Osedax bozoi Berman & Hiley & Read & Rouse 2024, n. sp.
Creators: name: Berman, Gabriella H.
name: Hiley, Avery S.
name: Read, Geoffrey B.
name: Rouse, Greg W.
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024
Subjects: Biodiversity
Taxonomy
Animalia
Annelida
Polychaeta
Sabellida
Siboglinidae
Osedax
Osedax bozoi

description: Osedax bozoi n. sp.
Fig. 3A, 4A–D, 6A
Material examined. Holotype: SIO-BIC A13918, female (GenBank COI sequence ON357631), collected from experimentally deployed cow bones deployed at 1,996 m depth in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore of New Orleans, Louisiana (28.103° N; 88.451° W); ROV Global Explorer dive number 17, April 15, 2019; fixed and preserved in 95% ethanol. Paratypes: SIO-BIC A10278 (destroyed, GenBank numbers in Table 2), A13920 (GenBank COI sequence ON357630), A13922 (GenBank COI sequences ON357686), females, collection data for paratypes is the same as for the holotype.
Diagnosis and description. Preserved holotype and other specimens white with greenish patches on root/ ovisac (Fig. 4A–D). Four apinnulate palps, distally coiled, ~ 1.5 mm long, ~ 0.2 mm wide, mainly contained inside transparent tube (Fig. 4A–D). Trunk ~ 0.5 mm long, 0.2–0.4 mm wide (Fig. 4A, B, D). Clear demarcation between palps and trunk; small ‘collar’ visible ventrally at truck/palp junction (Fig. 4B). Oviduct visible dorsally along trunk and extends into crown of palps, complete length unknown (Fig. 4A). Roots incomplete in holotype (Fig. 4B–D), though root extensions may be present on either side of the trunk (Fig. 4B, D). Paratype SIO-BIC A13922 with lobed ovisac, lateral root lobes, root extensions present on either side of the trunk (Fig. 4D). No dwarf males observed. The rDNC diagnosis for Osedax bozoi n. sp. was recovered as: ‘C’ at site 465, ‘G’ at site 468, and ‘T’ at site 561 of mitochondrial COI.
Distribution. Osedax bozoi n. sp. was recovered from cow bones (Fig. 3A) deployed at 1,996 m in the Mississippi River Delta region of the Gulf of Mexico south of New Orleans, Louisiana (Fig. 1).
Etymology. Osedax bozoi n. sp. is named for the first author’s late cat, Bozo.
Remarks. Osedax bozoi n. sp. belongs to Clade II (Fig. 2), an apinnulate ‘nude palp’ clade. Only associated with deployed cow bones (Fig. 3A). Paratype SIO-BIC A10278 was sequenced for 16S, 18S, 28S, and H3 as well as COI (Table 2), but the specimen was destroyed for DNA extraction. SIO-BIC A13918, which had a close COI sequence and was largely intact, has been designated as the holotype (Fig. 4A, B). Specimens SIO-BIC A10276 (ON357629) and SIO-BIC A10277 (ON357628) were also destroyed for sequencing COI. Osedax bozoi n. sp. had a 1.3% maximum pairwise distance among the six available sequences, which all showed the rDNC diagnostic bases. The haplotype network for Osedax bozoi n. sp. had four unique haplotypes (Fig. 6A). One was shared by three of the six sequences, including the holotype. There were three nucleotide substitutions between the most divergent haplotypes, based on a trimmed datafile of 344 bases. Osedax bozoi n. sp. was recovered as the sister group to a clade within Clade II that comprised O. docricketts, O. westernflyer and O. knutei (Fig. 2), though this was poorly supported. These three taxa are all from the Pacific Ocean. In terms of phylogenetic relatedness, the nearest species was Osedax docricketts, an apinnulate species known from Monterey Bay (California, USA) and Sagami Bay (Japan) on cow and whale bones (Rouse et al. 2018). Osedax bozoi n. sp. and O. docricketts share some morphological characteristics: both lack pigmentation on the trunk and palps and pinnules, both have a tube containing the palps. However, where O. bozoi n. sp. has a distinct demarcation between the palps and the trunk, O. docricketts does not, and the ovisac and oviduct are distinctive on O. bozoi. Osedax docricketts is suspected to be a cryptic species complex (Berman et al. 2023; Rouse et al. 2018) and the minimum interspecific distance between the two species was 13.7% based on sequence EU267676, an individual of Osedax docricketts from Monterey Bay (Table 3).
description: Published as part of Berman, Gabriella H., Hiley, Avery S., Read, Geoffrey B. & Rouse, Greg W., 2024, New Species of Osedax (Siboglinidae: Annelida) from New Zealand and the Gulf of Mexico, pp. 337-352 in Zootaxa 5443 (3) on pages 342-343, DOI: 10.11646/zootaxa.5443.3.2, http://zenodo.org/record/11045291