New records of introduced species in the Mediterranean Sea (December 2025)

Recent collecting along the Tunisian coast revealed the occurrence of many species of alien Mollusca, all of which had been reported in the past decades from the Levantine Sea. Baseline explorations of the Gulf of Gabès in 1982 and in the 2000s revealed that only a handful of species were then present. The new sampling in the Gulf of Gabès shows high increments of alien species associated to an algal bottom nearshore, in which...

Kelliella miliaris (Philippi, 1844) is a minute bivalve, living on the surface of soft sediments, from the continental shelf to bathyal depths, commonly in the oxygen minimum zones (OMZ) and/or in reducing habitats. The scarcity of data on the biology of Kelliella prompted us to investigate, at ultrastructural level, specimens found in southern Spain. Kelliella miliaris shows several morphological characteristics that would be...

Sea bottom sampling of the Skerki Bank in the Strait of Sicily updates the census of marine molluscs inhabiting a biogeographically key sector of the Mediterranean Basin. One single dredge haul at 112-m depth yielded 110 molluscan species belonging to Gastropoda, Bivalvia, and Scaphopoda, of which 41 are new records for Tunisian jurisdictional waters, including three gastropod species new to science. Nearly all the species are...

This study investigates the molluscan fauna of the South Azorean Seamount Chain (SASC), which comprises several seamounts culminating in 300–1600 m depth, separated by distances less than 200 km. Material was collected mainly by dredging and comprises mostly empty shells. A total of over 111,000 shells representing at least 439 species (409 identified) was collected. Larval development was inferred from protoconch morphology,...

A new species of gastropod, Episcomitra angelesae (Neogastropoda: Mitridae), is described from specimens collected in the upper bathyal level of the Alboran Sea (Seco de los Olivos and Alboran Ridge). The new species is compared with other similar species known from the Atlanto-Mediterranean area, including Episcomitra zonata (Marryat, 1819) and Isara turtoni (Watson, 1890). The habitat of this new species, hard substrate with...

The molluscan fauna of Cerro Gordo submarine cave, in the Spanish part of the Alboran Sea, is studied for the first time. The cave bottom spans from 16 m deep at its entrance to the sea level at its innermost section. Replicate soft bottom samples were collected from three different stations, along the horizontal gradient of the cave. Additional samples were collected on photophilous hard bottoms next to the cave entrance, in...

Molluscs associated with a Zostera marina bed from Cantarriján bay (Southern Spain, Alboran Sea) at 14–16 m depth were sampled monthly from October 1996 to September 1997. A total of 44,819 individuals belonging to 80 species were identified. In spite of the high species richness, only seven species of gastropods showed a dominance value (D) higher than 1%. Jujubinus striatus was the dominant species of the assemblage with 70....