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The holotype has yellow and purple sclerites with an elongated colour arrangement that gives the colony a bicoloured (yellow and purple) appearance, this colour morph was mostly discovered at depths of 10 - 20 metres.
In the paratype NMNH-1638553, there has also been a mixing of sclerites, one colony has the major proportion of purple sclerites compared to white, and the other colony has a major proportion of white compared to purple sclerites.
Purple colonies were mostly observed in shallow waters < 5 m depth, while the bicoloured colonies were mostly encountered at 7 - 8 m depth.
The paratype NMNH-1638554 was monochromatic white.
Leptogorgia iridis has been named after the Latin word "iridis", meaning "rainbow", due to the large number of chromotypes observed in the colonies. The large number of chromotypes is one of the most important diagnostic features of this new tropical species.
Source:
https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/50619/list/8/
Hernández O, Gomez-Gutiérrez J, Sánchez C (2021)
Three new species of the sea fan genus Leptogorgia (Octocorallia, Gorgoniidae) from the Gulf of California, Mexico.
ZooKeys 1017: 1-20. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1017.50619
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
In the paratype NMNH-1638553, there has also been a mixing of sclerites, one colony has the major proportion of purple sclerites compared to white, and the other colony has a major proportion of white compared to purple sclerites.
Purple colonies were mostly observed in shallow waters < 5 m depth, while the bicoloured colonies were mostly encountered at 7 - 8 m depth.
The paratype NMNH-1638554 was monochromatic white.
Leptogorgia iridis has been named after the Latin word "iridis", meaning "rainbow", due to the large number of chromotypes observed in the colonies. The large number of chromotypes is one of the most important diagnostic features of this new tropical species.
Source:
https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/50619/list/8/
Hernández O, Gomez-Gutiérrez J, Sánchez C (2021)
Three new species of the sea fan genus Leptogorgia (Octocorallia, Gorgoniidae) from the Gulf of California, Mexico.
ZooKeys 1017: 1-20. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.1017.50619
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
