PROC. BIOL. SOC. WASH. 99(2), 1986, pp. 286-315 MARINE TUBIFICIDAE (OLIGOCHAETA) AT HUTCHINSON ISLAND, FLORIDA Christer Erseus Abstract.— Tweniy-^\e species of marine Tubificidae are recorded from off-shore, largely coarse, shelly sediments at Hutchinson Island on Florida's lower central east coast. Nine species are described as new: Heterodrilus hispidus, H. perkinsi (subfamily Rhyacodrilinae), Phallodrilus hirsutus, Bathydrilus ingens, B. formosus, B. macroprostatus, Coralliodrilus corpulentus, Olavius latus (Phal-lodrilinae), and Tubificoides annulus (Tubificinae). Redescriptions of Hetero-drilus bulbiporus Erseus, 1981, and Phallodrilus acochlearis (Erseus and Loden, 1981), n. comb., are provided. Heterodrilus bulbiporus, H. occidentalis Erseus, 1981, 77. pentcheffi Erseus, 1981, and Adelodrilus magnithecatus Erseus, 1979, are recorded from Florida for the first time. The Hutchinson Island tubificid fauna comprises a mixture of warm-temperate (American east coast) and trop-ical (Caribbean) elements. In 1943, Gates described an intertidal earthworm, Pontodrilus gracilis [now re-garded as a synonym for P. litoralis (Grube, 1855), family Acanthodrilidae; Easton 1984] from the banks of a brackish river at Fort Myers, Florida. However, it was not until the middle of the 1 960's that a marine fauna of aquatic oligochaetes was discovered in this part of the southeastern U.S.A. The first, very scanty, records of Tubificidae from marine waters in Rorida were given by Brinkhurst (1965, 1966), while Kennedy (1966) used material from off Panama City, Florida, when describing the marine enchy-traeid, Grania americana. During a collecting trip to Miami in 1977, the author had the opportunity to gather a rich material of marine oligochaetes in the area just south of the city (largely Biscay ne Bay). The Tubificidae dominated this ma-terial, and most of the tubificid species have now been accounted for in various taxo-nomic publications (Erseus 1979a, b, c, 1980a, 1981a, 1982a, b, c, 1983a, 1984b). Additional collections of Tubificidae from other parts of the state have been treated by Erseus (1981b, 1984a), Erseus and Baker (1982), Erseus and Loden (1981), and Lod-en (1980). The species thus recorded from Florida to date number 34 (species not as-terisked in Table 1). One enchytraeid species, Grania mono-spermathecus Erseus and Lasserre, 1976, was recently reported from the Miami area by Coates and Erseus ( 1 985), and additional enchytraeid material will be treated else-where by the same authors (in preparation). In 1981, Erseus and Loden reported on a small collection of Tubificidae (four species of the subfamily Phallodrilinae) from sub-tidal sites off Hutchinson Island on Flori-da's lower central east coast. The material was obtained in 1976-1977 during a sam-pling program funded by Florida Power and Light Company (FP&L). The program was a continuation of an earlier, three-year (1971-1974) environmental baseline study conducted in connection with the location of the FP&L St. Lucie Unit No. 1 nuclear power plant on Hutchinson Island. The study was designed to generate a marine ecology data base for the future assessment of possible changes in the environment of the area influenced by the heated effluent
BioStor
