Discovery of the rare burrowing shrimp Calliapagurops charcoti de Saint Laurent, 1973 (Decapoda: Axiidea: Callianassidae) in shallow water: first record of the infraorder for Madeira Island

The genus Calliapagurops was established by de Saint Laurent (1973) for the new species C. charcoti based on a damaged specimen lacking the abdomen and both third and fourth pereopods. The specimen was collected south of the Azorean island of Flores from shelly sand in 190–230 m depth. The original description by de Saint Laurent (1973) was rather short; a redescription and figures were later provided by Sakai (1999) and Ngoc-Ho (2003). Ngoc-Ho (2002) described a second species in this genus, C. foresti, based on four specimens (three of them complete) collected between 186 and 198 m depth east of Luzon, The Philippines. During a night dive on 6 August 2010 with Scuba off Caniço, Madeira Island, two specimens of a burrowing shrimp were observed by one of us (PW) at their burrow opening on a shelly sand bottom in 19 m depth. The shrimp were subsequently baited with a dead fish and photographed (Fig. 1). Attempts to collect the shrimps by cutting off the retreat into the burrow with a knife yielded one specimen, unfortunately only its anterior body part. During a second dive on 27 August 2010, two further specimens (one complete) could be collected from shelly sediment at 20 m depth ca 300 m away from the first site. All specimens grabbed the fish bait with their chelipeds and attempted to pull it into their burrow. The specimens were fixed in 96% ethanol and are deposited in the collection of the Museu Municipal do Funchal (História Natural), Madeira (MMF), and the Naturhistorisches Museum in Wien, Austria (NHMW). Size is expressed as total length (tl in mm) from the tip of the rostrum to the end of the telson and as carapace length (cl in mm) from the tip of the rostrum to the posterior median edge of the carapace.