QH 1 B4X NH No. 14, pp. 205-214 25 June 1976 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON DISTINCTION BETWEEN A GULF OF MEXICO AND A CAROLINIAN ATLANTIC SPECIES OF THE SWIMMING CRAB OVALIPES (DECAPODA: PORTUNIDAE) By Austin B. Williams National Marine Fisheries Service Systematics Laboratory National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D. C. 20560 In their revision of Ovalipes Rathbun, 1898, Stephenson and Rees (1968) distinguished two forms of what they and Wil-Hams (1962, 1965) called Ovalipes guadulpensis (Saussure, 1858), and Rathbun (1930) called Ovalipes ocellatus guadul-pensis (Saussure). They found Form a in the Carolinian Province off the southeastern United States, Form b in the Gulf of Mexico, and gave an analysis of each form with illus-trations but felt that more study was needed before two species could be recognized. Tiirkay (1971) discovered, from study of type-specimens in collections of the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, Geneva, that Saussure's guadulpensis does not belong to Ovalipes, but to Macropipus, and was named for the locality Guadaloupe on the island of Graciosa in the Azores. Macropipus does not occur in the Western Hemisphere. The next available name for the western Atlantic taxon mistakenly attributed to Saussure, is Ovalipes ocellatus floridanus Hay and Shore, 1918, which Tiirkay continued to recognize as a subspecies. Reviewing the evidence again, I still regard the spotted O. ocelUtus (Herbst) of the western North Atlantic as a full species and in addition formally recognize the unspotted, yel-low Ovalipes Forms a and b of the CaroHnian Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico respectively as separate species. The analysis is based on study of material in collections of the National 14— Prog. Biol. Soc. Wash., Vol. 89, 1976 (205)
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