Umimayanthus, Montenegro, Sinniger & Reimer, 2015

Montenegro, Javier, Fromont, Jane, Richards, Zoe, Kise, Hiroki, Gomez, Oliver, Hoeksema, Bert W. & Reimer, James Davis, 2024, Museum collections as untapped sources of undescribed diversity of sponge-zoantharian associations with the description of six new species of Umimayanthus (Zoantharia: Parazoanthidae) from Western Australia and eastern Indonesia, Contributions to Zoology 93 (5), pp. 466-522 : 481-482

Genus Umimayanthus Montenegro,

Sinniger and Reimer 2015

urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:A7C6F356-9128-41EA-B108-271EC70B82F

The genus Umimayanthus was initially diagnosed by a unique insertion of 9 bp in length and one 14 bp deletion in the mt 16S-rDNA region. However, relying on deletions, or alignment gaps, as a diagnostic character can be problematic when analysing relationships between distantly related taxa. Therefore, here we revise the generic diagnosis and propose to use a combination of unique insertions and substitutions across the ITS-rDNA and 16S-rDNA molecular markers as follows.

The genus Umimayanthus can be distinguished from all other sponge-associated zoantharians by multiple conservative positions across the ITS-rDNA region in our concatenated alignment, as follows: two conservative and unique substitutions in base pair positions 22–23 bp as “TG”, and multiple unique combinations

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ZOOLOGY 93 (2024) 466–522

of substitutions between positions 20–24 bp as “GTTGT”, 52–54 bp as “GAC” and 663–664 bp as “CA”. Furthermore, between positions 1351–1354 bp in the 16S-rDNA region of our alignment a highly conservative insertion of four base pairs, “AAGG”, was also found to be unique to genus Umimayanthus ( fig. 3).

CONTRIBUTIONS TO ZOOLOGY 93 (2024) 466–522