Sistemática e Evolução - Pôsteres - 29/11/2023 - 15:30 h às 16:30 h

Sipuncula is a group of marine Annelida with no apparent segmentation, except for a ladder-like ventral nervous system with pairs of ganglia, which becomes a single nerve cord with no ganglia after metamorphosis from larva to juvenile. The current phylogeny of the group divides them into six families and sixteen genera. In Brazil, there are 39 species of Sipuncula from all six families distributed in twelve genera. Since the last species compilation in 2005, few studies related to this group have been made in Brazil. The ProTrindade Research Program from CNPq, coordinated by Professor Marcos Tavares, made eleven collecting campaigns between 2012 and 2019 at the archipelago of Trindade and Martim Vaz to inventory marine benthic invertebrates. This oceanic and volcanic archipelago is located at 1.200 km of coastline from Espírito Santo. As a result of this, a collection of 340 sipunculans were deposited at Museu de Zoologia de São Paulo (MZUSP). During a visit to the MZUSP collection, we analyzed this material and identified five Sipuncula genera: Antillesoma (Stephen and Edmons, 1972), Aspidosiphon (Diesing, 1851), Lithacrosiphon (Shipley 1902), Nephasoma (Pergament, 1940) and Phascolosoma (Leuckart, 1828). An extra level of analysis is necessary to identify species, such as dissection and study of the internal anatomy of each individual, so we asked for a material loan to study them in our lab. So far, we have identified four species: Antillesoma antillarum (Grübe and Oersted, 1858), Lithacrosiphon cristatus (Sluiter, 1902), Phascolosoma nigrescens (Keferstein, 1865), and Phascolosoma perlucens Baird, 1868. Among these, the last is a new record for the Brazilian coast.