Vertical distribution of polychaetes in a semi-enclosed brackishwater pond of Nethravathi estuary was studied for one year from February 2004 to January 2005. The semienclosed brackishwater pond is a shallow water body with an average depth of 1-1.5 m with an area of 12 ha having direct connection with the estuary which opens into the Arabian sea. A total of nine species of polychaetes were ide...

This paper documents the concentration of total arsenic and individual arsenic species in four soft-bottom benthic polychaetes (Perenereis cultifera, Ganganereis sootai, Lumbrinereis notocirrata and Dendronereis arborifera) along with host sediments from Sundarban mangrove wetland, India. An additional six sites were considered exclusively for surface sediments for this purpose. Polychaetes wer...

Macrobenthic polychaetes play a significant role in marine benthic food chain. A study was carried out to observe the abundance and diversity of soft bottom macrobenthic polychaetes along the South Indian coast, along with observations on sediment characteristics. The present study indicated an increase in the polychaete diversity as compared to earlier reports. Sixty-three different forms of p...

Vestimentiferan tubeworms are marine invertebrates that inhabit chemosynthetic environments, and although recent molecular phylogenetic analyses have suggested that vestimentiferan tubeworms are derived from polychaete annelids, they show some morphological features that are different from other polychaetes. For example, vestimentiferans lack a digestive tract and have less body segments and co...

A body wall musculature comprising an outer layer of circular fibers and an inner layer of longitudinal fibers is generally seen as the basic plan in Annelida. Additional muscles may be present such as oblique, parapodial, chaetal, and dorsoventral muscles. The longitudinal muscle fibers do not form a continuous layer but are arranged in distinct bands in polychaetes. Mostly there are four to s...

The Marine Ecoregions of the World system separates oceans into 232 ecoregions based on coastal and shelfwater species distributions. We tested separation those delineated subecoregions within Western Australian waters using intertidal macroalgal epiphytic polychaete Environmental predictors assemblages were also determined. collected macroalgae polychaetes 38 rocky shores four marine from 18°S...

Progenesis is defined as the retention of ancestral juvenile characters by adult stages of descendants due to an acceleration of the sexual maturation and thus is often regarded as a fast evolutionary process. Several small, meiofaunal polychaetes, such as Dinophilidae, some "Dorvilleidae" (for example, Parapodrilus), and Protodrilida, exhibit morphological simplicity in that they lack features...

Polychaetes are usually the most abundant taxon in benthic communities and have been most often utilized as indicator species of environmental conditions. This review finds that, while the use of indicator species for a particular pollutant is not simple, polychaetes can provide a useful means of assessing the effects of poor environmental conditions. Polychaetes may be used as sensitive monito...

As a result of their plastic body plan, the relationships of the annelid worms and even the taxonomic makeup of the phylum have long been contentious. Morphological cladistic analyses have typically recovered a monophyletic Polychaeta, with the simple-bodied forms assigned to an early-diverging clade or grade. This is in stark contrast to molecular trees, in which polychaetes are paraphyletic a...

Parasitism is increasingly recognized as an important determinant of population dynamics, productivity and community structure in intertidal ecosystems, and yet there is very little known about the effect of parasites on polychaetes, which represent a major component of the benthic fauna. We surveyed 11 polychaete species from a mudflat in Otago Harbour, New Zealand, and found that seven of the...