Dorididae, Rafinesque, 1815

Systematics of Dorididae View in CoL

Te families Dorididae and Discodorididae sensu Valdés (2002) are paraphyletic because Aphelodoris and Atagema , which were traditionally considered to belong to Dorididae and Discodorididae , respectively, cluster together in a separate clade outside both families. Similar results were found in other molecular analyses highlighting Aphelodoris as a problematic group ( Hallas et al. 2017) against morphological odds (Valdés 2002). Another conflicting result with morphological data is the fact that the caryophyllidia-bearing dorids are not monophyletic (Valdés 2002, Fahey and Healy 2003), which contradicts the conclusions by Valdés and Gosliner (2001). Tese results suggest that these complex dermal organs have evolved multiple times independently or have evolved early in Discodorididae (based on the early split of Atagema ) and have been lost multiple times. Te family Dorididae contains a substantial amount of diversity, suggesting that the proposal by Valdés (2002) to synonymize several taxa with the genus Doris was overly simplistic. More work is needed in this group to provide a more up-to-date taxonomy consistent with both molecular and morphological data. Since Doriopsis , Conualevia , and Homoiodoris are accepted genera within Dorididae , the Northern Hemisphere genus Archidoris and the Southern Hemisphere Austrodoris , synonyms of Doris , should be re-erected. Within Dorididae , our results support recent findings by Renau et al. (2024), except for the inclusion of Rostanga poddubetskaiae . Te morpho-anatomical characters that define the species were recognized as unusual, but molecular data placed the species in the genus Rostanga ( Innabi et al. 2023) . Here, we suggest transferring the species to Dorididae under the name ‘ Doris ’ poddubetskaiae comb. nov. pending a thorough taxonomic assessment of Dorididae .