Records of the nudibranch Hexabranchus sanguineus on Tongatapu island, Tonga

Occurrence
Latest version published by Southwestern Pacific Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) Node on Dec 20, 2022 Southwestern Pacific Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) Node

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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
NZ

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

  1. 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