Paralaxus, Scharhauser & Zimmermann & Gruber-Vodicka & Ott & Leisch, 2020

Scharhauser, Florian, Zimmermann, Judith, Gruber-Vodicka, Harald R., Ott, Jörg A. & Leisch, Nikolaus, 2020, Morphology of obligate ectosymbionts reveals Paralaxus gen. nov.: A new circumtropical genus of marine stilbonematine nematodes, Zoologica Scripta 49 (3), pp. 379-394 : 383

Paralaxus gen. nov.

ZooBank registration (http://zoobank.org): urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:417691DB-5EE3-49B7-B838-1BBF1569235F .

GenBank entries for 18S rRNA and COI sequences: see Table S1.

We erect a new genus for this clade with the following characters: cephalic capsule without block layer (Figure 2b, e, i, l, m); amphidial fovea spiral, no sexual dimorphism in shape of fovea (Figure 2b, g, i, l, m); male tail with velum (Figure 2c, j, n); symbiotic bacteria coccobacilli, arranged as multilayered coat covering body except for anterior and posterior end (Figure 1a, b). All Paralaxus sequences form statistically supported clades in phylogenetic analyses of the 18S as well as the COI datasets (Figure 3a, b). The specimens for each Paralaxus species clustered together in both gene sets and clearly separated each Paralaxus species from each other (Figure 3a, b).

We describe three new species and report on two additional ones.