genus meriones is the dominant member of gerbils in the palaearctic region, particularly in aride region of asia. this is also one of the most typical genus of subfamily gerbillinae with about 17 morphospecies namely: m. persicus, m. hurrianae, m. zarudnyi m. vinogradovi, m. meridianus, m. libycus, m. crassus, m. tristrami, m. rex, m. tamariscinus, m. unguiculatus, m. shawi, m. grandis, m. sacr...

Stony corals in the genus Pocillopora are among the most common and widely distributed of Indo-Pacific corals and, as such, are often the subject of physiological and ecological research. In the far Tropical Eastern Pacific (TEP), they are major constituents of shallow coral communities, exhibiting considerable variability in colony shape and branch morphology and marked differences in response...

Very few studies have analysed the niches of pelagic protist in details. This is because for most protists, both an accurate species definition and methods for routine detection and quantification of cells are lacking. The morphospecies Micromonas pusilla, a marine unicellular green alga, is the most ubiquitous and cosmopolitan picoeukaryote described to date. This species comprises several ind...

Trichodorus iranicus sp. n. is described and illustrated based on morphological and molecular characters and morphometric data. It belongs to the T. lusitanicus morphospecies group based on the shape of the spicules and vaginal sclerotised pieces. Males have a body length of 844-942 µm, onchiostyle length of 59 µm, three cervical papillae (CP), curved spicules, 28-30 µm in length, with narrow m...

Aquatic oligochaetes are well recognized bioindicators of quality of sediments and water in watercourses and lakes. However, the difficult taxonomic determination based on morphological features compromises their more common use in eco-diagnostic analyses. To overcome this limitation, we investigated molecular barcodes as identification tool for broad range of taxa of aquatic oligochaetes. We r...

The sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis sensu latu has been identified as the principal vector of American visceral leishmaniasis, a potentially fatal disease that primarily affects children in several countries of South and Central America. Over the past several years increases have occurred both in the number of reported cases and the population at risk: approximately 1.6 million people reside in ...

The agents driving the divergence and speciation of freeliving microbial populations are still largely unknown. We investigated the dinoflagellate morphospecies Scrippsiella hangoei and Peridinium aciculiferum, which abound in the Baltic Sea and in northern temperate lakes, respectively. Electron microscopy analyses showed significant interspecific differences in the external cellular morpholog...

Amphipods constitute an abundant part of Icelandic deep-sea zoobenthos yet knowledge of the diversity of this fauna, particularly at the molecular level, is scarce. The present work aims to use molecular methods to investigate genetic variation of the Amphipoda sampled during two IceAGE collecting expeditions. The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit 1 (COI) of 167 individuals originally as...

Insect parasitoids are a major component of global biodiversity and affect the population dynamics of their hosts. However, identification of insect parasitoids is often difficult, and they are suspected to contain many cryptic species. Here, we ask whether the cytochrome c oxidase I DNA barcode could function as a tool for species identification and discovery for the 20 morphospecies of Belvos...