Records of the nudibranch Hexabranchus sanguineus on Tongatapu island, Tonga

Data as a DwC-A file	download 9 records in English (4 KB) - Update frequency: not planned
Metadata as an EML file	download in English (6 KB)
Metadata as an RTF file	download in English (7 KB)

Description

This dataset records the occurrence records of the nudibranch Hexabranchus sanguineus collected for the paper "Habitat, food and reproductive activity of the nudibranch Hexabranchus-sanguineus on Tongatapu island" by Francis, 1980.

The taxonomy of the genus Hexabranchus Ehrenberg,1831 is confused and requires revision. More than 20 species have been described (see Thompson, 1972), many of them based primarily on differences in colour pattern. Some authors (Bergh, 1900; Eliot, 1904; Thompson, 1972) consider the many named species to be merely colour varieties of Hexabranchus sanguineus (Riippell & Leuckart, 1828). The validity of the use of colour pattern as a taxonomic character remains to be demonstrated in this genus. Nevertheless, a full description of the colour pattern of Tongan Hexabranchus is given below to facilitate comparative studies in the event that colour does prove to be distinctive. External and internal morphology appear to vary little among the described varieties (Eliot, 1904) but these features were not investigated in Tongan animals.

In the absence of any distinctive taxonomic characters, Tongan Hexabranchus are here referred to the type species of the genus, H. sanguineus (Riippell & Leuckart). Other described "species" will here be considered simply as colour variations of H. sanguineus.

Data Records

The data in this occurrence resource has been published as a Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A), which is a standardized format for sharing biodiversity data as a set of one or more data tables. The core data table contains 9 records.

This IPT archives the data and thus serves as the data repository. The data and resource metadata are available for download in the downloads section. The versions table lists other versions of the resource that have been made publicly available and allows tracking changes made to the resource over time.

Versions

The table below shows only published versions of the resource that are publicly accessible.

How to cite

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

Francis M (2022): Records of the nudibranch Hexabranchus sanguineus on Tongatapu island, Tonga. v1.0. Southwestern Pacific Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) Node. Dataset/Occurrence. https://nzobisipt.niwa.co.nz/resource?r=hexabranchus_sanguineus_tonga&v=1.0

Rights

Researchers should respect the following rights statement:

The publisher and rights holder of this work is Southwestern Pacific Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) Node. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) License.

GBIF Registration

This resource has not been registered with GBIF

Keywords

Occurrence; Observation

Contacts

Malcolm Francis

Metadata Provider ●
Originator ●
Point Of Contact

Marine Biologist

NIWA

Wellington

Geographic Coverage

Tongatapu, Tonga

Bounding Coordinates	South West [-21.27, -175.347], North East [-21.13, -175.145]

Taxonomic Coverage

No Description available

Species	Hexabranchus sanguineus

Temporal Coverage

Start Date / End Date	1976-03-18 / 1976-11-30

Bibliographic Citations

Francis, M. 1980. Habitat, food and reproductive activity of the nudibranch Hexabranchus-sanguineus on Tongatapu island. The Veliger, Vol. 22, Berkeley, CA, California Malacozoological Society, pp. 252-258.

Additional Metadata

marine, harvested by iOBIS

Alternative Identifiers	https://nzobisipt.niwa.co.nz/resource?r=hexabranchus_sanguineus_tonga