, recalls Obelia bidentata Clark, 1875 but, unlike that species, it builds flabellate instead of cypress-shaped colonies “with lateral branches tending to be in right-angled pairs, successively on opposite sides of stem” (Cornelius 1995: 292, fig. 68A). Superposition of line drawings of specimens from Bali with Bale’s (1888) pl. 12 fig. 5, Thornely’s (1900, as Gonothyraea longicyatha) pl. 44 fig. 4, and Schuchert’s (2003, as O. bidentata) fig. 24 (right hand side drawing), revealed the same shape and proportions, suggesting that all are very likely conspecific. According to the present molecular evidence based on the combined 16S, 18S, and 28S rRNA (Fig. 35A), the species obviously belongs to the genus Obelia Péron & Lesueur, 1810, and it should be confidently referred to as O. spinulosa (Bale, 1888) 14.

Two 16S rRNA sequences of Clytia linearis (Thornely, 1900) were also obtained from Balinese samples, both clustering with other available sequences of C. linearis from the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea (Fig. 35B).