TRACING ORIGIN AND COLLAPSE OF HOLOCENE BENTHIC BASELINE COMMUNITIES IN THE NORTHERN ADRIATIC SEA

The shallow northern Adriatic Sea has a long history of anthropogenic impacts that reaches back many centuries. While the effects of eutrophication, overfishing, pollution, and trawling over recent decades have been extensively studied, the major ecological turnovers during the Holocene as a whole remain poorly explored. In this study, we reconstruct ecological baselines defining benthic ecosystem composition prior to major anthropogenic changes at four stations characterized by low sedimentation and millennial-scale time averaging of molluscan assemblages. We discriminate between natural and anthropogenic drivers based on (1) stratigraphic changes in the composition of molluscan communities observed in sediment cores and (2) changes in concentrations of heavy metals, pollutants, and organic enrichment. The four 1.5-m long sediment cores reach back to the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, allowing for a stratigraphic distinction of the major sea-level phases of the Holocene. During the transgressive phase and maximum flooding, sea-level and establishment of the modern circulation pattern determined the development of benthic communities in shallow-water, vegetated habitats with epifaunal biostromes and, in deeper waters, with bryozoan meadows. After sea-level stabilization, the composition of these baseline communities remained relatively uniform and started to change markedly only with the intensification of human impacts in the late highstand, leading to a dominance of infauna and a decline of epifauna at all sites. This profound ecological change reduced species richness, increased the abundance of infaunal suspension feeders, and led to a decline of grazers and deposit feeders. We suggest that modern soft-bottom benthic communities in the northern Adriatic Sea today do not show the high geographic heterogeneity in composition characteristic of benthos prior to anthropogenic influences

An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): more Red Sea species

Rudolf Sturany published a series of papers describing multiple gastropods and bivalves from the Red Sea collected during the expeditions of the vessel “Pola” between 1895 and 1898. In a less known paper, he introduced the genus Levanderia (Galeommatidae) and described three more species from the Red Sea: Drillia levanderi, Levanderia erythraeensis and Raeta jickelii. We here list and illustrate their type material, provide the original description, a translation into English and curatorial and taxonomic comments

An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): deep-sea Eastern Mediterranean molluscs

The “Pola” expeditions were the first to explore the deep Eastern Mediterranean Sea in the 1890s. They remained the most intense surveys in that area for a century and constitute today a fundamental baseline to assess change in the basin, whose fauna is still inadequately described. Solid taxonomic foundations for the study of deep-sea organisms are needed and we here contribute by revising the name-bearing types of mollusc species introduced by Rudolf Sturany on the basis of the “Pola” material from the Eastern Mediterranean Sea stored in the Natural History Museum in Vienna. Sturany introduced 15 names (Marginella occulta var. minor Sturany, 1896 shall not be considered as the introduction of a new name). He described and established two manuscript names by Monterosato: Jujubinus igneus and Pseudomurex ruderatus. The genus Isorropodon was also introduced together with its type species I. perplexum. For each name, we list the available type material, provide the original description and a translation into English and illustrate the specimens in colour and with SEM imaging

An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): Red Sea bivalves

Rudolf Sturany, the curator of molluscs of the Natural History Museum of Vienna between the late 19th and early 20th century described 21 species of bivalves from the Red Sea collected by the pioneering expeditions of the vessel “Pola” which took place between 1895 and 1898. We here list and illustrate the type material of these species, provide the original descriptions, a translation into English, and curatorial and taxonomic comments. All species are illustrated in colour and with SEM imaging. To stabilize the nomenclature, we designate lectotypes for Gastrochaena weinkauffi, Cuspidaria brachyrhynchus, and C. dissociata, whose type series contained specimens belonging to other species. This paper concludes the series on the type specimens of marine molluscs described by Sturany from the “Pola” expeditions