Content area
Full text
ABSTRACT. Despite the great advances in research on the taxonomy and ecology of hydroids of the Brazilian coast, those studies are concentrated in the Southeast and South regions of the country, leaving a gap in knowledge from the North and Northeast regions. Aiming to fill part of this gap, we studied the hydroids communities in the state of Sergipe, Northeast Brazil, in the continental shelf and in three estuarine regions. In the continental shelf, samplings with fishing trawls took place during the dry and rainy seasons of 1999-2003 (8 campaigns), from 18 stations distributed at depths of 10, 20, and 30 m. In the estuaries of the rivers Japaratuba, Sergipe and Vaza-Barris three ropes with six polyethylene plates were installed in each place and left submerged for three months in the dry and rainy periods of 2017. Seventy-nine hydroid species of 26 families were identified. Sixteen of these have been assigned to nine Anthoathecata families and the remaining 63 species to 17 Leptothecata families. Among the identified species, 60 are new records from Sergipe and among those, nine are also new records from the Northeast region and two from the Brazilian coast. Our results increase the hydroid records from Sergipe and extend the range of some species inside the Brazilian coast and the Atlantic Ocean, showing the potential for future studies in other environments of the Sergipe coast.
KEY WORDS. Anthoathecata, Atlantic Ocean, biodiversity, ecology, Leptothecata, new records.
INTRODUCTION
Studies on the hydrozoan species of Brazil started as a result of major oceanographic expeditions in the 19th and 20th centuries (e.g. Allman 1883,1888, Nutting 1900,1904, Vervoort 1946). A second wave of studies on benthic hydroids, mainly from the Southeast region, started with the studies of Vannucci (e.g. Vannucci Mendes 1946, Vannucci 1949, 1950, 1951a, 1951b, 1954). Decades later, several studies were published from other locations of Brazil (e.g. Mayal 1983, Migotto and Silveira 1987, Pires et al. 1992, Migotto 1996, Grohmann et al. 1997, Nogueira et al. 1997, Maria A. Haddad unpub. data) and in 2002 a list of the Brazilian Cnidaria was published by Migotto et al. 2002, mentioning 347 species of Hydrozoa to the Brazilian coast. Over the past 20 years, studies on hydroids have focused largely on the fauna from the...